Love it or leave it? Owners weigh in on 25 for $25 promotion

Talk about March Madness. Twenty-five for $25 is well under way, offering a chance to "Dine Around Seattle" enjoying fancy food at a discount. The 25 select participants include high-enders like Campagne, Oceanaire Seafood Room and Ray's Boathouse (see www.nwsource.com/25for25 for the full list).

This bi-annual event, now in its fifth year, is held in March and November. In addition to their standard menu, participating restaurants offer a three-course dinner for $25 (tax, tip and beverage excluded) Sundays through Thursdays. Nine of the 25 are offering a three-course lunch for $12.50.

Clearly, this promotion is a good deal for the consumer. But is it a good deal for the restaurant business? Well, that depends on who you're talking to.

"For us, it's fantastic," says John Sillers, co-owner, with his wife, Kendell, of Market Street Grill. Their Ballard restaurant was among the original 25 that banded together in 2001 to promote themselves when business took a dive after 9/11. The popular event has allowed his restaurant to survive and thrive in an increasingly competitive market.

"On a normal month we serve maybe 1,200 people. During Twenty-Five for $25 we'll do 4,000," Sillers says, adding that his sales double in March and November, spiking from a monthly average of $60,000-$70,000 to as much as $140,000. "It's those two months that make it so Kendell and I can stay alive.

The $1,000 per promotion he contributes to the group's operational budget buys an enormous block of advertising — a relative bargain given the cachet the affiliation provides. (As a sponsor, The Seattle Times Co. and its online division, NWsource, provide much of that advertising base.)

Mauro Golmarvi is far less enthusiastic. As owner of Assaggio Ristorante in downtown Seattle, he, too, has been involved with Twenty-Five for $25 from its inception. But this month, after an intense internal debate, he opted out. "It wasn't cost effective," he explains.

"My average dinner check is $51 per person. The months of Twenty-Five for $25 it goes down to $25-$28 per person. On a Tuesday night in March, instead of doing 70 people, I'd do 200, and I was running food costs of 38 percent. That's a huge number" — 10 percent higher than his normal nightly average. "Labor costs were tremendous. I'd need an extra dishwasher, two extra sous chefs and two extra busers." His staff regularly worked double shifts, says Golmarvi, incurring overtime. Worse, during the event, "I couldn't accommodate my regular clientele because my seats filled up with Twenty-Five for $25 people."

That blow would have been easier to accept if those diners would have then become regulars. "The original idea behind the promotion," says Golmarvi, "was that customers will come in and say, 'It's so inexpensive, let's order a bottle of wine!,' but that didn't happen." Instead, "customers came in and said, 'This is my first time in! This was great! I'll see you in November.' People are out for a deal, and I don't blame them."

The folks at Six Seven at the Edgewater Hotel were happy to step in this month when Assaggio pulled out. Six Seven's inclusion brings the number of hotel-restaurant participants to seven. Add to those the Oceanaire Seafood Room, one of a Minneapolis-based chain, and more than a few nonparticipating restaurateurs are asking "What's up with that?"

Their question is a valid one. According to founding member Rich Malia, owner of Ponti Seafood Grill near Fremont, Twenty-Five for $25's original vision was to help local owner/operators promote their fine-dining restaurants. The group's original intention, Malia says, was to shy away from chains and give a collective boost to restaurants with underfunded advertising budgets. But getting 25 restaurants to join was difficult early on, Malia says. These days, there's a waiting list.

Bob Day's Fremont restaurant, 35th Street Bistro, is on that list. "I think that as a smaller restaurant, we all feel we need to be involved because of the promotion attached to it. It's very hard to get noticed in a sea of restaurants," he says. Donna Moodie, owner of Marjorie, in Belltown, is "amazed at how huge the effect is on nonparticipating restaurants," and cites a downturn in weeknight business during the promotion. So does Place Pigalle's Bill Frank. "It's been that way since day one," Frank says.

Lissa Gruman, a partner in Bellevue-based Gruman & Nicoll Public Relations, is variously described as "the point person" and "the driving force" behind the event. When asked to explain why so many hotel restaurants are involved, possibly at the expense of smaller independents, she says, "the real answer is that they have to have the size and the bandwidth to keep up with the promotion. The number of diners who want to participate is so amazing, and the small guys can't keep up with that."

So how does that explain the success of Market Street Grill? Or the fact that Amy McCray, chef and co-owner at Eva, a small neighborhood restaurant near Green Lake, appears to be keeping up very well since joining the group last fall? And why was Craig Serbousek, whose restaurant, Crow, was not on the list, offered a spot this past year? "We turned them down," Serbousek says. "Most of the time you can get three courses here for $25, so I didn't think our restaurant was a good fit."

Ethan Stowell believes that politics are part of the program — and part of its problem. When he opened Union in 2004, he felt the pinch as downtown diners headed elsewhere during the November promotion. In order to combat the competition the following March, Stowell offered eight courses for $25. When the next promotion came around, he was asked to join the club. His response: No thanks.

"I completely understand why dining promotions exist. It's to expose new customers to your style of food and service," Stowell says. "I support that idea, but it has to be beneficial to all parties, not a select group. I think it is time to start thinking of the future of the restaurant industry as a whole." Stowell says it's time to open up the restaurant to a broader base.

"Twenty-Five for $25 is only helpful to 25 restaurants," he says. "If every restaurant that wanted to could join, then it would re-establish a level of competition and balance for the entire restaurant industry." Other local restaurateurs agree, citing popular citywide promotions held in New York; Washington, D.C.; Boston; and Vancouver, B.C.

Gruman says she and the original group have worked hard to build the Twenty-Five for $25 brand. "If we change it, do we do Thirty for $30?" she asks. Some have suggested that with the growing number of local restaurants meeting the group's fine-dining criteria, 50 restaurants might share the fall and winter promotion, keeping the number at 25. Others insist it should be open to all comers.

"Were it to become a citywide thing, and not an exclusive 25-restaurant event, it would really put Seattle on the map as a dining town and allow all the restaurants to be on equal footing to showcase their stuff," says Frank, Place Pigalle's owner for the past 24 years. "Maybe there should be 100 restaurants involved. These days there are 100 good restaurants in town. Twenty years ago, that would have been all the restaurants in town."

Nancy Leson: 206-464-8838 or taste@seattletimes.com

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Catch Nancy Leson's commentaries on food and restaurants on the third Wednesday of each month on KPLU (88.5 FM) at 6:30 a.m., 8:30 a.m. and 4:45 p.m, and again the following Sunday at 6:30 and 8:30 a.m. Listen to her first commentary.