KCFreePress.com

Kansas City is getting its very own restaurant week. January 22-31 (yes, that's actually 10 days), nearly 100 restaurants around town will offer lunch for $15 and/or dinner for $30.

Restaurant Week has all the promise of being a huge boon to Kansas City's food scene. Not only will it provide an opportunity for diners to visit restaurants that they ordinarily would not visit — a number of unfamiliar establishments have popped up on the participant list (and I'm supposed to pay attention to these things) — it will help draw crowds to restaurants during their slowest season.

Existing programs, like KC Originals and the Power and Light District's Restaurant Week, operate on similar premises, but are more limited in scope, and other cities have held similar events in efforts to showcase local eateries.

But in Kansas City, Restaurant Week is not just a fancy food grab, it's a genuine charitable endeavor. Ten percent of all proceeds from Kansas City Restaurant Week will go to Harvesters, a community food network.

Kansas City appears to be one of the few cities to incorporate charitable giving into the Restaurant Week idea. "It was a no-brainer," said Derek Gale, the Kansas City native who came up with the idea in 2007. "What makes more sense than finding a partner that provides food for hungry people in the community?"

From his home base of Chicago, Gale developed the Kansas City version as a metro-wide event, encompassing all types of establishments. A food writer and hospitality industry enthusiast, he saw smaller cities hosting restaurant weeks and thought his home town had an opportunity to showcase itself as a great food destination. Before long he signed on the KC Convention & Visitors Association and The Greater Kansas City Restaurant Association as sponsors of the project. This proved instrumental in getting restaurateurs to buy in.

Once they built up a critical mass of 50 participants, the last 46 requests flooded in very quickly. Fine dining powerhouses like Lidia's and Michael Smith are participating, but so are 75th Street Brewery, Blanc Burgers & Bottles and all of the metro Bo Lings locations. Pretty much every area of the metro is represented, from Shawnee to Lake Lotawana and many places in between.

Chain restaurants are getting into the act too, including two of the fancy but awkwardly pronounced variety: McCormick and Schmick's and Ruth's Chris Steak House. (I can't in good conscience recommend that you bypass excellent local restaurants in favor of chains, but these places do offer among the best deals you can get during Restaurant Week.)

Because of the fixed price and anticipated volume, menu options are limited, though some places are offering a choice of appetizers, entrees and desserts rather than single courses. With so many restaurants participating, it will pay to do your research before venturing out for dinner. Ideally every participant would be offering meals at a tremendous value, but frankly, a few of them aren't, so be sure to check ahead of time.

Gale indicated that in future years the Restaurant Week executive committee will look to "provide education and training about how to put your best foot forward when building a menu that equals value for your customers." (This is the very first year, so I'm more than willing to cut some slack, particularly since a portion of my tab will help feed the hungry. In the meantime I'll let you, dear reader, be the judge of what is a good value or not.)

If things work out well for everyone involved, expect to see Restaurant Weeks occur regularly in Kansas City. As Gale said, "we've already had restaurants asking about next year."

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