In June, Domenico Cornacchia added a $14 two-course lunch option to the menus of his two Italian restaurants in McLean and Bethesda.
Within six weeks, lunchtime sales at Assaggi Osteria and Assaggi Mozzarella Bar were up nearly 20 percent.
“There is very big demand,” said Cornacchia, executive chef and owner of the restaurants. “The results have been very good — 80 percent of the people who come in order the two-course special.”
With names like “executive lunch” and “power hour,” it’s no secret that local restaurants are targeting businesspeople with prix fixe meals and promises of speedy service. Overall sales are still reeling in a weak economic recovery, and restaurateurs say they are increasingly looking to lunch to beef up their bottom lines.
Fiola, an Italian restaurant in downtown Washington, began offering a three-course “power lunch” for $34 in April.
“For people who are conducting business during lunch, it’s more important to be in their conversations than to spend time going through an a la carte menu,” said Fabio Trabocchi, the executive chef. “There needs to be a quick and very straightforward set-up.”
The benefits of a prix fixe lunch menu are two-fold for customers, analysts say: They offer good value — a $25 three-course meal at a steakhouse, say — and are served quickly, since many of the items are prepared ahead of time. For restaurants, they help attract lunch customers at a time when many potential clients still prefer home-packed lunches or cheaper options such as deli sandwiches.
In many ways, local restaurateurs say the movement is an offshoot of the popular D.C. Restaurant Week, which offers lunch for $20.12 and dinner for $35.12 at area restaurants two times a year. This year’s second installment of Restaurant Week begins Monday and runs through Sunday.
“I was sitting here one day and was like, ‘People really like Restaurant Week,’” said Bryan Yealy, corporate chef at Georgia Brown’s in Northwest Washington. “Why can’t we use the prix fixe menu to get people to come in here all the time?”
The $24 three-course lunch at Georgia Brown’s, which was implemented about five years ago, has raised the average lunch bill by 3 percent to 5 percent long-term, Yealy said.
“Every once in a while, someone who would have gotten a salad gets the prix fixe,” he said. “That helps bump us up a bit.”
The Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington said it does not track lunchtime sales or trends.
In any case, even area restaurants with preexisting fixed lunch menus are revamping their offerings to be more executive-friendly.
Earlier this summer, The Source by Wolfgang Puck tweaked its lunch menu to offer two new prix fixe options: one geared toward business clients who need to be in and out in an hour ($22), and the other for those who have more time to linger ($45). Both menus offer three-course meals, but the latter includes more of the restaurant’s specialties and a glass of wine, Executive Chef Scott Drewo said.
The Palm, a national chain with steakhouses in the District and Tyson’s Corner, has long been offering a three-course lunch that includes an appetizer, entree and dessert for $22.95.
But even that may be changing, said Brian McCardle, vice president of culinary operations for the company.
The Palm is looking to pare down its lunch menu to two courses and a lower fixed price.
“We see a lot of people who choose not to get the dessert because they just want to be in and out,” McCardle said. “The whole idea of the business lunch, where you order three martinis and dine all day, is over.”
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