Restaurant deals and BBQ

This week in Ann Arbor, restaurants all along main street will be wooing townies to sample their meals by offering fixed-price menus. Waltz in and be treated to a selection of the restaurant's finest three-course meal for only $25. It's all part of Ann Arbor Restaurant Week.

My wife and I were looking through the menus online when we began to ask ourselves, "Just how much are we saving by eating out for this special event?" After searching through a couple of menus, it turns out to be wrong for us. Restaurants aren't offering special menu items, so we just priced the same meal. Some places offered choices, so we chose the most expensive items to compare.

We found that most places only save us a couple of dollars off the equivalent meal. In one case, the fixed price dinner (with no options) would cost $1 more than normal. But it's worse than that. When we go out, we would order less food than 2 fixed meals: we typically split appetizers and deserts. Taking that into account, there wasn't a single restaurant we looked at that presented us a true savings.

So what is the use of Restaurant Week? It's all just advertising, pure and simple.

Usually, I hate letting myself be influenced by advertising, but this time, the advertisers were successful. Not in the way they intended though.

We had been trying to pick out our favorite place for BBQ baby-back ribs in Ann Arbor, and we thought this would be a good time to experiment. We headed home with a half-rack of ribs from our two top-runners: Grizzly Peak and The Blue Tractor. They're owned by the same parent company, but they do serve different food. We'd been going back an forth on this issue for a while now, so we finally made the direct comparison.

The winner: Blue Tractor sauce on Grizzly Peak meat. Grizzly Peak's meat was more tender and better quality, but the sauce was really too sweet. Blue Tractor had a nice spicy sauce, but its meat was a little tough. Since meat quality could vary by the night and by chef, we can't definitively say which place serves better ribs, but our bet's on Blue Tractor.