SAN DIEGO COUNTY, Calif. — San Diego leaders along with restaurant owners held a press conference at The Fish Market in Downtown San Diego to introduce the San Diego's 2021 Restaurant Week. The spring rendition of Restaurant Week aligns to support the restaurant industry as it progresses into safe reopenings.
The 8-day event has expanded to provide more dining to bring additional aid to struggling restaurants. The event kicks off on Sunday, April 11 and will run through Sunday, April 18. San Diego Restaurant Week will feature 100 restaurants that will offer variations of prix fixe menus at much cheaper than normal prices.
For a full list of participating restaurants, click here.
This year’s event is especially important as more than 110,000 restaurants nationwide were forced to permanently shut their doors due to COVID-19. That equates to nearly one in every six restaurants. At the height of the pandemic’s impact on jobs last spring, California restaurants lost between 900,000-1 million jobs. That is out of a total of 1.4 million restaurant workers in the state.
Once outdoor dining reopened and restaurants reopened at limited indoor capacity, some of those jobs came back, but the number went back down in December of 2020, when the stay-at-home order was reinstated and outdoor dining closed once again, with indoor dining already closed by that point. In the month of January 2021, the hospitality industry lost another 70,000 jobs — no doubt because of the loss of on-site dining.
Participating restaurants span across San Diego County and will offer three-course prix-fixe dinner menus for $20, $30, $40, $50 or $60 per person and/or two-course prix-fixe lunch menus for $10, $15, $20 or $25 per person.
Watch: San Diego Restaurant Week returns for Spring Foodie Celebration