Dining's dog days
During the slow season, Baton Rouge restaurants and their workers need your business. Tips for dining well and helping restaurants too.
Restaurant Week rolls around twice a year, a strategy dressed up as a celebration: put bottoms in seats when sales are slow. The summer edition lands in late July, timed for the people still in town while everyone else takes in the last days of summer before fall arrives with school, football, and the spending that follows both.
Why it matters: Baton Rouge dining is slow all summer long. That’s not a problem for diners. That’s an opportunity for people who eat and the places that feed them.
The summer math: Heat is misery for restaurant workers, who live on tips. But it’s a gift for everyone else. No reservation lines. No wait at the busiest places in town. Even Superior Grill’s two spots go quiet on a summer afternoon. Walk in, get a table, get a server who has time to talk you into dessert and an after-dinner coffee.
What you can do to help restaurants:
- Go out more if you can afford to. Your bartender needs the tip. So does your server, your coffee shop counter person, your regular beer joint.
- Let someone else run the grill during the suffocating summer. Get the boudin at Offset Smoker, the smoked chicken at HannaQ, the burnt ends at TJ Ribs. Somebody already stood over the fire for hours so you don’t have to.
- Spend money on your drive home. Get the to-go margarita from Mestizo—they’ll hand it over with a lid, as will many other places. Don’t drink on the way home; it’s illegal and dangerous.
- Look for the seasonal specials restaurants build specifically to get you in the door in June and July.
- Book the big table now. Group reservations get hard to secure in the fall. Right now, nobody’s fighting you for a table of twelve. Throw the early birthday party. Do Christmas in July if you want to.
The bottom line: Restaurant Week will still happen, and it’s worth booking—plenty of people use it to try somewhere new. But the best deal in Baton Rouge dining right now isn’t a discount menu in late July. It’s an empty dining room in June, a server with time to spare, and a tip that means more than it will in October.
