What Does Restaurant Week Look Like in A Small Town on a Great Lake?

The idea of Restaurant Week is not new. It’s a New York City tradition that started in 1992 with lunch specials and has been embraced in urban areas across the world to build customer loyalty, offer savings and create opportunities to try a new restaurant. 

In a small town like Vermilion, the Restaurant Week experience is more personal. You know the owner, the chef, or the wait staff because your kids go to school together, or they’re your neighbors. Hang out in their restaurant enough and by now you are surely friends. Maybe you’ve watched guys like Jeremy and Joe from Pavilion Grill evolve from busboys to wait staff, cooks to sous chefs to operating two, soon to be three, awesome Vermilion restaurants.

Our local restaurants are where we go for birthdays, engagements, weddings, girls’ night, breakups, makeups, reunions and more. They feed us as we move through life events.

Perhaps you know a particular restaurant’s menu so well that you order without one. And your favorite waiter knows your brew and as you walk in the door, you can see them fetching it from the cooler.

Chances are you also know what your favorite restaurants did to make it through 2020, a year of restrictions, compliance measures and shutdowns, and that 2021 is still hard. You’ve watched them keep it together, create a safe and comfortable new experience, do what they could to keep staff employed and work in the short term to get from one week to the next. They reinvented themselves quickly and frequently. If they made it look easy, it wasn’t but they made it happen.

How do you help? How do you say, “Thanks”? Come out for our first ever Vermilion Restaurant Week, Sunday, March 21st through Saturday, March 27th. There are 13 participating restaurants preparing to make your visit delicious and memorable with something for every taste and budget.

Let’s say you have $40 in your pocket. You can go to Touché for a prixe fixe dinner for yourself (because you earned it) or you can go to Martino’s International Cafe and feed the family on Old World Samplers ($10.99 each) featuring cabbage rolls, pierogis and paprikash and have money left over to take home a couple of gyros ($5.99 each) for lunch.

Spend it at Salvatore’s Italian Restaurant & Pizzeria and welcome the new owners who opened during a pandemic. Free dessert? Yes, please with each pasta entree at Jim’s Pizza Box or with a home-cooked meal at the VFW on Poorman Road, where the public is welcome, and the talk is all local. 

Discover what’s cooking during Vermilion Restaurant Week by visiting our website and following Main Street on Facebook and Instagram where we’ll be talking about, looking at and eating delicious food this month. Be sure to thank your local independent restaurants for hanging in there and providing the local flavor that makes dining in our Small Town on a Great Lake so memorable.

—Marilou Suszko, Executive Director, Main Street Vermilion

Note: Vermilion Restaurant Week is hosted by Main Street Vermilion. If you have any questions, please contact us via email or by calling 440.963.0772