It certainly varies by place. In San Diego, the typical Restaurant Week menus cost $30, and include an appetizer, entree, and dessert. Most of the places where I go for restaurant week normally charge something like $21-28 for an entree, $7-12 for appetizers, and $6-8 for dessert. Some places downsize the entrees, but most don't seem to do that. So it really comes down to whether or not you would have ordered both an appetizer and a dessert. If you would not have, then Restaurant Week probably offers very minor savings at the expense of a reduced set of choices. But on the Restaurant Week menu, you basically get either a free dessert or a free appetizer as part of the promotion.

And nobody is forcing you to order the Restaurant Week menu - you are perfectly entitled to just get whatever you might want off of the normal menu.

Same experience as yours. Either very small portions or cheap dishes that wouldn't normally appear on the menu.

in Boston: Capital Grille for example ... can't eat the restaurant week menu size and the menu is the price of a regular entree. It can be a fantastic value.

Go to Fogo de Chao or similar Brazilian steakhouse. Usually it is $60-70 for all their delicious goodness of meat. In Denver, it is $30 for our restaurant week. It's a steal.

P.S. If you go, skip the salad bar. Trust me. Save the room for the meat.

I've had decent Restaurant Week experiences at local (non-chain) places. We like to try newer, upscale places during that week...places that would probably be $60-75/person regularly. Even if they downside the menu a bit, we still get a good feel for whether we'd go back later.

I don't mind if they downside the menu and then I'm getting good value for it. The worst is when they downside the menu, *and* charge you more, *and* the whole service/experience sucks. Valentine's Day, New Year's Eve, etc.: that's when we completely avoid restaurants.

Thankfully, to date, our RW experiences have been okay.

Mixed. Good value at a few restaurants, ripoff at most others.

BTW, Fleming's, while having started in Newport Beach, is now a national chain with locations in almost thirty states. It is owned by the same company that owns and operates Outback Steakhouse and Bonefish Grill.

This is the main problem I have with Restaurant Week. Whenever I'm traveling, I like to use Yelp to find good places to eat. And very frequently I'll find clusters of horrible reviews of places that seem to otherwise have good reviews, all attributable to Restaurant Week. It took me a while to catch on to this. Most of the reviews don't mention that they went during RW, they just say the food/and or service was terrible ("overpriced," "overrated," etc.). Sometimes I'm lucky enough that one will mention RW, and then I realize I can completely ignore all the other reivews posted around the same time.

Now that I've recognized the pattern, when I see groups of reviews that are incongruent with the rest, I will sometimes actually look up when restaurant week was in that city, so I know which ones to ignore. But I wish Yelp had a way to just filter out all Restaurant Week reviews from the ratings, because I find them completely irrelevant. Not only is the experience during RW different from the "true" experience of that restaurant, but also the clientele seems to not be the normal clientele of the restaurant. If they aren't regular patrons of "fancy" restaurants, their expectations will be different and also they won't have enough basis for comparison to provide an accurate review.

In short, I don't really care if restaurants participate, but I do care when people post reviews of restaurants based on experiences during Restaurant Week.