Shrewsbury Restaurant Week 2024
It’s Shrewsbury Restaurant Week!!!!
If you’ve read some of my other blogs, you’ll be familiar with my ramblings and maybe expect to not have a clue what I am on about but to save any confusion let’s lay it out on the table!
This is an amazing initiative cooked up by Original Shrewsbury. For the first time ever, they have got a whopping 35 of Shrewsbury’s restaurants to sign up and create offers and specials that are going to be available throughout this celebration of the Shrewsbury food scene! The full list of restaurants and their offers are on the link at the bottom - head over to Original Shrewsbury to scope it out!
The concept is like a loyalty/stamp sort of vibe. Pick up a stamp card, get it stamped at every restaurant you visit when you pay and if you manage to accrue 5 stamps (by visiting 5 different food joints) then you enter a prize draw to win a 3 course meal for 2 at a venue of your choice - or a £100 voucher if you choose a takeaway place!
It’s a pretty enticing offer if you ask me and let me tell you, I am shooting for gold!
We should all be well aware that the hospitality industry is on its knees. It’s crumbling right before our eyes. You might have noticed some well loved places in town closing their doors for good recently but the problems run much deeper than you might ever think. Even the big restaurants are struggling. You may have heard the news about Purnell’s in Birmingham. A Michelin starred institution. A place that I thought would be around forever, impenetrable, a fortress! Closed for good! A proper jaw dropping moment!
What I am trying to say is that we’ve reached a climate where no-one is safe! And we should not be assuming that places are doing ok - every single establishment needs support and that’s why it is so important that we get behind this scheme and use the chance to go and explore the amazing variety of restaurants we’ve got in our gorgeous town!
Money is tight for so many of us at the moment and I totally get that but don’t have regrets that you didn’t try somewhere. Don’t put off that meal. Don’t sit on the sofa in your pants, wallowing over a missed opportunity, wishing you’d taken that chance when you had it! Go and eat! The great Anthony Bourdain once famously said ‘If you don’t risk a bad meal, you’ll never get the magical one’ and it is so true! So get out there, get your stamp card ready and start collecting!
I feel so fortunate to live in a town where independent businesses thrive. I feel like it is like a badge of honour for all of us! It’s also one of the main reasons I knew I could settle in Shrewsbury.
So what am I doing to celebrate Shrewsbury Restaurant Week?
Well, wouldn’t you like to know……..
I hope you do want to know actually……I am going to tell you anyway so, tough luck if you didn’t want to know! (I figure you are this far down this rabbit hole of waffling with me already, you’re sticking the course!)
Although now I have genuinely confused myself about whether I was trying to get you to listen to what I am doing, whether I wanted you to want to know what I am doing or whether I even wanted to tell you? I definitely wanted to tell you, so it can’t be that. I also definitely want you to want to know….I think…….ABORT ABORT……..
What were we on about?……
Right, what I am doing………
I am setting myself a challenge to get out into Shrewsbury and I want to eat in places that I have never been before. Balancing family and work means my time for enjoyment and eating out has been stripped right down to the bone. Every meal has become a balancing act with the value of the babysitting token…..’It HAS to be worth it’…….so we end up eating in the same places, places we know and really trust……like Drazic from Heartbreak High, I have lost my spunk! I’m not even listening to Anthony anymore - I’m not risking anything! That has to stop! And it stops with Shrewsbury Restaurant Week!
I am going to throw out some of my top picks and recs for the week from the offers on the table and let you know where I reckon I am going to try! Then I will hopefully summon my inner University student and bring it all back with a lovely evaluation of my week. Fingers crossed I will change the habit of a lifetime and actually manage to make a tangible point that will actually answer the question in hand, rather than just prolong the balanced argument even further, hiding behind the fact that I am terrified of being wrong!
Was there even a question in this?………I’m not sure…….
So lets all stand and raise our stamp cards to taking risks!
Cheers to Shrewsbury Restaurant Week 2024!
NB: just to be clear, I will be eating in places I don’t normally go, however, I will also still be eating in places that I do go!
IMPORTANT LINKS:
All the restaurants and their offers are below - check them out
https://originalshrewsbury.co.uk/shrewsbury-restaurant-week-the-menu
