Happy... Lunar Valentine’s Gras?
Restaurants are busy as holidays converge
Three holidays are converging this weekend to keep restaurants hopping, a long weekend of dining for Lunar New Year (beginning Friday), Valentine’s Day (Sunday) and Mardi Gras (Tuesday).
And following hot on their heels is Lent, when Milwaukee’s demand for fish fries hits a fevered pitch.
“It’s a lot going on, honestly,” said Darin Yenter, the executive chef at Hot House Tavern, N88-W16631 Appleton Ave. in Menomonee Falls, who noted that aside from monthlong Mardi Gras specials, Hot House was planning romantic specials for Valentine’s weekend and gearing up for Ash Wednesday.
Before the weekend even began, some restaurants marking both Lunar New Year and Valentine’s Day, or Mardi Gras and Valentine’s Day, already were booked with reservations or close to it. Restaurants also were already getting takeout orders.
Tony Ho, the chef-owner of Momo Mee Asian Cuisine at 110 E. Greenfield Ave., has a Lunar New Year menu that will run through February; it includes items such as jiaozi dumpling soup with pork and shrimp, or zhangcha, or tea-smoked, duck.
Even customers reserving tables over the weekend were already placing their orders, Ho said — perhaps to secure the menu items they wanted, or to minimize time spent dining inside.
At Black Shoe Hospitality, which operates west side restaurants Maxie’s at 6732 W. Fairview Ave., Blue’s Egg at 317 N. 76th St., and Story Hill BKC at 5100 W. Blue Mound Road, coowner Dan Sidner said midweek that
Story Hill had already almost sold out of takehome kits for two.
Reservations for the restaurants? Those essentially had to be shut off, Sidner said, because the tables were full. He thought the restaurants likely would be able to take some last-minute customers, after cancellations.
Reservations are relatively new at Maxie’s. It’s a change brought about by COVID-19 to avoid having people wait in the restaurants for tables.
Grateful to be busy, Sidner did wish Valentine’s Day could have landed midweek, so that restaurants would see an influx of diners celebrating then, along with those who would have gone out on the weekend anyway.
“You always want New Year’s Eve to fall on a Wednesday night, not a Saturday night,” he observed.
Sidner, Ho and others have said that reservations on the weekends have been in demand over the past few months. Weekdays are much slower, and the pandemic remains an economic challenge for restaurants.
So, with all the holidays clustered together, “we’re just lucky that there’s something to celebrate,” Yenter said.