Restaurants

Per Se Is Offering A 50-Percent Discount To Millennials

So instead of a $325 dinner, you'll pay a not-so-insignificant $175 per plate. Wikimedia Commons
Joanna Fantozzi|

There's a reason why food trucks and fast-casual cuisine are the preferred "going-out" meals of millennials — namely, fine dining is just too expensive. Thomas Keller wants to change that. Per Se has introduced a new "30-for-30" dining experience that slashes the price of a tasting dinner in half for young adults.

You have to be 30 or younger to participate in the one-day-only event on March 30, which cuts the usual $325 price of the dinner down to $175. The deal for 30-tables-worth of lucky diners offers a seven-course tasting dinner and an optional $50 wine pairing. The event is meant to "usher in a new generation of diners" and offer a taste of the posh gastronomic world they probably can't quite afford yet.

"There is a rationale to offering a lower cost for a group of people who has a trillion in student-loan debt," Eve Turow Paul, the author of A Taste of Generation Yum: How the Millennial Generation's Love for Organic Fare, Celebrity Chefs and Microbrews Will Make or Break the Future of Food told Market Watch. "It's very hard to rationalize spending $400 on one meal, or whatever it's going to be after alcohol is included."

There's also a real danger of "Restaurant Week effect" with this meal. Why would you go back and pay almost double the price of your former millennial experience, when you could Instagram your one-time Per Se dinner and then go back to ordering Seamless and going out to cheap, boozy brunches instead?

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