NYC Restaurant Week returns on Monday

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The time that food fans circle on their calendar every summer and winter will arrive on Monday, when NYC Restaurant Week returns to the area. Click here for more info on NYC Restaurant Week. That means across city, many participating restaurants will be offering two-course lunches for $30, and three-course dinners for $45. As David Amorelli, the executive chef at the Pine Group, and F&J Pine in Van Nest says, "it gets you an opportunity to check out a restaurant that maybe you wouldn't normally go to at a price that's a bang for your buck." In the Bronx, that includes restaurants serving up just about every kind of food, including Jamaican, Cuban, Italian and steak. "You have a staycation," said Parul Ramirez, the co-owner of The Bronx Beer Hall. You get to kind of travel around new York and have a little bit of everything." For the Greenhouse Cafe in Bayridge, the summer months can be slow as local residents are often on vacation. They are hoping the prefix menu can keep them in town and dining out. "It does definitely increase your business 20, 30%," said Owner John Keegan, adding that "in the kitchen, making sure that..., we're putting our best foot forward, giving the people, value for their dollars." For newer restaurants like Aromi in Red Hook, they say it helps increase their reputation. "For Restaurant Week, we picked our signature dishes.... it's a lower price target, but we want, to let people know... since we've been open for just a couple of years," said owner Andrea Grillio, adding that "our typical customer spends $55-$60 so a $45 menu is a good 20% off." At F&J Pine, Amorelli says this is the first year the restaurant has taken part, telling News 12 that "we've been around for so long, that sometimes we get taken for granted, and they kind of forget about us and, you know, we're just as good as we ever were, if not better." With that in mind, he says he put together a Restaurant Week menu that he hopes will appeal to both returning and new customers alike, explaining "we always want to go with our home run team, your starting lineup's always got to be solid, but we're always trying to throw in some new things, like we did a bruschetta with fresh strawberries and a truffle honey which is kind of seasonal and fun." While The Pine is more of a traditional sort of place you would expect to see doing Retaurant Week, the Bronx Beer Hall is not. Since it has no kitchen or food menu of their own, it instead decided to team up with two restaurants and a bakery that are also on Arthur Avenue to put together their own lunch and dinner deals - which of course, also include beer. Ramirez says he hope it will "be a representation of what Arthur Avenue is best known for. We see ourselves first and foremost as a communal space, beer comes second, and being a communal space, why not represent the best that the community has to offer?" Restaurant Week runs until August 18, and all participating locations are listed online. "