Podcast: Savannah Restaurant Week is now Hostess City Eats!
Jesse discussing some plans for the enhancement of Savannah’s very popular Restaurant Week every Winter. So much of it is the same, some of it will be different. Give it a listen.
Jesse Blanco: Quite possibly the most popular food centric event of the entire year here in the Savannah area isn’t a big old food festival, isn’t anything going on out at the beach, isn’t a food truck festival, it isn’t any of those things. If you strictly go by the numbers, digital and otherwise, I could make a very large case for Restaurant Week. Restaurant Week is something we’ve been doing since–I believe it was 2018, every time it comes up I think about it, was it 2018 or was it 2019? I want to say it was 2018 when Eat It and Like It started doing Savannah’s Restaurant Week, and it was an instant hit. Restaurant Week existed long before Eat It and Like It started putting it together, or putting a version of it together–it used to be run by the Savannah Morning News once upon a time. But for a lot of reasons we don’t need to get into here, it was a good opportunity for us to take a shot at it, and it kind of caught on and it kind of worked, and it has become our baby, if you will, every single year. And it’s growing, obviously it took a half step back during 2020- 21, and I believe up to 2022, where everybody took a half a step back, if not more, during those handful of years. But Savannah Restaurant Week, I believe–again, I should go back at some point and put pen to paper and see what the dates were, but in the big picture it really doesn’t matter, after the shutdown and the pandemic and all that, Savannah Restaurant Week started to crawl its way back.
If you remember–just a quick little 30 seconds on the history of the last five years of Restaurant Week, if you remember, coming out of the pandemic, a lot of restaurants continued to struggle even though, you know, everything was open and we were back to work and all that stuff. A lot of restaurants continued to struggle for a while, a year or more, because they couldn’t find enough employees to make it all work. And you know, not gonna get into the politics of all that, “of course I couldn’t find employees because everybody was getting free money” and all of that nonsense, but it was a struggle to get restaurants fully staffed. So when we started shopping Restaurant Week around those first couple of years, it was hard to get people on board, because they wanted the business, but they didn’t have the staff to properly handle that business. So it has clawed and scratched its way back, Restaurant Week has here in Savannah, back to full strength, and the last two years are proof of that. We have enjoyed very successful Restaurant Weeks, and the traffic, like I said a few minutes ago, digitally, proves all of that. I think this past Restaurant Week, 2025, which ran January–well, was supposed to run January 23rd through February 7th. Restaurant Week in 2025 was a huge success despite the fact, do you remember, we had an ice storm at the beginning? (laughing) We had to shut down, I laugh, and you look back and laugh now, and it wasn’t really funny at the time, it was very stressful, but an ice storm came and landed on Savannah and essentially shut the city down in pieces, if you will, for four or five days. And that coincided exactly with the beginning of Restaurant Week, so it made it a little bit difficult to get going. But once we got going, everybody I spoke to reported that Savannah came out, Savannah supported, as it usually does. So that was good to see. If you go by digital traffic, our website, savrestaurantweek.com, enjoyed 168,000 visits in three weeks. That’s a lot, y’all. That is a ton. Now, a lot of that is people looking at menus and all of the things that Restaurant Week offers. Over and over, it’s cold outside, you’re bored, you’re looking, “oh there’s a new menu, let me look.” So a lot of that, I’m sure, is repeat visitors. But it was still 168,000 visits to that website, which was a record, went up on some double digit growth from ‘24, so we were excited about that.
So, Restaurant Week as it moves into 2026, we’ve been talking about this idea for a hot minute, dare I say two or three years, myself and some marketing people around Savannah, in the hotels, here, there, and everywhere… we’ve been talking about the idea of trying to do something bigger in the winter, when it’s otherwise slow in Savannah. And I came up with a few different names of it, it has evolved and changed a number of times over the years, what it would look like, what it would be called, how it would be themed, all kinds of stuff, all kinds of conversations, a lot of great ideas, some of which I won’t share here today, because they’re not happening, but we came up with, back in the spring of 2025, the thought to move forward with our first enhancement–that word is very important–our first enhancement of Savannah’s Restaurant Week, enhanced in so much as we had 36, I believe, 37 restaurants participate in Restaurant Week in 2025, and that is everything you know, Savannah Restaurant Week to be. The restaurants offer three courses at a special fixed price that you can go and enjoy over an 11 day period, and it gives you an opportunity to get to restaurants you maybe haven’t been [to] in a while, or maybe can’t necessarily afford all that often, or occasion restaurants, or all that good stuff… it is that, and that concept exists in cities all over America, and Savannah obviously is no different. But the enhancement comes in the fact that we thought we could sprinkle in a handful, three to five tops, of events that would exist over the top of Restaurant Week, events that would signify, I guess, celebrate the food culture here in Savannah that would be indicative of what we do here day to day, week to week, month to month, in the Lowcountry here of the South. And so we discussed–and I keep saying we, because a lot of people think that I do all this alone, I most certainly do not–we discussed, I poked, I focus-grouped with my inner circle, and we discussed what that would look like. And so those events were carefully chosen to fit the dynamic, if you will, of what life is like here in the Lowcountry. That handful of events, like I said, three to five, and that is, as I record this podcast right now, a moving number, those three to five events are called, we’re calling it the whole thing together, Hostess City Eats.
Why are we calling it Hostess City Eats? It sounds like a food festival. No, we are very careful to avoid using the word festival. The word festival implies, you know, a big open field with endless samples and people sipping and consuming and drinking bourbon and sipping all there is to sip and eating all there is to eat and having a good old time with live music and a very festive festival atmosphere. Hostess City Eats won’t be any of that, at least not in year one or year two, if I have my way. This is going to be a little more controlled events, events that will–because it’s happening in February, largely all of them, except for one–will be indoors. Because as we all know, February is the dead of winter, not only in Southeast Georgia, but across the country. And if you’ve lived in this area for any amount of time, then you know that we can just as easily get 67 degrees, or we could suffer the misfortune of having 37 degrees in early February. And so planning anything outside in a festive atmosphere, is–I won’t say asking for trouble, but playing with fire is the best way to describe that. So we decided we would do all of our events indoors. And so what we have come up with is a series of events, some of which I can tell you about today, a couple of which need an I dotted and a T crossed so that we are able to share those with you, so I can’t share them today. But we have come up with a handful of events that are aimed at not only giving us who live here in the Greater Savannah, Bluffton, Hilton Head general area something to do in the dead of winter, food-wise, but also perhaps attract some visitors to town that wouldn’t otherwise come if they love food. This is aimed at becoming a very large food celebration. We are calling it Savannah’s biggest celebration of food, it will go on for 11 days. Why 11 days if there’s only three or five events? Well, because these three to five events will exist on top of Savannah’s Restaurant Week.
So the events that we have—I’ll run through them quickly, I’m not going to go into a ton of detail, I’ll tell you where you can find more detail here in a second, but the events that we have so far begin with a kickoff event we’re doing on Monday night, January 26th, down at District Live at Plant Riverside District at the JW Marriott. We are calling it Eat It and Like It Live. And we are going to have a–I chuckle, because a friend of mine came up with a perfect description for it–a spirited discussion of Savannah’s food scene, what’s going on here, what we can expect in the future, with a handful of chefs here in the area. There’s a live music venue here at the Plant Riverside District at the JW Marriott, we’re going to have a nice conversation, a panel, if you will, maybe a cooking demo, we haven’t finalized that yet, with a couple of chefs here at District Live. And then afterward, we’re going to move into one of the riverfront ballrooms, and everybody’s going to enjoy sips and bites from the chefs that we just met, and enjoy a wonderful Monday evening along the Savannah River, celebrating, really, Savannah’s food scene, and what it is becoming. The only other event that we can say that will be happening–the others will be happening, [I mean] that I can share, is on Sunday, February 1st—Sunday, February 1st is not Super Bowl Sunday, just FYI. The Super Bowl is on the 8th in 2026. But on Sunday, February 1st, we are going to have a fish fry, and I’m calling it #fancyfishfry. And we are going to do–again, I had someone describe it to me as your classic humble Sunday fish fry reimagined. We’re going to invite a handful of chefs, I would think five to seven, to offer little bites of fried fish with maybe sauces, maybe sandwiches, however they want to prepare that fried fish on that Sunday. It’s going to be about a three hour afternoon. It’s the only event of Host a City Eats that will be outdoors, because you gotta have a fish fry outdoors in the spirit of a good old-fashioned oyster roast. Come with your coat, we’ll have heaters obviously, we’re planning a tent to help control the temperatures if we have the unfortunate misfortune, if you will, of getting bitten by a cold snap, but we are going to enjoy that outdoors on Sunday, February the 1st. It will be a good time. And everybody that I tell about the fish fry, their eyes get big, because a Sunday fish fry, elevated, if you will, is so classically Savannah. If you know Savannah, you know we’re all about our comfort food. And yes, we like good food, we like a lot of great things, but this is a traditional community that loves its fried chicken, as we know, and its seafood, and its oysters, and just, you know, a laid back kind of vibe is what we’re going for with the fish fry.
In between all of that, there’s going to be two or three other events. We’re hoping to honor our first responders with a dinner, we are hoping to raise some money for a scholarship fund here in town, details I can’t get into on all of that, but it’s going to be a really, really good time over 11 days. Where you can find all of the details about all of this that I have just shared with you is at our website, hostesscityeats.com. That is hostesscityeats.com, is where you can find more information, and where you can see as we start rolling out events, there’ll be E-Blasts, there’ll be, you know, stuff on social media announcing new events as they come, because as I record this, I think the website–we have a countdown going on the homepage, we are about 104 days away. Now, the reason why we’re bringing all this up now, if we’re 104 days away, is because I don’t need to tell you, once we kind of hit Thanksgiving, it’s a 30 day banana peel to Christmas, and not too many people are going to be thinking about what they’re going to be doing in February. And so we wanted to get it out there and give everybody a chance to think about if they plan to or hope to join us January 28th through February the 8th for not only Restaurant Week, everybody should know what dates those are so that people that are out of town can make their plans to come to Savannah, but also, look at our events as we continue to roll them out through the month of October and into early November. And we hope to have a full slate–we will have a full slate by early November, that anybody could look at. And these tickets are affordable, I think the fish fry early bird tickets are $65, I want to say, I think the ones for the Eat It and Like It Live are $80, but that includes your food and drink. And so they’re very appropriately priced, and we’re excited about that. Some of those others are going to be higher ticket items, like I said, raising money for scholarship funds and all that stuff, but we will get to those details a little bit later.
This is something that I’m incredibly proud of, I have spent 15 years documenting the food scene here in this city, and this region, and the thought of building something over the next couple of years–because we’re putting this together, it’s going to be good, but we have our eyes on year two and three already. What would it look like if we expanded it? I think it will go well. It all depends on how well we promote it, I believe we will do that appropriately, but I think it’s going to be good. And I hope, knock on wood, that it will grow into the future like we think it can. Savannah used to have a week-long food and wine festival in November. I haven’t really, over the years, ever really had any interest in putting something like that together ever again, even though I was part of it for every year that it was here. That’s not something that I’ve ever wanted to try to dabble in, but this is different. Everybody loves Restaurant Week. Everybody can engage in Restaurant Week, because the price ranges are so varied. And this is something that I want to use to enhance it, and hope to bring some people to town during what is otherwise, I think we would all agree if we live here, the absolute slowest time of the year in Savannah. If you don’t get out January, February, then you know, once we hit March–I call it the green flag, because obviously of St. Patrick’s Day, but all the people come back and everything gets crowded and locals start complaining about parking downtown and yada, yada, yada, yada. And you step on that banana peel, and next thing you know, you’re into the dead of summer and it’s hot and all of that stuff. So if you want to get out and enjoy Savannah or come to visit Savannah, with not a lot of people around–yes, there are people, but not nearly as many as you’d find in the spring and summer–give some thought to coming to join us January 28th through February the 8th. That is Savannah’s Restaurant Week, but it is also being renamed, rebranded, re-imagined as Hostess City Eats. And again, you can find all you need to know about it right now, including a link to tickets, at hostesscityeats.com. Thanks for hanging out. We’ll see you next time.