Restaurants Expect To Feel Valentine's Day Love

Valentine's Day is shaping up as a financial feast this year for the city's restaurants.

That's the word from one top restaurant after another, even amid a flurry of financial worries, such as a faltering economy, increasingly erratic stock markets around the globe, and mounting job losses. Such turmoil is undoubtedly causing growing numbers of New Yorkers to cut back on their big-time spending — but that apparently doesn't extend to the annual romantic Valentine's Day dinner.

Based on a check of many of the town's most highly regarded dining delights, initial indications are that Valentine's Day will be a windfall this year for the city's leading restaurants. Many, in fact, look set to enjoy their briskest Valentine's Day business ever.

Typical is Daniel, one of the city's top-rated restaurants. "I think this will be our busiest Valentine's Day we've ever had," an employee told me. Daniel runs $295 a person for a four-course meal, and reservations for the most desirable evening dining hours (between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.) are long gone. If you're a late eater, though, and you're willing to start dinner at say 10:30 p.m. or 11 p.m., Daniel will try to accommodate you, the restaurant tells me. In fact, very late and very early dinner accommodations — kicking off as early as 3:45 p.m. and as late as midnight — are part of this year's Valentine's Day scene.

Midnight dinner is offered by Le Perigord, a 44-year-old East Side French winner. Based on its sizable number of reservations, Le Perigord should have its best Valentine's Day ever, its owner, Georges Briguet, tells me. "We're already turning people away." He credits part of the strong demand to the demise of many fine French restaurants. "Fine dining in the city is a dying art," he says, "and we're like the last of the Mohicans."

Per Se, one of the city's priciest restaurants, has been fully booked for Valentine's Day for two months. Its per-person charge for the holiday: $275. Asked about the possibility of being put on a waiting list, I was told by the reservation taker, "Don't bother. You're wasting your time and mine; you'll never make it."

Hope is not all lost. The Four Seasons, for example, still has some Valentine's Day openings at $150 a person. "But you will have to act fast because we're almost fully booked," a spokeswoman told me.

If you're willing to ante up big bucks for a Valentine's Day dinner extravaganza, specifically $1,295 a couple, there are seats available at the Astor Center in Greenwich Village. Dinner will feature five courses, all with foie gras, along with eight vintages of Chateau d'Yquem, the world's premier sauterne. All told, there are 36 seats available as of this writing.

While the Samson-like strength of this year's Valentine's Day restaurant business may surprise a lot of people, given the plethora of financial worries, that's not the case with Nicola Civetta, the owner of Primavera, the city's premier Italian power restaurant.

"It's irrational to think people here are going to pinch pennies on the most romantic day of the year," he tells me. "Reservations are strong and we should have a full house, as usual. The real problem," he adds, "is that on Valentine's Day, you're forced to turn away more people than you can accommodate."

He finds that Valentine's Day has now become the restaurant's biggest revenue day of the year, surpassing both Mother's Day and New Year's Eve.

If you're about to try to get a reservation at one of the leading names in town, don't bother ringing up any of the following names, as they all tell me they're sold out: Bouley, Le Bernardin, River Café, Chanterelle, Union Square Café, Gotham Bar & Grill, Nobu, the new Alain Ducasse in the St. Regis Hotel, Gramercy Tavern, Le Cirque, the Rainbow Room, One if by Land, Il Mulino, and La Grenouille.

One of the city's renowned gourmets told me he is 100% sure there are Valentine's Day openings at his favorite restaurant in the city, Jean Georges. He is right. They are available, but for 2009, not 2008. "Try us next year," an operator taking reservations there told me, noting that reservations for this year's $168 seven-course dinner were fully committed.

I also rang up the ever-busy Peter Luger Steak House in Brooklyn to see what the possibility was of getting a Valentine's Day reservation. "All booked except at 3:45 or 10.45; that's it," a spokesman said. Any chance of breaking through and eating at a more normal hour? "If you want, come in, go to the bar, grab a drink, and pray," he replied.

dandordan@aol.com