Librezine.com - Free Library Ezine for Everyone

In France, they go for something francy – em – fancy, like foie gras when they want to go out and dine in style. In America, it's nothing as pretentious as that (well, most of the time, anyway). A nice well done steak at the best steakhouse in town is all it takes to get an American to feel really well-fed.

The thing is, the recession has done nothing to bring down the fortunes of any top-flight restaurant that primarily sells premium steaks. Over the last year, they've all found that business has been good to them. If you're the best steakhouse in town, (or one of them anyway), you'll find that your profits probably rose more than 6% last year. That's compared to 2% for regular top-flight restaurants that sell more than just steaks.

And it's not that the restaurant business has let this go unnoticed. It may not be very good news for cows, but apparently, restaurateurs are closing down their regular full-service restaurants and opening premium steakhouses instead. The number of premium steakhouses just keeps rising every year. Restaurant Guide now lists more than a hundred.

Americans are fanatic about their food. They will either be fanatic about building the most perfect kitchens and cooking the most perfect meals in them, or they will be passionate about dining out as often as possible. But of course, now that people have fewer resources to fall back on, it can be kind of hard often to fund this kind of passion. You might get out nearly as much though if you know a few tricks to snag a restaurant discount or two.

Now, a restaurant discount doesn't mean you're supposed to stay away from the dessert cart, the bar and the good side of the menu. It's about taking a tour of every part of the restaurant and bar menu that you like, but doing it in moderation and paying very little.

The first thing you want to do is to see if the website of the restaurant you're interested in has anything for you. It used to be that restaurant websites were about the least well-designed ones ever. These days though, they're putting a lot of effort into making every page a kind of experience in its own right.

Even better, if you're interested in visiting the restaurant, they are going to have a restaurant discount coupon for you to print out or take to the restaurant on your smartphone.