Bucharest has plenty of good restaurants, but getting people through their doors has become harder lately. Inflation, rising operating costs and cautious consumers have left the city's hospitality industry under pressure. Summer is particularly difficult, when much of Bucharest heads for the seaside.
Alexandra and Cătălin Cincu, a couple well known in Romania's food scene, with 70,000 Instagram followers and nearly 15 years of experience in journalism and digital marketing, decided to give people a reason to come back to the table.
Alongside restaurant reservation platform ialoc.ro and branding agency Studio Maller, they launched Bucharest Food Week, held from 14 to 20 September.
Restaurants would create special menus at three fixed prices: 69, 119 and 189 lei (approximately €14, €24 and €38), while ialoc handled reservations and the organisers took care of promotion. The ambition was to encourage customers to try new places and maybe later return.
They started working on the project in May, a four-people team. They settled for the third week of September (14-20) because school starts the week before and most people would be back in town.
Rather than relying on emails, the organisers approached restaurant owners personally. Alexandra spoke to 60 in just three days. By September, 110 restaurants had signed up, alongside roughly 40 bars, bakeries and other venues offering special dishes or drinks.
The programme grew to include masterclasses, wine tastings, collaborative dinners and a pop-up by Les Enfants du Marché, the cult Parisian restaurant, hosted at Bucharest's Tabra. (Less than a month later, on 12 October, a fire destroyed its permanent home at Paris's historic Marché des Enfants Rouges.)
The week in numbers
- 18,000–20,000 estimated participants, including approximately 10,300 diners with honoured reservations, another 2,000 walk-ins and more than 6,000 purchases of special products.
- 40% more honoured reservations than the annual weekly average.
- 85% of reservations came from first-time diners at the restaurants they chose.
- 10% more reservations even at restaurants outside the event.
- 412 seats sold out in six hours for the Les Enfants du Marché pop-up, with more than 800 people on the waiting list.
Fine-dining restaurants Kane and NOUA sold out their allocations on the first day. At Miez bakery, a special meat pie sold out by 11am daily, even after production doubled. For a city whose operators have been complaining about falling spending, those are encouraging numbers.
