Thursday is the beginning of Orlando Weekly Restaurant Week. No, I don’t know why it starts on a Thursday, but it probably has something to do with it running for 10 days instead of the usual seven days associated with a week. A better question is why do they call it Restaurant Week and not Restaurant 10 Days?

OW’s Deca Dining Days has four price structures: $10, $15, $25 and $35. In the first two you’ll find restaurants offering both lunch and dinner menus for those prices. The two higher prices are dinner only. Each restaurant offers a multi-course menu, special for the run of the event, and most with at least two choices per course, sometimes several.

For example, for dinner at K restaurant, you can choose a starter of heirloom tomato salad or ceviche, a main course of Palmetto Creek Farms pork or Local Cape Canaveral Seafood, and  a dessert of pecan pie or bread pudding for $25.

Or for a $10 lunch at Paxia you can have one of four main courses and a dessert. That may or may not include a beverage — at the top of the Paxia menu on the Restaurant Week website it says it includes a choice of Mexican soda or Coke product and at the bottom it says beverage, tax and gratuity not included. Confusing.

Paxia and K are a couple of good choices. I’m also liking Funky Monkey, Spencer’s for Steaks and Chops, Crave and Big Fin. I count fewer than 30 participating restaurants. I commented that last year’s list looked small; this one looks smaller. But one thing has changed: last year’s Restaurant Week was only seven days long.

Click here to see the Orlando Weekly Restaurant Week website. Click on Restaurants to see which restaurants are serving in each category. Then click the name of the restaurant to take a look at the menu. When you visit one of the restaurants, you may have to specifically ask for the Restaurant Week menu.

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