The dinner bell rings in Rexburg’s Restaurant Rush Week

REXBURG, Idaho (KIFI) - The week of Monday, Feb. 20 to Saturday, Feb. 25 is a large week for many of the Rexburg dining locations. The Rexburg Chamber of Commerce is sponsoring a week of deals and discovery of the many places to eat within the city of Rexburg.

"It is a time that we can thank all of our restaurants, dessert places, eateries in our surrounding area to thank them for all the times that they're up late with us, that they're ready early mornings," said CEO of the Rexburg Chamber of Commerce Janalyn Holt.

The chamber has 22 restaurants participating in the rush week, and the Chamber also is having a side activity to encourage people to visit the restaurants as well. "We have established this bingo game for the restaurants that if you go to four of the participating restaurants, come and drop off at the chamber with receipts verifying your purchase. There you'll get put into a gift basket. Each of these restaurants have given us a $25 gift card, so we're making up gifts, baskets with those so you could win that," said Holt.

Restaurants we visited said they are enjoying the attention. "The community here is awesome and we work closely with the city and so we saw it as a great opportunity. When we heard about it and we were, we try to jump in as soon as we can and we started preparing for it. And so yeah, we lined up a bunch of events as soon as we could," said owner of Space Crepes and Space Drinks Steve Hwang.

"We wanted to kind of just open ourselves to the community and let you know that we are more than a breakfast restaurant even though we are known for our breakfast," said Makaila Brackenbury a waitress at JB's Restaurant.

And many of the Restaurants are offering side activities or deals this week as well. "We have our our Space crab eating contest on Saturday, which, uh, has the mayor, city mayor of Rexburg coming brother. Oh. From BYU and along with a few other contestants. And we're just hoping to have fun and and compete and see who can eat to create the fastest. And that's just like one of our events. We also have, like, canned food drive," Hwang said.

"We have actually a couple of our dinner specials that we are serving for a lower price. But it's definitely a lot more people have been ordering it and we've seen a lot of our community loving the idea of us serving dinner, and especially for the deals we have going on during this restaurant week," Brackenbury said.

And so far restaurants say the week is off to a great start. "It's definitely been going great. We've had a lot more business towards the evening hours more than we've honestly even expected, which is amazing and we are so thankful for it," Brackenbury said.

"As a small business, obviously, we are always looking for to get the word out about our cute little restaurant here. We put a lot of work into it and our team members have put a lot of their effort and hard work into here and we would love to have the people around this area learn more about us and the cool stuff that we're doing," said Hwang.

For a list of the different participating restaurants and what deals they have to offer you can visit the Rexburg Chamber's website here. Or if you want to find more information on the rush week you can visit the events Facebook page here.