The Downtown Winnipeg Biz, keen followers of trends that they are, have launched an event entitled Let's Do Lunch Downtown. A group of downtown restaurants have agreed to offer reduced rates on select menu items at lunch time in April. This appears vaguely similar to Dine About Winnipeg, only without the high-end dining aspect.

While Dine About Winnipeg interested me, Let's Do Lunch Downtown has far less of an appeal. Perhaps its the fact that three course meals aren't being offered, or maybe it's that some of the restaurants aren't exactly independent local outfits, but the issue I have is that some of the 'deals' really aren't.

The one example I noticed is that Boston Pizza is offering a pizza and salad for $9.99 which is a princely discount of ($0.04) from the normal price of $9.95. While I only checked three restaurants, there could be a couple other deals of this caliber hidden in the list.

That having been said, restaurants like Modern - East African Tapas really could use the additional business so this might be beneficial to them. I just have some lingering doubts about just how great these 'deals' are.