Special Dinner Outings

Small groups here decide later than anyone, about three weeks out. That lines up neatly with dinner planning, since many of the Valley's sought-after rooms release tables around a month ahead.

So the rule is easy: the day you secure the table, send us the reservation time.

For ten or fewer, the Sprinter limo is what we quote most often, with the stretch limousine a dressier minority. For a dinner we would lean smaller and quieter still. Three couples celebrating something fit the 8-passenger limo Sprinter with space for coats and a gift bag. A more formal evening wants the 10-passenger stretch limousine. A supper club of ten or eleven should look at the 12-passenger limo Sprinter. A party bus only makes sense when the table is a long one, like a birthday dinner for fifteen in the 16-passenger party bus.

Four hours is the length most of our trips run, and a dinner fits it: half an hour there, two and a half at the table, half an hour back, and a little slack. The median small-group quote has historically been around $900 for the trip, which across eight diners is a modest line next to a tasting menu. That is a record of past quotes, not a price.

Not every meal out calls for one. These do:

• Wine pairings and tasting menus. Seven courses with pairings is five or six glasses across three hours. Nobody at that table should be driving, and nobody should have to volunteer.
• A reservation across town. A table in North Scottsdale when you live in Gilbert is forty minutes each way. With a driver it becomes a drink on the way there and a calm ride home.
• Hosting clients or visiting family. One vehicle, one arrival, and nobody following directions to a valet stand they cannot find.
• Milestones. A promotion, an engagement, a parent's seventieth, the last dinner before somebody moves. Arriving together is part of it. Anniversary evenings have their own anniversary page.
• Supper clubs. Four or five couples taking turns picking a restaurant. Split ten ways, the ride is one of the smaller numbers on the night.

Fine dining here concentrates in a few areas. Rough evening drive times:

Those are seven o'clock numbers. A 5:30 reservation means driving in rush hour, so add fifteen or twenty minutes to any freeway leg and check it in the drive time calculator.

You do not have to cross the Valley for a great meal, either. Downtown Gilbert's Heritage District, downtown Chandler and the restaurants around Kierland all have kitchens built for a celebration. East Valley diners can start with the Gilbert page; Scottsdale has the most choice inside a few blocks.

If you put the dinner together, these five details are what make it go smoothly.

• Tell the restaurant how you are arriving. Ask where a limo or Sprinter should pull up. Some valet stands wave larger vehicles to a side entrance, and knowing that in advance saves confusion at the curb.
• Limit the pickups. Three homes in one neighborhood is fine. Five across two cities adds 45 minutes and gives the first couple a very long ride. For a scattered group, meet at one house and have a drink there first.
• Work backward from the reservation. The timeline planner does it for you, and restaurants that only hold a table fifteen minutes are strict about it on a Saturday.
• Set the dress code. Resort dining rooms and steakhouses differ, and guests hate guessing. The dress code generator gives you a sentence for the invitation.
• Plan the gratuity. Our quotes do not include it, so settle on the amount beforehand with the tip calculator.

From late October through April, the best tables in the Valley are outdoors: resort terraces facing Camelback, courtyards in Old Town, rooftops downtown.

Those are also the busiest months for restaurants and for us, with winter visitors and spring events stacked on top of each other and nearly half the year's demand falling between February and May. For a Saturday in March, reserve the table and the ride in the same week.

Summer is the locals' season. Menus and specials appear, reservations open up, vehicles are easier to get. The drawback is the 105-degree walk from a parking structure in dinner clothes, which going door to door removes entirely. That makes summer a good time to try the rooms you cannot get into in March.

A first stop is easy as long as it is close. Drinks at a resort lounge in Paradise Valley and dinner in Old Town are ten or fifteen minutes apart, which costs you almost nothing.

Schedule that first stop to end thirty minutes before your reservation, and treat the dinner as the fixed point that everything else is timed around. It is the one part of the evening that will not wait for you.

Going on to a show afterward changes the shape of the night more than people expect, because the curtain is a second fixed point and it is much less forgiving than a table. Our theater night page covers curtain times and where drivers can actually wait downtown.

Whatever comes before or after, tell us the whole plan when you request the quote. The hours get priced once, rather than discovered at 10:30.