Toronto Restaurant's "Fuck Mondays" Specials Cut Prices Until Food Runs Out

Food waste is a big problem for many restaurants. But Farmhouse Tavern in Toronto has a creative way with dealing with it. Every week the restaurant closes on Sunday night and reopens on Thursdays (four-day work week, l love it). So to prevent all that food from spoiling over those three days, the restaurant has a "Fuck Mondays" special every Sunday night, in which it keeps slashing prices until all the food is gone.

NPR's The Salt explains that the special is based on owner Darcy MacDonell's "lifelong dread" of the coming workweek (the Sunday scaries, as it were) and how slow Sundays in the restaurant biz "lead to either throwing away food or freezing it." Chef Ashley MacNeil likens the weekly event to a bit of a "weird teeter-totter game": "You want to run out [of food], but you want to make sure that you have enough of a selection so people come back." Even on a Sunday night, Farmhouse fans now flock to the lower-priced food (like "buck a shuck" oysters) and the $9 ($6.70 in U.S. dollars) glasses of open-bottle wine. The ultimate goals is a clear fridge and empty wine bottles before the kitchen closes down for the week.

NPR points to a recent study that "found that restaurants, hotels and institutions are responsible for 13 percent of avoidable Canadian food waste," (18% in the U.S.) so it seems like more restaurants could use a Fuck Mondays night. You can read more about it at npr.org, where they have to use asterisks. But we do not.