Let’s hope word of this doesn’t leak out. Voters in Ashland, OR, last week renewed a five percent tax on restaurant meals due to expire next year. That’s right, a city in Oregon, the state famous nationwide for having absolutely no sales tax whatsoever, has again singled out restaurants to be the lone exception to the state’s otherwise-uniform sales tax policy. How come operators are the only ones whose businesses are forced to contribute to the common good?

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We’ve had 99 cent meals at fast food outlets, two-for-one BOGO offers in casual dining and, as we reported last month, even upper-echelon chains and their independent fine dining brethren have succumbed to the lure of the bargain meal, with “bargain” being a relative term at their level. But the restaurant industry will reach the final frontier of cut-rate dining later this week at San Francisco’s Palio Asti, which is offering a sizable markdown on its legendary truffle dinners. Will other fine dining restaurants follow suit?

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The owner of Lucky’s, an Italian eatery in Kalamazoo, MI, who apparently hasn’t been quite so lucky, closed his two-year-old restaurant last year. Now he’s raffling it off. Jim Sieklucki has announced that any applicant who ponies up a $185 processing fee can enter a raffle to decide who will be running the 2,000-square-foot, 72-seat restaurant in the future. He plans to select two applicants at random from the pool, fly them to Kalamazoo and have each one prepare pizza and an entrée for the Sieklucki family. Best cook gets the keys—for $1.

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