Weekend: Restaurants calling your name during Dine Out Long Beach

Did you give up fine dining for Lent like we almost did before we checked the calendar? Give up. Get on the hellbound train that is Dine Out Long Beach, Restaurant Week 2.0, from Sunday through March 5. It’s easily the best week of the year to revisit your favorite restaurants or, better, discover a crop of new ones.

Whatever you do, tu off the stove for the week and check out the lunches and diers being offered by the dozens of restaurants in the city of our dreams.

Such fine establishments as the Crooked Duck, Fuego at Hotel Maya, Brix at the Shore, Papalucci’s, Kihon Sushi and Parkers’ Lighthouse will be offering menus of prix fixe (it’s fancy because it’s French) meals: two-course lunches (appetizer and entree) and three-course diers (with dessert), at prices ranging between $10 and $50. Most offer several options for each course.

And the coolest thing of all is you don’t have to buy tickets or join a club. You just make a reservation like a normal person and go in and eat. We’ve taken care of everything, except your tip. And parking. And cocktails. And transportation – look, it’s as easy as it’s going to get.

Got to www.dineoutlongbeach.com where you can search participating restaurants by neighborhood and/or type of cuisine, as well as scope out the menus.

Oscars at the Art

Oscar night at the Hot! House usually entail us hiding in a back room with our dogs Jasper and Aie while our wife Mamie Eisenhower and her mom and half of her siblings and our daughter watch the awards presentation on TV and make the sort of snarky remarks that, if we made them, would get us yelled at.

We’re not a big Academy Awards fan. We spent several of our reportorial formative years covering them from backstage and watching them now is like a hot-dog maker eating hot dogs.

Still, it isn’t our job to suggest you spend Oscar Sunday cowering in a room with a book and a brace of pit bulls. Rather, it’s to tell you what we would do in another life: Head over to Long Beach’s beautiful Art Theater, 2025 E. Fourth St. at 4 p.m. Sunday for the theater’s aual Red Carpet fundraiser and live screening of the awards presentation.

You are encouraged to get dolled up. Wear somebody. And enjoy wine and hors d’ouevres and mingle with the other great people. Members of the Art Theater get a free buy-in to the party. Or you can buy a membership at a variety of levels ranging from $25 to $100.

To find out more or buy tickets/memberships, go to www.arttheatrelongbeach.com.