For those that don’t know Black Angus is a steakhouse chain. It’s at least near me in Silicon Valley, but I don’t know how prevalent it is in other parts of the country (the “Locations” area on the site isn’t very helpful with this information). We had plotted and planned all day. We had our had our weapon prepared. Everything was a go until we showed up. We hadn’t counted on one thing: Black Angus was going help us pull off the heist. By the end of the night we had made off with over $33… in savings.

Yep our weapon was the coupon below:

They helped us out by offering a half-price bottle of wine with the purchase of two entrees on Monday and Tuesdays. Hmmm, that was exactly what we were ordering. We hadn’t checked the coupon’s fine print and just asked if the wine deal could be combined (in hindsight I see the coupon clearly states that it can’t be combined with other offers). Fortunately we got the answer we wanted. Checking the wine list, they had a bottle of Blackstone merlot, a winery in Sonoma that we love, for $25. It’s a fine bottle of wine, but probably not going to win a million awards. At $12.50 it’s pretty close to what you’d pay in a liquor store.

For under $50 ($49.50 to be exact) we had bread, salad, a sampler platter (consisting of a shrimp cocktail, friend garlic zucchini, 4 buffalo chicken tenders, loaded potato skins), two steak entrees (with potato and vegetables), and a big mountain chocolate fudge cake, and a bottle of wine. We at like kings and still had plenty to take home. If we had just walked in and ordered this separately it would have cost a few pennies less than $83.

I’ve written that every restaurant wants to save me money, but this economy has taken things to the next level. I’ve always known that margins on restaurants are pretty good (note: we could have probably saved a lot more making this all home), but if they are going to put things on such big sales, can they survive?

It’s never been easy to run a restaurant. It’s usually a labor of love. I really hope that love is great because right now it’s so easy to save money at restaurants.

As a final note: I know many of you may say that the restaurant robbed us. The better financial move would have been to cook dinner at home. We do that much of the time. However, on this occasion, we are looking at the glass as half full – we saved a lot and satiated our desire to go out to eat for some time.