By Arielle Maxner
Certain restaurants in the Studio City area are now offering discounts to Harvard-Westlake students, due to the efforts of the Prefect Council.
Restaurants currently offering discounts include Big Mama’s and Papa’s Pizzeria, Il Trammezino and the Coffee Bean. The discounts are 10 percent off at the Coffee Bean, 10 percent off an individual sandwich at Il Trammezino and 15 percent off at Big Mama’s and Papa’s.
The discounts are only valid at the Studio City locations of the restaurants.
“These are all chain restaurants, you can’t go out to a different location and get the discount,” Head Prefect Brooke Levin ’12 said.
Head Prefect Rishi Bagrodia ’12 and Levin are currently working on negotiating more discounts with other restaurants, and are talking to chains including Jamba Juice and Chipotle.
The Prefect Council sent out a survey to the student body asking which restaurants students frequently eat at in the area, “to see which restaurants they go to the most to get the most optimal discounts for them,” Bagrodia said. “These restaurants are already so heavily visited that with a decreased price, we think students will eat there even more.”
The survey provided some solid proof that Harvard-Westlake students are a part of the restaurant’s profit, Levin said.
One of the biggest conditions to receive the discounts is to have one’s student ID at the restaurant.
“If students order multiple things, and one goes to pick it up, he or she has to have all the IDs,” Bagrodia said. “It’s the restaurants’ policy. And in reality, it still helps, because 10 percent off one sandwich for each person is the same discount. So 10 percent off one sandwich times five is 10 percent of the total of five sandwiches.”
Bagrodia said that he thinks a lot of students are reluctant to eat off campus because of the price of food, so the discounts help alleviate that concern.
It’s a “win-win situation,” Bagrodia said. “This helps students with price, and the restaurants with business as more students go.”
Overall, most restaurants were “willing to negotiate,” Bagrodia said. “It helps their business. All of them required us or them to go through their district managers, but all of them readily endorsed the idea.”
While it may appear that the discounts would only apply to seniors, students can still go to restaurants after school or before practices, Bagrodia said.
“Granted, seniors will be the ones who can fully optimize it, but all grades can use it to their advantage,” Bagrodia said.
