Wimberley Restaurant Week preps for inaugural year

Wimberley Restaurant Week, a celebration to recognize the community’s unique restaurants and their top chefs, kicks off in July. Eight restaurants are on the menu: The Wimberley Café, Marco’s Italian, The Carvery, Community Pizza, The Supper Club of Wimberley, Hildee’s, The Let Go and Fish Tales.

Thirty passes to each establishment are available and can be purchased online at wimberleyrestaurantweek. com. The passes are redeemable at the selected restaurants July 1 through 31. Passes purchased for one restaurant are not redeemable at other participating restaurants. The $50 passes became available June 15 and cover an experience for two people.

Proceeds from the Wimberley Restaurant Week benefit students in the Wimberley area through Camp CommUnity, a summer camp for kids. One of the programs of the local nonprofit, Start-Up Kids Club, the camp is designed to expose kids to real-world learning activities that might not be part of their regular school curriculum. Some of the camp classes include radio broadcasting, journalism principles, three-dimensional printing and classes to teach entrepreneurial skills.

Wimberley Valley Radio General Manager Tim Kiesling, a member of the nonprofit’s leadership team, said Camp CommUnity helps prevent “the summer slide,” a phenomenon in which kids lose what they’ve learned over the summer and begin the next school year knowing less than what they did before school let out.

“We wanted to create an event that was fresh and appealing to the people of Wimberley,” he explained. Jay and Jen Bachman of the Wimberley Café and Marco’s Italian “jumped on board with their support.”