Alcohol is rarely included in Restaurant.com discounts

Don't get burned thinking that you can order a couple of appetizers and a nice bottle of wine to use up the $50 restaurant.com certificate for which you paid $4.

I made a mistake several weeks ago when I blogged that customers could count alcohol toward their minimum required to use a restaurant.com certificate at Nick & Eddie in Minneapolis. Then reader Sharon let me know that during a recent visit, she was not allowed to use a bottle of wine to count toward the $35 minimum. (She had a $25 certificate for which she paid $2, but in order to get the $25 credit she had to spend $35 on food.)

When I went back and looked at the wording on the cert, it says "Use of certificate for alcoholic beverages is at the sole discretion of the restaurant." Sometimes a cerificate will say "Use of certificate for alcoholic beverages is not allowed." Check the fine print at Restaurant.com before you buy.

My apologies to anyone who went to Nick & Eddie and planned to drink to meet the minimum. But let's be reasonable here. Say you and a friend, S.O., or spouse spend $40 on your meals, and $14 on a glass of wine each. That's $54 before tax, but you're really only paying $31 because you get $25 credit for the certificate minus the $2 you paid for it. A very respectable 40 percent discount.

Still a deal in my opinion. By the way, today's discount is 70 percent at Restaurant.com. Use DISH as your discount code and get a $25 cert for $3.