OK, everybody, start your engines! Take this edition of the News-Press and sort through your itinerary for next week. How many of the 31 restaurants participating in the first annual Falls Church Restaurant Week can you visit for either lunch or dinner starting this coming Monday? They’re all great establishments with very tasty food and with terrific special offers that will be available throughout the week.

The News-Press is proud to present Falls Church’s first ever Restaurant Week, the launch of yet another annual tradition with the potential to reach far beyond the boundaries of The Little City and bring in dollars from throughout the region. The idea is that once exposed to what we have to offer in the way of first-rate fare, folks will come back again and again throughout the year.

It’s our contribution to establishing Falls Church as a “destination location” in the minds of the wider D.C. Metro region, crashing the party that Alexandria’s Old Town, Georgetown and certain other popular places have dominated. Now, with the gradual but persistent emergence of a “critical mass” of outstanding restaurants right in our area, it’s time to proudly unveil Falls Church Restaurant Week.

Launching this project, we did not know how many of our area restaurants would buy in, even though there’s no doubt they are the primary beneficiaries of the whole thing. But the level of participation has exceeded our wildest hopes. The over 30 restaurants includes some entering the area’s public fray for the first time, such as four outstanding Vietnamese-American establishments in the Eden Center.

Often limiting themselves to doing their best and hoping people will notice, with the Falls Church Restaurant Week they are able to step forward and welcome new patrons to their establishments. For anyone who jumps into this as a diner, the rewards are self-evident: the chance of exposure to some truly extraordinary cuisine right in our neighborhood, in almost all cases affordable and with ample parking.

There are included some long-established eateries, too, not the least being Anthony’s, where diners may not have been for awhile, where now they have a fresh opportunity to return to see what’s new.It is not our job to play any favorites in this, but to celebrate each and every participant, and moreover, to celebrate their collective role in our community, and to celebrate the celebration of that by way of the first ever Falls Church Restaurant Week.

Everybody has had two and a half months since New Year’s to punish themselves for overindulging during the holidays and make New Year’s resolutions to get in better shape stick. Now, it’s the onset of spring, of warmer weather, of sunshine, of planning for summer travels. What better way to get started than to treat Falls Church Restaurant Week as a sort of home-turf starter travelogue, to venture out to both the familiar and the unfamiliar right in one’s own back yard?