The diet for students on a budget consists mostly of fast food, pizza and other foods of questionable provenance. Fortunately, the local restaurant community is reaching out to those on a budget to showcase the cuisine of the Triangle.

In it’s third time running, the biannual Triangle Restaurant Week will feature 80 different restaurants with discounted menus to promote local businesses, two of which are right next to campus.

Manager Chris Filan of Porter’s City Tavern on Hillsborough Street said the restaurant has benefitted from Triangle Restaurant Week in the past and looks forward to a boost in business. The restaurant, which Filan described as an “upscale Tavern,” has participated in the previous two restaurant weeks.

“We took a hit with the renovations on Hillsborough Street, but in the past people enjoyed the specials. It was very successful,” Filan said. “All aspects of our menu are going to be new: the soup, dessert and entrée.”

According to Filan, the chef of Porter’s used inspiration from summer ingredients in season. The specialty menu, which will be served along with the standard menu at the restaurant, will include many local ingredients.

“A lot of fresh tomato, watermelon and fresh ingredients we can get locally,” Filan said. “We have a new chef, and we are definitely trying to get a lot of the Southern summer-y feel into our food.”

Neighboring Porter’s is Frazier’s, a casual wine lounge with a small but elegant menu. According to chef Rob Bland, the restaurant-week menu at Frazier’s takes advantage of simple flavors.

“The menu reads very lightly, as a restaurant as a whole and from the kitchen’s perspective, too,” Bland said. “We don’t want to bog dishes down with too much. There are only three of us in the kitchen, and we play off each other and have fun. It’s about simplicity, seasonality and technique.”

Frazier’s menu will include specials like smoked North Carolina trout salad, pork enchiladas and a strawberry and mango sorbet.

Rahel Gebremeskel, program manager of TriangleBLVD, the company that started the restaurant week, said the company chose to renew the festival due to turnout in January.

“We had about 60 restaurants in January, and it was great,” Gebremeskel said. “This year we have more restaurants joining, and we are getting inquiries all the time. The only requirement we have is that the restaurants provide table service.”

Gebremeskel said Triangle Restaurant Week is not exclusive to local restaurants and “there will be very upscale restaurants and very casual restaurants represented.”

Gebremeskel said the menus show local inspiration in seasonal vegetables and ingredients.

“A lot of the chefs got creative with the menus, which shows their enthusiasm for the event,” she said.

The expanded list of participants also includes Buku, located downtown on the corner of Wilmington Street and East Davie Street. The restaurant specializes in what Chef Tony Hopkins calls “global street food,” and the menu will feature dishes including sushi from Japan, Latino empanadas, Caribbean jerk chicken and steamed prawns in yellow curry sauce.

“Our vision is to give the menu at Buku a casual feel with dishes and prices, but we want to make it feel a tad upscale to make the experience more special,” Hopkins said. “We want to make the food like what street food is like in other countries, which they take seriously, so it requires a lot of research for us.”

This will be the first restaurant week for Buku, and the global-street-food inspired menu will include a banana spring role and Filipino halo-halo, a shaved-ice/ice-cream confection, for dessert.

“Restaurant week really gives the community something to look forward to and celebrate, and we’ve seen it do good things,” Buku manager Sean Degnan said. “If you look at a street like Wilmington Street in the past, it wasn’t as nice as it is now. Things like this bring people out to experience it.”

Chef Hopkins said he wants to reach out to people of all walks of life in the community, even students.

Scott Crews, a recent graduate in biological sciences, went to restaurants The Big Easy and The Oxford during the Triangle Restaurant Week in January, and he said he appreciated the wider variety of restaurants.

“For the quality of the food I got, the price was justified,” Crews said. “I enjoyed going out and seeing the community participate in this, but it didn’t seem like there were a lot to choose from last time. The bigger numbers will be good for more options.”