The Restaurant Marketing Calendar for 2026–2027: Market Around Events, Not Seasons

Most of the trades in this hub plan marketing around weather or construction seasons. Restaurants are different: demand is driven by events, not the calendar month, and a marketing plan built around “spring” or “summer” misses the actual moments that drive reservations.

The major events each have their own lead time

Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and the December holiday party season are the clearest examples — each drives a genuine reservation spike, and each has diners planning and booking well before the date itself. A restaurant that starts promoting Valentine’s Day the week of February 14th is competing for whatever reservation slots are left after diners who planned two or three weeks out already booked elsewhere.

Smaller, local events matter too

Patio season opening, a local festival, game days for a nearby sports team, or a neighborhood event all create smaller but genuinely predictable demand spikes. A restaurant near a stadium or a festival route that doesn’t specifically market around those dates is leaving foot traffic on the table that a nearby competitor with event-specific promotion will capture instead.

What to push around each type of event

• Major dining holidays (Valentine’s, Mother’s Day, December parties): reservation availability, special menus, and early-booking incentives, pushed two to three weeks ahead.
• Local and seasonal events (patio opening, festivals, game days): timely, specific posts and promotions tied to the actual event, not generic “come on in” messaging.
• The rest of the year: the steady baseline work — review response and frictionless reservations and ordering — that keeps the restaurant converting regardless of what event is or isn’t happening.

Google Business Profile should reflect the current event too

Updating photos and posts to reflect a current seasonal menu, patio availability, or an upcoming event keeps the profile aligned with local SEO fundamentals at the moment diners are actually deciding, rather than showing the same static profile year-round.

The 2026–2027 dates worth putting in the calendar now

Most restaurant calendars are written for a generic North American market and miss the dates that actually move covers in Quebec. Working forward from late 2026:

• Thanksgiving / Action de grâce — October 12, 2026 and October 11, 2027. A long-weekend family meal event, and one of the few where the booking is often made by someone organizing for a group.
• Halloween — October 31. Small for fine dining, meaningful for anywhere with a bar, a patio heater or a family menu.
• Holiday party season — mid-November through December. The single longest lead time on the calendar: office party organizers start looking in early November, and a restaurant with no visible group-booking option is invisible to them.
• New Year’s Eve — December 31. Prix-fixe territory, and the one night where publishing the menu early is the whole marketing plan.
• Carnaval de Québec and the winter festival stretch — February. Relevant to Quebec City restaurants specifically, and worth its own push rather than being folded into Valentine’s.
• Saint-Valentin — February 14. The clearest two-to-three-week lead-time event of the year.
• Easter / Pâques — March 28, 2027. Brunch, not dinner, and marketed differently because of it.
• Fête des Mères — May 9, 2027. Typically the highest-volume brunch service of the year; slots sell out earlier than any other single date.
• Journée nationale des patriotes — May 24, 2027. The unofficial start of patio season more than a dining event in its own right.
• Fête nationale du Québec — June 24. A genuine local event that a national marketing calendar will not have on it.
• Canada Day / moving day — July 1. In Quebec this behaves like a takeout and delivery event, not a dining-out one, because a large share of the city is carrying boxes.
• The construction holiday — last two weeks of July. Quebec’s defining summer pattern: downtown and office-district restaurants empty out while resort, cottage-country and neighbourhood restaurants fill. Which side of that you are on determines whether these two weeks are your best or your worst of the summer.
• Festival season — late June through early August. Festival d’été in Quebec City, the jazz and comedy festivals and Osheaga in Montreal. Proximity to a festival route is worth marketing against by name.
• Fête du Travail — September 6, 2027. The last patio weekend most people treat as one.

The calendar to build once and repeat

The specific dates repeat every year, but few restaurants actually build a standing calendar around them rather than remembering each event a week too late. Once built, the same calendar — major holidays, Quebec-specific dates, local events, and the steady baseline between — repeats with minor adjustments each year. For how this fits into a complete restaurant growth plan, see the restaurant growth playbook.