Hotels and casinos at Atlantic City. (AP)

Atlantic City, March 4: This den of vice on America’s east coast is making an offer this week that is hard to turn down.

A three-course lunch at a swanky casino restaurant for just $15.09. The 70 restaurants which are trying attract business here include the best names familiar to diners all over the US.

Some like Morton’s, the celebrated steakhouse that traces its history to Chicago’s wild ways, are offering only dinner, but at a bargain price of $33.09. The normal average cost of a Morton’s dinner for two is $170 without tax or tips.

The list of restaurants makes the choice hard: Casa di Napoli serving Italian wedding soup, stozzapreti and clams and, of course, casa tiramisu, from among a wider menu to pick from. Or Izakaya, which describes itself as a “modern Japanese pub”, features sweet sake and shallots, Kobe beef and banana spring rolls.

All for the very special but common price.

This is the first time that Atlantic City, a magnet for gamblers along America’s eastern shores and a quick tourist hop for many visitors to New York, is hosting its “restaurant week” a concept that has been popular in many US cities.

All these years, Atlantic City did not need such promotions. The city did not have to reduce prices — and reduce them drastically to attract clientele.

Its casinos, restaurants and “factory outlets” — which offered virtually everything direct from the manufacturers at half the price because retailers and middlemen were not involved — made Atlantic City the fourth most visited location in the US.

The rich came and spent their money here anyway. Those who made money on the casino floors — $4.9 billion was paid out to winners in 2007 — splurged it in the restaurants or in shops here before going home.

For those who lost everything on the slot machines and had just enough to pay for petrol for the ride home, there was always the dollar menu at McDonalds or at a Burger King.

But the economic downturn has changed it all.

At the Trump Taj Mahal, which used to entice visitors with the promise of “feel the heat of the action”, there is no more the deafening jingling noise simulating coins dropping off slot machines or the bells announcing a jackpot winner. On the day this correspondent visited the Taj Mahal’s casino, there were hardly 100 people on the gambling floor.

In the good days, it was difficult to find a free slot machine: the casino has 4,000 of them. In addition, it could seat 210 at a time at table games, not to mention a Baccarat Pit and the second biggest poker room in Atlantic City that is home to the US Poker Championship. The highway-lane-size corridor between eateries at the Trump Taj Mahal was appropriately named “Spice Road” to go with the evocative oriental name of the complex that Donald Trump built in 1990 at a cost of $1 billion.

Some of the restaurants along Spice Road now open only on weekends. The naming of the casino complex after Agra’s wonder was controversial in India.

Just before the economic collapse almost knocked the bottom out of Atlantic City, the billionaire real estate mogul spent $250 million on a new “Chairman’s Tower” increasing the number of hotel rooms at the complex to 1,250.

Rooms at the Chairman’s Tower are now being offered for just $99 a night, a steep decline for similar accommodation a year ago. Two weeks ago, Donald Trump resigned from the board of Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc., the company he founded, even as it was reported to be under siege from creditors.

Unlike many cities in the US, which are desperate, Atlantic City, though, has not given up hope. Like the Restaurant Week, for the first time this city will play host to the “Antiques Roadshow”, a sort of reality TV series hawking antiques in June.With the economy in crisis, people may be selling off their family silver.

Applications to take part and sell their antiques are up by 25 per cent over the previous event elsewhere. Jeffrey Vasser, president of the Atlantic City Convention and Visitors Authority, says: “While there is no doubt that the downturn will continue to have an impact on travel, Atlantic City is in a relatively good position to meet the challenge.”

In an op-ed article in The Philadelphia Inquirer last week, Vasser pinned his hopes for this city on the human weakness that “especially these days, people need a destination where they can forget their worries, relax, escape, and enjoy. There is no nearby destination more suited to that than Atlantic City.”

He believes “there are challenges ahead, but they are the same challenges faced by every travel destination during a struggling global economy, and we will meet them head-on”.

One thing is for sure. This city is not sitting back and looking for bailouts from somewhere else. The authorities, for instance, are making it easier to get to Atlantic City.

A new train service from New York has been started and new daily direct flight from Boston is in place. Also, more than $270 million is being spent on highways and on the local airport. For a city that has thrived on gambling all this is a gamble on its future.