Pub crawls are easy. Pick a neighbourhood with several watering holes local to each other and drink your way from one to the next. If you want to get frat-boy fancy about the operation go ahead and google the rules for pub golf.
Food crawls–especially where the aim is to make critical comparisons–are an entirely different beast. Over a series of crawls with friends Suresh, Mike, Alex, and Mark I think we’ve gained a bit of experience that I’d like to share.
Decide on classic vs. outright best: This was a hindrance for us on our wing crawls. Should we care how well a particular restaurant’s offering satisfies a (rigid) standard or do we just want delicious? The answer is probably either but not both. Wings with spicy HP sauce are okay but they’re difficult to compare (and I’m a purist).
Accept oddball suggestions on a whim: Out of nowhere on our last wing crawl Alex announced that he knows where to get stuffed, butter-fried wings. (Bamboo Cafe Chinese Restaurant at 494 Danforth Ave.) These things have a freak-show appearance but were absolutely delicious and I would have regretted it if we’d passed that suggestion by.
Ignore the dirty looks from waiters: At Golden Turtle it took three confirmations for us to establish that yes the five of us intended to share one extra-large bowl of pho and one order of spring rolls.
Take notes: Even if you don’t plan to write about your experience a blackberry note, photo, or (my choice) digital voice recording will be the only way you’ll remember which place had the pho with a distinct hint of cinnamon in the broth and which uses white onions instead of scallions.
Any ideas for what we should do next? Leave a comment below.
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We were considering a tea crawl, but figured too many people would be jumping off the walls, high on caffeine, by the third stop.
We did a poutine crawl to raise money to fight cancer though. It was modeled after one we heard about in TO, organized by Vicky (@momwhoruns).
Described here w/photos: http://www.foodieprints.com/item/2669
[seriously not trying to pimp a site...feel free to remove the link!]
Don, I’m not a huge tea guy but the tea crawl sounds like a great idea. And of course the poutine crawl looks delicious.
No worries on the link. Happy to have any link that isn’t shilling cheap pills.
Love the idea of the of a food crawl! In fact, I ran 3 Chinatown food crawls at a Foodie group on Meetup (http://www.meetup.com/Foodies-in-Toronto/events/16766774/) . It’s a lot of fun bonding with friends or new people over food! It does require quiet a lot of planning though.
On our Chinatown food tour, we planned 5 restaurants, staying a total of 30 minutes at each place. I booked all the restaurants before hand and even asked for a special dish they could prepare for all of us! All in all, we had so many varieties of Chinese food: Northern, sichuan, BBQ, Chinese Muslim, and hand-made dumplings. We were suppose to do 5, but ended up doing 4 because we were all too full!
Lovely experience, I encourage everyone to do it! It’s cheaper too, under $20 on avg of the 3 times I’ve gone. But it does require a lot of pre-planning unless you want to go on a crawl on the whim.