Let’s have a grub crawl

During my college days at Eastern Kentucky University, I remember an interesting project that our staff at The Eastern Progress did one Saturday afternoon for a lifestyle page feature.

Mark White is Editor of The News Journal.

Several of the staff members and a few significant others, set out on a quest to determine which restaurant had the best wings in Richmond. We went to four or five restaurants/bars in the Richmond area, which were known for having good wings.

A Mexican restaurant named Pacos, Banana’s Tavern, and Madison Garden were among the places that I remember going. I think there were at least a couple of more.

We would eat wings at each restaurant, then fill out a survey grading the wings on a number of categories. At any rate, the paper picked up the tab for wings at each restaurant.

We all paid for our own drinks some of which were, suffice it to say, alcoholic in nature. For the record, yes, we had a few designated drivers with us. For partying college kids, our newspaper staff was overall a pretty responsible bunch.

We didn’t actually make it inside the last restaurant, but instead picked up some wings to go and took them back to the Eastern Progress office where we did the final eating and judging.

I remember first using the to go wings to spell out the word “WINGS” and taking a picture of it before consuming the wings. We used the picture as the headline for the story.

It made for an interesting story and photo page. The last time I was in Madison Garden about five years or so ago I guess it was, a copy of our wings page was still framed and displayed on the establishment walls.

I started thinking about this endeavor after getting into a conversation with some co-workers the other day about the recent pub crawl in Corbin, and Jennifer Perkins suggested that a grub crawl might be a good idea.

Instead of traveling from restaurants and bars trying alcoholic drinks, participants could instead travel to participating restaurants and bars to try a certain appetizer, such as wings, that would be covered with your admission fee for the grub crawl.

Each participant might pay say $25 per person or $40 for a couple to take part in the grub crawl that might have say 10 restaurants taking part. The restaurants could provide participants with say three wings each, which is a sufficient sample size. If the restaurants and bars were smart, they could naturally make these ‘hot’ wings, which would prompt visitors to buy plenty of drinks…LOL.

With a grub crawl you could space it out over say a week, kind of like burger week, and let people vote for their favorites.

This might be a good way to get a few more people into restaurants and bars during their slow times when they could be socially distanced better.

The recent pub crawl in Corbin certainly drew a lot of participants to the tune of about 300 people on a Saturday night, which I presume is the busiest night of the week for most of our restaurants and bars.

Normally, I love events that draw lots of people to our community, but I am not sure doing another pub crawl during a worldwide pandemic would be the wisest course of action now that have a good idea what the turnout would be.