Details on the Chocolate

We've confirmed our locations for January's Crawl! Please meet us this weekend, on Sunday, January 15 at 3 p.m. Look for folks at the NE corner of Prince and MacDougal Streets. I'll be there with maps, can't wait to see everyone!

Hot Chocolate: inappropriate given it's 60F out?

Well, we're going to do it anyway! I received no less than 3 requests for hot chocolate during the macaron crawl, so here it is. The afternoon of Sunday, January 15th we'll crawl through SoHo to seek out the city's best cocoa. This is a crawl I've been doing a bit of personal market research on, so I can assure you it would be worth braving cold weather for, if, miraculously, Mother Nature remembers that it's January and should be freezing.

We are currently firming up details, so check back later this week for the meeting place and time. Or use the handy widget on the right sidebar of the blog to subscribe to the blog via email; each time I make a new post, it will go straight to your inbox.

Now I am off to enjoy some of this insanely gorgeous, if unseasonable, weather.

August is Cannoli Month

Good evening crawlers, and welcome to your August edition of NYC Food Crawl!

Right now we're hard at work smoothing out some last minute details before we go a-crawling this Thursday. Based on the inquiries I've been getting in response to the crawl invite, I thought I would share a bit of how that works.

1. Lots of reading and surfing. We'll look around at the word on the street for what's good for, well, anything. As some of you may know, we've done samosas, brownies, tacos, hot chocolate, and of course the food that started it all...dumplings. But as always it needs to be small and easy to carry out.

2. Callin'! We always work to make sure folks know we're coming and roughly how many we'll be. This is the biggest reason why we've been pickier about the RSVPs as of late. One of the frustrations we occasionally hear about from crawlers is that hosting establishments are overwhelmed, and this is something we work very hard to avoid. It irks folks who are kindly letting us descend upon them to briefly sample their wares and it makes for unhappy crawlers. Both undesirable outcomes. Trick is, we don't have a very reliable metric for giving our kind hosts an estimate. RSVPs are one of the more efficient ways of doing this while staying accessible to everyone. (And you don't even need a Facebook account to RSVP: rsvpfoodcrawl@gmail.com)

3. Maps - a crawler's best friend. Another strategy for keeping things going smoothly for everyone involved is writing up different routes. If we stagger when our groups swing by, it lessens the wait time for crawlers and increases the patience of the folks kindly serving us our portable treats. And don't forget crawlers, be kind to the tip jar when there is one! It still takes time for these folks to give us snacks even though they are small ticket items. So please, stick to the route order.

And this, my friends, is why we don't release meet up points right away. A lot of thought and research goes into them, and if we're going to do something, it's worth doing as well as we can.

Can't wait to see you this Thursday! Happy fooding, fellow crawlers!