Dishcrawl offers local foodies a unique way to enjoy NOLA restaurants

Dishcrawl allows diners to enjoy small plates from a selection of nearby restaurants, while socializing with fellow foodies.

When asked what their favorite local restaurant is, many New Orleanians have difficulty narrowing their answer to a single eatery.

With a plethora of wonderful places to dine in NOLA, folks tend to divide their favorite spots into categories — a favorite Uptown restaurant, a favorite oyster place, a favorite Vietnamese eatery…etc — often times revisiting their standing favorites.

Dishcrawl ambassador and guide Michelle Mashon is trying to change this.

Based in over 250 US cities and active in NOLA since March 2013, Dishcrawl is a dining organization that arranges unique foodie adventures that consist of stops at three or four restaurants in a single night, with small plates — from tacos to kale salad to bacon-wrapped dates — at each stop. The restaurants are near one another, so attendees can travel on foot from restaurant to restaurant, led by one of the jovial Dishcrawl guides.

“Dishcrawl is dedicated to re-imagining the way people think about food, drink, and their community,” Mashon says. “New Orleans is such a ‘foodcentric’ town — we appreciate discussing and learning about the food on our plate and the culinary engineers behind our meals almost as much as we enjoy eating.”

Subsequently, the crawl has been arranged to be an interactive experience for diners. At each restaurant, the chefs come out of the kitchen, greeting diners and discussing their restaurants’ respective histories as well as the menu. And since separate parties are often seated together, Dishcrawl provides diners with the oppurtunity to meet and socialize with fellow foodies

Another goal of Dishcrawl, Mashon says, is “[to expose] local people to new restaurants” and hopefully allow folks to discover new culinary favorites.

And this mission seems to be working. According to Dishcrawl participants at a recent event, many of them say they’ve become repeat attendees, with the majority never having dined at the crawl restaurants before. “We’ve been back to a one of the restaurants from the Irish Channel crawl three times in one month since we discovered it,” said one couple.

Hungry? Dishcrawl’s next event, which will visit three Magazine Street restaurants, will be on November 11th and 12th. Although the locations will remain secret until 48 hours prior to the events, Dishcrawl has released a few hints about the dining spots. Fixed-price tickets are $45 each and include a plate at each stop (alcohol is not included). For event specifics, click here.