Tastemakers, a fun idea

A restaurant tasting walk was an idea I encountered in Delray Beach in 2011. Several restaurants joined forces to give people a reason to visit the high street and try places they might not know.

The video is from 2011. The ticket price and discussion of the event describe the situation back then.

A restaurant tasting walk with one shared passport

The event was called Tastemakers of Delray. You paid 25 dollars for a passport that gave access to a tasting at each participating restaurant. Once you’d visited a place, it was marked on the passport.

Then you could walk from restaurant to restaurant, try something and have a small glass of wine. The restaurants helped market the event, and there was also an organiser behind it.

Give people a reason to try somewhere new

What interested me was that there were more people on the street on a Thursday than I was used to. The lesser-known restaurants also got visitors as people made their way up the high street.

A taste could make someone want to sit down and keep eating. The restaurants got a chance to show what they could do instead of simply talking about it in an advert.

An idea for restaurants close to one another

I imagined the organiser’s business might lie in ticket sales and the work of bringing the restaurants together. I didn’t know the event’s precise accounts.

The idea needs an area where you can walk between the venues. If you live in a town with ten or fifteen restaurants close together, it could inspire a collaboration or something similar. I discuss my own experiences of developing business ideas in Iværksætter til jeg dør.

A tasting passport for Thursday and Friday

Delray Beach is the town where we live at the time. In the video, I show the lovely high street and the little stalls where restaurants hand out samples. The event runs Thursday and Friday. You can buy the brochure, their Tastemakers Passport, from participating restaurants and use it to make the rounds.

The 25 dollars came to around DKK 125 by my conversion back then. I guess the ticket money goes to the company behind it, which prints the passports and makes agreements with restaurants, among other things. Both the organiser and restaurants help market the tour. It’s a bloody nice concept: People taste the food, and restaurants get visitors. Perhaps you can use the idea for something in your own town.

De bedste hilsner

Martin