(Can we verbify that? It should totally be one.)

Dishcrawl is an event where a bunch of people gather and hit up local restaurants and get a taste of what unique dishes or drinks they may never have even knew existed in their neighborhood. It’s a great social event – everyone is happy and eating. What could be better than that?

On Wednesday night, some 120-ish people gathered at Mezcal for the second San Jose Dishcrawl event. It was fantastic! There was some food I’d never had before and some I was very familiar with. That’s the beauty of Dishcrawl though. Sure, on your own you can venture to various restaurants.. but if you go this route you’ll get to sample a little of everything and enjoy the company of happy people.

At Mezcal I sampled some mezcal – a “distilled alcoholic beverage made from the maguey plant” (thank you Wikipedia), a few bites of quesadilla and calamari… but the biggest deal and the one I was excited for — grasshoppers! So I’ve never eaten a bug, I was intrigued OKAY?

As the title of my photo says – the bug on my dish was delish. It was crunchy (duh) and had a ever-so slight zing flavor to it. I overheard another dishcrawler state that at the end of it, it was quite “proteiny”. Mmm.

Next on the list was the MoGoBBQ food truck – a favorite of mine. It was parked around the corner in front of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Joseph. After some line confusion (a few eager happy hungry people following their noses to the food truck of yum a little earlier than others in line… I suppose I can’t blame them) everyone was happily nomming on their quesadilla and tacos. I decided to get spicy pork this time – Mmm. Not disappointed my friends.

Just look at it… doesn’t it make your mouth water?

Truth be told, I only ate the quesadilla. I have had the tacos before and I was a little full at this point so I focused on something I hadn’t had before.

But we’re not done yet. Now we’re on to Hanuman Thai Cuisine. I had been wanting to check them out after spotting them a few times while walking around downtown. We made our way to the dining area upstairs and then through the serving line. Pad thai, a chicken/veggie curry (?) dish, some rice and shrimp rolls later… some of us were starting to get full. I must say, opinion here… I wasn’t too impressed. The pad thai I’ve had before at either at New KrungThai or Thai Orchid Restaurant is far better. Much more flavorful! Sorry, Hanuman.

The food aside – let me tell you how happy everyone was. You might have been there with friends but you were meeting so many other people – it’s just a great way to hang out as a huge group with the same game plan. Eat. Food. I overheard people sharing local restaurant tips and favorites or brainstorming ideas for future Dishcrawl event themes.

Did I say we were getting full? I lied – it was now time for TREATBOT! Man, I love ice cream. I love their ice cream. The flavor choices are always unique, even if you’ve had ‘em from Treatbot before. Black marble raspberry was the choice for me that night.

Overal a great time was had and I can’t wait until the next one. It’ll be March 23rd (night before SOMEBODY’S 31st birthday.. Hmmm) and located at the San Pedro Square area.

Join me! Buy your ticket TODAY.

Check this out too – NBC’s “The Feast” was there and took this awesome video of the event. Check out the super pale girl eating food around the :27sec mark.

The day before Valentine’s Day, fun-loving people from San Jose gathered at high noon in the Plaza De Cesar Chavez park downtown. Some brought feathery pillows – prepared for the moment of POOF! Some wrote funny phrases or drawings on pillowcases and one person even had a belt with tiny pillows attached all around. Gumby, a gorilla, and a Spartan showed up as well.

They were ready.
It was time to fight. One of the organizers yelled into a bullhorn to the “soliders” to line up along the facing sidewalks of the park. “Raise your pillows!” The horn blared. The “soliders” charged at each other.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a happy fight.

It was a great time – even as just a bystander with a camera. My hair was full of pillow-fluff and my jeans and shoes were covered in feathery debris. One of the major concerns during the week building up to the pillow fight was that it would cause a mess, a mess so big that everyone would just abandon it for the city to clean up and therefore cost the citizens of San Jose a load of money in tax cleanup (like that of the much-reported San Francisco Pillow Fight of ‘09) Thankfully, the group that showed up to play was small compared to the thousands in SF; and I’d say about 95% of the participants stayed to clean up.

The event went on for about 45 minutes when finally everyone was getting tired and started to pull out trash bags they brought. Organizers brought a brooms, bags, and gloves for everyone to use. A Groundwerx vacuum sweeper showed up – voluntarily – and helped suck up some of the rogue tiny feathers that were hard to grab.

A happy event and a great way to spend a few hours in Downtown San Jose.

A group of us, over almost a year now, have gathered for various food-drink related adventures.

We went to the Eat Real Festival in Oakland and “Fooding in SF” back in August. Then there was the trip to St. Georges Spirits to taste flavors of Hanger 1 vodka and abstinthe followed up with a trip to La Pinanta in Alameda.

In January we had two adventures:

We participated in Dine About Town in San Francisco – almost every city seems to do these now – restaurants get involved and share prix fixe menus with a sampling of some of their dishes. It’s usually a pretty good deal. We planned on going to a chinese restaurant but when our group arrived… we found that the restaurant wasn’t open on the weekend. Boo!So we walked over to Waterbar and enjoyed salmon, crab cakes benedict, and some wine. After, we made our way to the Golden Gate Park Disc Golf course and some of us played and some of us watched others get their frisbees out of trees. We followed that up with some quality time at a new fave of ours, Smuggler’s Cove. We finally ended the night with some dinner at Sauce.

A few days later a few of us took off to Lodi for some wine tasting. I have never been wine tasting before, so it was all new to me. But I think I took to it like a champ! Hah. I don’t even pretend to know HOW to taste wine “the right way” – I just taste it. I’ll try to guess some flavors or pick up on a aspect about it that seems unique to me, but in general I just taste it and decide if I like it or not. Would I purchase it? Would I order it with a meal?

We went to a handful of wineries that were open, ate our snacks of pate, cheeses, meats, and hummus and ended the day back in Berkeley at Looney’s BBQ. A delicious outing and another successful FDC Adventure.

Wait – what is FDC? It’s a little silly club we’ve decided to umbrella all these activities under. FDC stands for Foodie Drinkie Club. It’s quite the sophisticated name, isn’t it? It’s meant to be silly fun, good food and drink, and hanging out with friends. So far, we’ve been quite successful!