Hendersonville Epicurean blogger: Small plate crawl can boost local restaurants

Hendersonville Epicurean weighs in on the Asheville restaurant scene and offers up an idea – a “small plate crawl” – on how to support it:

Each restaurant put together a special menu of 5 to 7 small plates, priced from $2.00 to $8.00. Crawlers went from restaurant to restaurant, purchasing only the small plates they wanted. Sharing was encouraged. Crawlers could print out a Passport online, which mapped the 23 participating restaurants. Each restaurant visited punched the passport. Five or more punches and you could enter the Passport for a prize drawing. Over $400 in prizes were donated for the drawing.

In an effort to help the restaurants off the beaten path, getting a Passport punch from one of them as one of your five restaurant minimum meant that your passport was entered into the drawing twice. It worked! 86% of the Passports turned in, included a visit to one of the bonus restaurants.

Another big plus was that people tried restaurants they’d never been to before and have since been back. The low prices and “permission” to have just a taste gave them the motivation to try new places without worrying about putting out the money for a meal they might not like. The crawl was purposely timed for after “visitor” season and on a slow day of the week. It was extremely successful in spite of heavy rains, flooding and street closures. It turned into a party of sorts, with everyone chatting with others that were crawling.

We’re planning on doing this twice a year, as the seasons and menus change. Asheville would be a perfect location for something like this – easily walkable to lots of restaurants.