The Art of Noshing

Something Sacramento is rapidly becoming known for is its crawls. With something like 100 bars and restaurants within the midtown grid, the walkable drinking terrain in this city is highly impressive. Last weekend, we took part in The Big Nosh, a 25-stop crawl to raise money for cystic fibrosis research (similar to last year's Crawl for a Cure). Basically you make a team, pay $30, and spend the afternoon bouncing from place to place, each of which gives you a helping of food and booze. From 12-5 PM, it's your duty to try and make it to every stop on the crawl, or face utter defeat. A hefty task, no doubt, but Team Noshtradamus was ready to fight the good fight.

With a team consisting primarily of Piedmont High alumni (voted the #1 high school in the country for underage drinking during our tenure, or so I recall), we set out with ambitious ambitions, ready to eat and drink our way to glory!

Each stop provided its own style of eats for consumption, some more impressive than others. Tacos, soup, sandwiches, sushi, fancy cheese, froyo, pizza, risotto... A little bit of everything in no logical order. Same with the booze... wine, beer, mohito, sangria... all tossed together in a random liver-busting mish-mash. Pound it down and move along, we've got a long way to go!

Hands down, the best stop along the way was The Melting Pot, a classy-type fondue joint. With two types of dippin' cheese and hearty wine pours (complete with abundant refills), I was tempted to set up base camp here and proclaim that the crawl was called off... but alas, we had a mission. A mission bigger than one man. So I took what I had coming to me, and we went on our way.

So in the end, did we win? Well, it wasn't a competition, but the answer is still no. Last year our team hauled ass across midtown with the determined goal of finishing strong. We lost a few along the way, but damnit, we did it. This year? Not quite as glorious. We did manage to make it to 20 of the 25 stops, which in itself is a reasonably decent accomplishment. But we did fail. In all fairness, it's difficult being "closing time drunk" at 4 in the afternoon, and huffing it around The Grid can get tiring. No excuses, and Team Noshtradamus gave it our best... but we still failed.

Our grieving was done at the final location, by way of a Pabst-fueled chess match.

Training for next year's crawl starts today. I refuse to fail again.