A taco crawl? It's coming to downtown Naperville
Downtown Naperville has hosted wine crawls, chocolate crawls and cookie crawls to highlight local businesses.
Next up is a taco crawl.
To help kick off Hispanic Heritage Month in mid-September, the Downtown Naperville Alliance is holding the event that will feature 10 participating restaurants.
The Downtown Naperville Taco Crawl is slated for 4 to 8 p.m. Sept. 19. Tickets cost $30, with a portion of the profits benefiting the Naperville Sister Cities Foundation.
"We're just looking for new, fun, engaging ways to bring people into our downtown," said Danielle Tufano, executive director of the Downtown Naperville Alliance. "We thought doing a taco crawl was a perfect fit to bring a couple pieces of the puzzle together."
Tufano said the event also is designed to support the Hispanic Heritage Festival taking place Sept. 16 in Central Park. Tufano spoke with festival organizers to come up with a way to work together, and they landed on the taco crawl.
Restaurants quickly jumped on board. Because so many are participating, the taco crawl will have two routes.
The participating restaurants are Allegory, Empire Burgers + Brew, Fat Rosie's, Hizemans, Potter's Place, Q-BBQ, SixtyFour Wine Bar & Kitchen, Smokeshow BBQ, Tapville Social and The Lantern.
The exciting part of the taco crawl, Tufano said, is the interpretation each restaurant will put on the food. It could be beef, chicken, pork or fish tacos served in a variety of ways based on the chef's vision.
"It's been great just looking at some of the ideas that have been thrown around," Tufano said. "Everybody's going to be putting their own spin on it."
Two hundred tickets will go on sale Tuesday at downtownnaperville.com. Maps will be provided at Pinot's Palette, the check-in location, at 175 Jackson Ave.
After the taco crawl, participants are encouraged to return to Pinot's Palette for a Hispanic-themed dessert, drawings and a photo booth.
"There's already been a lot of interest," Tufano said. "Once we posted it on social media, it blew up. We definitely anticipate it selling out."