Walkin’ Around Checkin’ Stuff Out. #30
We started the Checklist Project with the Heavy Table years ago on Central Avenue. The idea was to eat at every restaurant on a main drag like Central Avenue, review and photograph the food, write about the experience and do a bunch of drawings, giving some exposure to small hard working restaurants that oftentimes go unnoticed.
10 years later we’ve covered Central Avenue, University Avenue, East Lake Street, and just this last week we finished Lyndale Avenue. It is a massive amount of work, food and fun.
To give you a sense of the scale of this thing, there were about 80 restaurants on Lyndale. I generally do about 5 drawings per restaurant…that amounts to somewhere around 400 drawings…and that’s just Lyndale. Add to that the food reviews, the food photography and the atmosphere write-ups and this thing has become a massive archive.
As cool as the project is to work on, I’m not gonna lie…I’m glad it’s over. We kid around and say we’ll never do another one, but we know damn well we’ll be out there again.
Before we dive into another street, the plan is to revisit the four Checklists we’ve completed and update them with new restaurants and find a way to showcase all the work in some sort of interactive map based way. Stay tuned for that.
Please consider joining the Heavy Table. Members make projects like the Checklist possible. Get out and support independent restaurants…they are working their butts off to serve better and more interesting foods than any chain ever could.