Save the date: LoDo Bites!

​These days, it seems like every city has a Taste of Whatever-Ville. Taste of Dayton, Taste of Barstow, Taste of Weehawken, and so forth. What's more, it seems that, in the larger cities, every neighborhood wants to get in on the action with its own mini-festival celebrating whatever it was that made the neighborhood such a unique cultural touchstone in the first place.  And while some of these are excellent excuses to get together and eat, say, Italian food during one of Buffalo's street festivals, the best of all the wursts at the Kutztown Folk Festival or a little bit of everything during the Ninth Avenue Food Festival in Hell's Kitchen, some are just an excuse to party. Road-kill festival? Just check out Marlinton, West Virginia.  There's SPAM in Waikiki and the RC Cola and Moon Pie Festival in Bell Buckle, Tennessee.

And somewhere between the Ninth Avenue Food Festival and the Pierogi Fest in Whiting, Illinois, comes yet another of our own, homegrown foodie fiestas: LoDo Bites (genius name, by the way...). On Tuesday August 18 from 5 to 9 p.m., those who are interested can stroll up and down the streets of LoDo sampling the fare from twenty neighborhood restaurants.  Participants run the LoDo gamut and include everyone from Vesta Dipping Grill (which is a perfect fit for this kind of event), Dixons (just identified in the latest Guess where I'm drinking?) and the Wazee Supper Club to a couple of bars that really ought to just give out baseball hats, certificates for free tramp stamps and references for DUI lawyers.

In other words, it's a guaranteed good time. Tickets for the extravaganza are $25 in advance, $30 the day of the event, and more information can be found online at the lodo.org website.