Taste of College Area returns Sunday, Sept. 27 for its third year, bigger than ever and featuring even more restaurants, coffee shops and bars.
The self-guided tasting tour includes 19 of the College Area and Rolando’s best eateries and coffee houses, where ticket holders can sample a variety of drinks and dishes.
Tickets are $40 and can be purchased online through the College Area Business District, the nonprofit putting on the event.
Jim Schneider, the organization’s executive director, said he hopes to get both locals and people who live outside the neighborhood introduced to new restaurants.
“This highly undiscovered neighborhood of College Area and Rolando has got a lot to offer,” he said.
“The bars, restaurants and all the amenities here are not just focused on college students. Normal people can come here, too.”
Schneider said this tasting event is the result of years of work growing the businesses in the district by supporting some of them through the COVID-19 pandemic and providing assistance with bookkeeping.
“We gained a lot of goodwill out of that whole effort,” he said. “The businesses knew us better, and we wanted to find ways to bring people back into their shops.”
Schneider said Taste of College Area, first held in 2024, was one of their ideas to increase traffic to neighborhood restaurants.
“Second year was about double the success, if you look at it from a financial perspective and the number of people that came,” he said. “This year we’re hoping to do that one more time.”
The tasting event includes new spots like Love Letters Pizza, Mesa Bar and Grill, and Dessert Castle, as well as decades-old neighborhood staples like Woodstock’s Pizza and Sala Thai.
The business district stretches from 55th to 73rd Street, so the event has hired four Old Town Trolleys to shuttle event-goers along El Cajon Boulevard, stopping at different restaurant hubs.
“The whole idea behind that is to get on the trolley, have a whole bunch of people that may or may not know each other, talking about the event, sharing their experiences, and then getting dropped off at a place where you can walk to a few restaurants,” he said.
Participating businesses currently include:
- Barlando
- Boxing Crab
- Charoen Krung Thai Cuisine
- Cheba Hut
- Dessert Castle
- Dirty Birds
- Himalayan Yak & Yeti
- Love Letters Pizza
- Majorette
- Penelope’s Mexican Food
- Pokedon
- Sala Thai
- Scrimshaw Coffee
- Smashburger
- Tajima
- The Mesa Bar & Grill
- Tokyo Sushi Loha
- Woodstock’s Pizza
- Yogurtland
