By ZELORY GREGLER //
The “magical mystery tour,” you know … but the “edible mystery tour?” Now you’re cooking.
At least, you’re eating. And cracking codes, parsing puzzles and otherwise working the case – all part of the fanciful and filling fun of Food Done It, the brain-bending, palate-pleasing creation of husband-and-wife entrepreneurs Elizabeth and Kevin Hindley.
The 2017 startup is a Main Street restaurant crawl blending society’s insatiable appetites for “experiential dining” and confounding mysteries. Participants enjoy a prix fixe menu as they journey from one walking-distance restaurant to another, where the next course – and the next clue – await.
Diners decide if it’s a breakneck pace from restaurant to restaurant or a leisurely stroll from one scene of the crime to the next – pre-booked tours take place over three to five hours, with groups of four to 10 enjoying five curated courses, buying their booze separately (if they’re thirsty) and bagging some sweet souvenirs (the fake-mustache/eyeglass disguises are sort of a company calling card).
Zelory Gregler: Mostly clueless.
It’s as much a mobile escape room as a moveable feast, with smartphone interactivity key to the developing plotlines – of which there are eight, set in seven walkable Long Island downtowns.
Patchogue boasts two food adventures (“The Cupcake Conundrum” and “The Burgling Bookworm”), each with its own distinct story and stops; the latest Food Done It tour, “Debacle Downport,” kicks off Dec. 1 in Port Jefferson.
The Hindleys will slide the scale for different party sizes (two detectives can take the case for an extra surcharge and larger corporate groups can also thicken the plot – nothing builds teams better than cracking cases over a plate of short ribs and basil-garlic shrimp).
However many starving sleuths join a party, the adventure always ends the same: cases closed, bellies full.
That was the ingenious plot device back in 2017, when Kevin (a professional salesman) and Elizabeth (a teacher at Longwood Junior High School) founded their LLC and offered their very first tour, “The Cupcake Conundrum.”
Kevin, whose degree in music composition “prepared me perfectly for sales,” had followed an opportunity – selling rooftop solar arrays – from Colorado to New York. There he met Elizabeth, a teacher and unabashed foodie eager to spice things up.
Elementary, dear entrepreneurs: Elizabeth and Kevin Hindley deduced a clever food-tour formula.
She recalled one parent-teacher conference, just after her mother died, when a parent – perhaps sensing her tumultuous emotional state – asked Elizabeth to describe her passion. Restaurants, she replied.
“I love the interiors,” Elizabeth says. “I love restaurant owners. I can just go into different restaurants all day long.”
She’d already explored the possibility of opening her own eatery – a cost-prohibitive pipedream – so the persistent parent pushed the teacher to consider other ways of working her dreams into her reality. The Hindleys’ home base of Patchogue was rapidly evolving into “a mega arena of artisan restaurants,” Elizabeth recalls, so she started thinking about food tours. But how to compel participants from one restaurant to the next?
“I thought … the elements of an escape room, the elements of a trivia night, the elements of a scavenger hunt … and it happened just like that,” the entrepreneur adds. “Literally, right there in my classroom.”
Kevin was all-in. He’d been a theater kid in both high school and college, so storytelling was ingrained in his mentality. And coming from the all-hustle, highly competitive sales world, the idea of starting a business “was not as intimidating to me as it might have been for other people.”
In addition to personally curating each of the downtown tours – lots of walking and tasting, Elizabeth notes – the entrepreneurs leaned into available technologies.
Eat it up: While solving a puzzling mystery, participants also chow down on an awesome selection of artisanal foods.
On tour day, participants are e-mailed the secret starting-point – a restaurant where they’ll enjoy an appetizer and receive their first puzzle, via the downloaded Food Done It app. Solving the riddle and entering the correct answer unlocks the next destination.
Each scrumptious scavenger hunt includes six stops – five eateries and a retail establishment – that are never revealed in advance. But the fixed menus along each tantalizing trail are available beforehand, so guests can customize their clue-hunting carte du jours for food allergies, vegetarian preferences and other specifics.
The new Port Jefferson caper, for instance, includes stops offering choices of beef or chicken sliders, lamb chops or oysters Rockefeller, chicken tikka masala or “assorted skewers,” and duck wings or a “colossal meatball” (a dead-giveaway clue for usual Port Jeff suspects), all chased with fresh churros.
The Bay Shore “Munchie Heist,” meanwhile, opens with a first-course “Snack Attack,” in which hungry hunters select from mac ’n cheese balls, birria eggrolls, taquitos and more.
Other tours feature theme-flavored selections: Rockville Centre’s “The Tour You Can’t Refuse” includes a mafioso menu marked by an “Italian Sandwich” and house-made gelato, while Farmingdale’s “Fusilli Fiasco” is highlighted by a handmade pasta del giorno.
Figuring it out: Where will Food Done It go next? Stay tuned for more clues.
Recruiting restaurants is not difficult, according to Kevin, who notes “a win for everybody.”
“There are a lot of factors that go into which restaurants wind up on the tour,” the innovative impresario notes. “The size of the dining room, whether they can accommodate certain parties at certain times of the day…”
“The food,” Elizabeth adds.
“Definitely the food,” Kevin says. “And we pay the restaurant a negotiated rate per person, so they’re not losing anything.”
Topped off with not one but two of the greatest slogans in recent history (“Seek and Ye Shall Dine” and “Catch the Culprit – Or Dine Trying!”), Food Done It has proven popular even with repeat customers, including fans awaiting the opening of new location-based tours – and one who continuously brings different companions on the same scripted adventures.
“She likes knowing the answers and watching them struggle,” Kevin notes.
With “Debacle Downport” set to stretch legs next month, the Hindleys are already considering future expansions. The Food Done It website offers an application for interested restaurateurs and walkable restaurant rows in Ronkonkoma, Bellport, Long Beach and the Bell Boulevard section of Eastern Queens are all under consideration – though where the tour goes next is an unsolved mystery.
“We’re exploring a few different towns,” Kevin says. “But the response has always been very positive and we get a lot of repeat customers, so we know we’re doing something right.”
“We always hear ‘there’s so much food,’ so people are definitely getting their money’s worth,” Elizabeth adds. “But the biggest compliment we’ve gotten is the people who keep coming back.”
Zelory “Celery” Gregler has been cooking for most of his life, and eating for all of it.
