COLUMBIA'S LUNCH REVIEW

Tank here.  Publican and I found ourselves eating lunch in the Vista and asking this question - how do you reinvigorate your lunch life?  We concluded that the solution was to set an overly-ambitious goal and recruit some expert lunch companions that are outside of our regular lunch crowd to join us in the pursuit of that dream. So began the Lunchmen began the Yelp 100 Lunch Challenge.  The idea is so glorious that Rabbit is increasing his day trips from Charleston to his Columbia office so he can hit some Challenge lunches. Frodo, who has written some of this blog's most-trafficked articles,  has stepped up to the plate to help fill in Rabbit's absence.

I must be honest, I have doubts about Yelp and its rankings, despite Yelp's ascension to the top of the restaurant ranking world since our blog entered hibernation. The Challenge will give us a methodical way to test Yelp's credibility and reliability. We will evaluate each restaurant based on the factors that matter most at lunch:

We will be weighing in with our thoughts collectively on Yelp under the name "Lunch Challenge."

To compose the Challenge, we searched the categories on Yelp to see which had the most restaurants open at lunch. We identified 100 of the highest Yelp-rated restaurants in Columbia (including W. Cola, Cayce, Lexington, and Irmo) in those categories. Then, we built a calendar that forces us to go through the 100 restaurants in 1 year.  To help judge the restaurants, we recruited Porkchop, an ironically slender member of the clergy who can eat like the devil; Noodles, a local attorney whose years living abroad gave him taste for the exotic; and Motherboard, an IT executive and writer who has yet to meet a dish too spicy to handle.

Here is where we are eating over the next 52 weeks.  Our goal is to have each person committed to the Challenge attend at least 50% of the scheduled lunches, and to have at least 3 people at each lunch.  Of course, we will be bringing along others to enjoy some of these restaurants, because lunch remains the core of our sense of community.