One of the main attractions of the University of Delaware is Main Street. I know when I was looking at colleges, this was particularly high on my list because it gave me something to do on the weekends. If it’s a nice Saturday, chances are you or one of your friends have suggested walking up to Main Street as a way to procrastinate your work and to get out of the dorm. And there really is something for everyone up there.

One of my personal favorites is a record shop/used bookstore. I could sit in the used book section for hours browsing different titles and leave with multiple books, having bought them for under ten dollars.

Another attraction on Main Street is a number of restaurants. There's a variety from Italian to Chinese and everything else in between. The restaurants are for the days when you can’t possibly eat another dining hall meal without going crazy. As someone who is very particular about the food I eat or having any other Chinese food besides Mr. China, the Chinese food I’ve eaten my whole life, it has helped me to branch out in my eating habits.

One night my friends and I were walking back from an event and decided to cut through Main Street. We were discussing all the different types of restaurants and how we had heard which ones were the best and which ones to stay away from. Being freshman it was a little overwhelming to be presented with all these food options and wanting to try all of them. That was when our idea was born.

We decided that by the end of our senior year here at UD we would have tried every restaurant on Main Street. We set the rules to try one restaurant a month.

When we got back to our dorm I organized a spreadsheet and found there were 51 restaurants. We also found that it was mathematically impossible to eat at one restaurant a month and make it to graduation. There were just too many places. We looked at each menu with the prices and what they served (we’re picky eaters and broke college kids).

We cut out the restaurants that we have near our houses such as Chipotle and Panera. We also eliminated the Brazilian Steakhouse (sadly) and the Chinese restaurant that served cow stomach and jellyfish. No matter how adventurous I was going to be in eating, I was not going to be that adventurous.

This weekend some of us went to eat at Red Bowl which is a Chinese restaurant. Always a little skeptical of new restaurants, I was pleasantly surprised. I got the General Tso’s Chicken and it was amazing.

Dare I say even better than Mr. China’s from back home? Everybody else loved their dinners as well. We came to a consensus that we have to take the other Chinese restaurants off the list because nothing else could beat the amazingness of that dinner.

So far I have eaten at five different places. Each time I eat at a restaurant I check it off on the spreadsheet and put the date next to it. Now, are we really trying every restaurant? No, but we certainly are broadening our horizons for what we like to eat. And who knows maybe we’ll find a new favorite restaurant on our quest throughout the next four years.