Slow Roll Week 2 - AsiaTown

After a record-smashing opening night ride from Wade Oval, we're ready to keep this thing rolling forward. Next week we'll give you a preview of the upcoming Cleveland Asian Festival, set to take place May 18-19 just a few blocks south of our starting location tonight. We'll be rolling through much of the surprisingly large and somewhat amorphous part of our city that can be called "AsiaTown," and we hope to give you a feeling for the culture and history that thrives here but is often sadly overlooked by people searching for "real Cleveland."

We're as real as it gets here at Slow Roll 216, and we're bringing next week's ride to you from the safe harbor of an abandoned parking lot, left to crumble by a local supermarket chain when it left behind its flagship store for greener and more expensive grass a couple of miles away. Neighborhoods being jilted by their local grocers is unfortunately a recurring feature of inner city Cleveland, and a story we see repeated all too often, success stories like Fairfax Market notwithstanding. Here you'll find a lot of people whose trek to fill their cupboards got a lot more complicated about five years back.

Increasingly, Asian supermarkets like Park to Shop and Tink Holl have risen to the challenge of filling these voids, while also exposing people to new food experiences along the way. We'll briefly spot these wonderful places along our route, but we encourage everyone who participates on Monday to come back and explore the local commercial districts and hidden reserves of art, music and great food that exist in AsiaTown today.

We'll start our ride at 7 PM sharp from 3338 Payne, and you can drop by any time after 6 PM to visit us at our booth, grab a free schedule or Slow Roll sticker, and maybe buy one of our new 2024 t-shirts (the Happy Monday shirts were so popular we're already almost out of them, but we will have more in stock in a couple of weeks.) If you need to register, you can do it by clicking the "sign up" button on the Slow Roll page, or just by going to this form:

https://forms.wix.com/f/7187268305940382645

If you forget and don't do it before you ride, we have QR codes that can help you out and we can also guide you through the process. You'll only need to do it one time all year