Taste 27th Street

The Taste 27th project began as a casual office observation:

“It’s interesting how all these diverse restaurants from different countries are all on 27th Street.”

“Yeah. Why isn’t there a passport to help people try all those places?”

And so begins Taste 27th.

Challenge & Objective:

We pitched the idea of a culinary passport to Visit Lincoln and laid out the concept: Global flavors. Local spots. One street. Why aren’t we talking about this?

Visit Lincoln was immediately on board, but there was a catch. They didn’t want to do a booklet passport. They wanted to build an app for Taste 27th Street. And they wanted the stories of the restaurants.

There were two main objectives for Taste 27th:

  1. Break through the myth that Lincoln is just a boring town in boring Nebraska, full of corn, college football, and farmers.
  2. Drive more business to these local establishments.

Our challenge was to highlight every participating restaurant with a mixture of videos, photos, and write-ups. These features would tell the quick story of each restaurant, highlight the most popular dishes, and suggest essential items visitors order.

This was no small feat. For starters, we had to make a list of every local, non-chain restaurant on the street. Then we had to refine it: Does the location serve ready-made or freshly prepared food? Yes? It makes the list.

Next, we had to see who actually wanted to participate. Which meant we needed letters explaining the goal of the project in English, Spanish, Arabic, and Vietnamese. We partnered with UNL’s Translation and Interpretation Services to help us with this step.

Finally, once we had a list of excited participants, we had to determine which locations were video and which were photography.

Strategy & Tactics:

The goal for Taste 27th was always website, app, and social media. Since we were editing these videos for easy sharing on social sites, we leaned into the playfulness of social media and tried to capture the diverse personalities of 27th Street in the music, typography, colors, and hand-drawn elements.

Videos were kept short, and each feature was limited to three recommended dishes, with one to two additional highlights.

Results:

In addition to hundreds of thousands of organic views and shares, restaurants along 27th Street began seeing a surge in business after the launch of Taste 27th.

Taste 27th has been recognized for several awards since its launch. In February of 2026, Visit Lincoln was awarded Outstanding Marketing Campaign by the Nebraska Tourism Commission for Taste 27th. Additionally, Taste 27th was awarded a Prism award in April 2026 for Organic Social Media (non-paid) and Sterlings for Video, Social Media, and Social Media Campaign (paid/organic).