ALL JUICED UP
With party people opting for good, clean-eating fun, do juice crawls signal the end of NYC nightlife as we know it?
ON a recent Thursday night, 50 frisky people did the chicken dance and then the conga along Mulberry Street, wearing light-up, neon-colored headphones blasting Gloria Estefan & Miami Sound Machine’s “Conga” in their ears.
Bystanders looked on, confused. A restaurant owner ran out of his establishment and screamed, “What the f - - k is this?!” at the revelers.
But the dozens of street dancers weren’t drunk and disorderly; they were high on nothing more than life — and cold-pressed kale and cucumbers. They were on a juice crawl.
Last October, Anna Garcia, a 28-year-old East Village resident, held the first official Juice Crawl. It sold out, and Garcia, a freelance trumpet player, has since held eight other crawls, with two more to come in October. “People loved it, and I decided to see how far I can take this,” she says. “I’m working to make Juice Crawl huge.”
In an era where sexy singles head to SoulCy- cle — not the Limelight — for throbbing beats and endorphins, it seems only natural that it’s come to this.
Tickets for each event range from $15 to $50 and include tastings of as many as 25 juices from three to five different shops. A recent sold-out crawl through Soho and the East Village was also a “quiet clubbing” party, with participants wearing headphones blaring all the same songs, allowing them to dance together without inflicting cheesy pop tunes on innocent pedestrians.
Melissa Guttman, 32, an accountant who lives in the East Village and says she’s typically a “cynical” city gal, got quite a juice-high from the event.
“I’ve been here for 10 years,” she says. “It’s rare when I have experiences that are like, ‘Wow! New York is so magical! I can’t believe I didn’t know about this cool thing I could do!’ ”
The night began at the sportswear shop Athleta, where the participants — a mix of hipsters, NYU kids, a few hard-core veggie lovers and precocious underage thrill-seekers — enjoyed a “pregame” “Kalefornia” juice (kale, banana, kiwi, dates, blueberries and coconut water) from Rawpothecary.
There were three more bar stops throughout the night offering small cups of juice like LuliTonix’s “Fresh!” (avocado, basil, spinach, mint, lemon, ginger, fig, lettuce).
But it wasn’t all about the liquefied produce. The crawl’s official leader, Will Petz, 36, had the group storm a Samsung store and dance around a security guard, who clearly wasn’t having any of it. The high jinks continued at an art gallery, where the proud extroverts sang along full-voice to the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way.”
Many were keen on being able to let loose on nothing more than juice.
“It’s better without booze because you’re using your natural life-force energy, and I think that’s so important,” says Leora Edut, 37, founder of the Goddess on the Go women’s group and a resident of Long Island City, Queens. “Your inner 5-year-old gets to come out and have a mother-freakin’ blast!”
But for some, the sober fun wasn’t enough. While the group was enjoying ginger-carrot juice at Agavi on East Seventh Street, one crawler wearing a “Vegan” T-shirt and Vibram “FiveFingers” shoes discreetly ducked into Blue & Gold Tavern across the street. He emerged a few minutes later looking mighty pleased with himself.
“Did you do a shot?” asked Petz to no response. “Two shots?” asked the guide.
The buzzed vegan gave a big thumbs up.
But Guttman and her friends stayed sober until 9 p.m. and still felt a jolt.
“We forget that we can be happy and fun, and get high just off our natural love of life,” she says.