I have some
questions.
Yes, Max was very much a real person. He ran a fantastic restaurant called Le Golosità Di Nonna Aurora in Bologna, Italy. The restaurant is still there, and still fantastic. If you're ever in the area it's worth visiting.
No, he is not. The name started more as a memorial to Max. Back in 2015, a group of friends stumbled into Le Golosità Di Nonna Aurora for lunch. Little did they know that they would spend the next 4 hours eating lunch and talking to Max, despite Max not speaking the best English. Max sat down with them, bringing his favorite liquors, and simply hung out.
A few years later, that group of friends started doing an annual long weekend to some city where seeing sites was secondary to eating and drinking. A few months before the inaugural weekend, Max Dinamyte died. It was an easy decision to name the annual trip in Max's honor.
That's a great question. When you have only four days in cities like New York, San Francisco, Santa Fe, etc. and your goal is to eat and drink as much as possible, you had better get organized.
One of the group, Christopher Williams, started putting together maps with places to eat and drink. The goal was to allow them to be as efficient as possible and not miss anything. Initially, these maps were cobbled together through word of mouth — talking to friends who had traveled to a city. But with each subsequent trip, he curated his maps, noting those places he liked, and the places he didn't think were worth his time. Since they were originally created for the Max Dinamyte Memorial Holiday, they started referring to them as Max Dinamyte maps.
Over the years, word spread among friends, family and colleagues about Christopher's maps, and people would come to him asking for them whenever they were going on a trip. Invariably, they would return home and tell Christopher how helpful the guide was, and that they didn't have a bad meal or watered down drink the entire time.
As a lifelong traveler, and someone who has been lucky enough to live in multiple countries, Christopher came to the realization that he could help people love where they were going. It became abundantly clear that these maps were making people's vacations more enjoyable.
Compiling these maps is not cheap. They often take two or three trips to a city for at least a few days if not weeks. The $2.99 price is a small price to offset the costs.