On July 1, California becomes a zero–foie gras state. Senate Bill 1520, which Arnold Schwarzenegger signed in 2004, outlawed the force-feeding of birds to enlarge their livers, and what’s more, prohibited the selling of those livers—in short, a total ban on foie gras in the state that gave the world Stars (Jeremiah Tower's now-defunct restaurant) and the French Laundry. But the law came with a grace period expiring at the end of June 2012, to allow producers time to engineer alternatives to the feeding tube. They didn’t. And late last month, a star brigade of California chefs—putting faces to the recently formed Coalition for Humane and Ethical Farming Standards—fired off a Hail Mary pass to lawmakers in Sacramento, trying to score a stay after proposing a list of new ethical standards for foie production. So far, it looks like a fumble.

Meanwhile, whether defiant or resigned, chefs have mounted protest dinners, mournful farewells, $150-a-plate denials—Californians with the means to afford it have probably eaten more foie gras this year than at any time since the days of San Francisco’s robber barons. But now, fans of fatty livers are being forced to swallow what had seemed unthinkable even after SB 1520 became law: the French Laundry without foie.

But Thomas Keller, Vinny Dotolo, Michael Chiarello, Chris Cosentino: As much as I admire you guys, it’s time to face reality. Let the foie go, chefs. Just let it go.

THE ULTIMATE NOVELTY
Just so you know where I’m starting from, I’ll cop to my own biases. I have no particular love for foie gras, nor do I hate it. I feel slightly uncomfortable in high places—maybe it’s the memory of my union-member dad, a grocery clerk who had a distrust of wealthy people and expensive things and yet aspired to culture. Maybe I just naturally prefer cheap food over fancy.

The times I’ve eaten foie gras, I’ve felt ambivalent: It’s almost always been seared, garnished with something sweet—onion jam or quince mostarda or preserved cherries—and I pretty much hate eating sugary stuff before dessert comes. But I've also eaten a $15 takeout foie sandwich whose main purpose seemed to be novelty, and foie ice cream (subtle-tasting, triple the novelty value). The best I ever had was a $50 foie appetizer (for one) at L'Atelier de Jöel Robuchon in Vegas, all gorgeous sear, caramelized meat sugars, and shocking smoothness. I'm glad I tried it—once.

Still, I appreciate the idea of foie gras, the culture of traditional animal husbandry that created it, farmers who patiently grew and harvested bird livers in some picture-book idyll of the Languedoc. It makes foie gras seem like a world cultural legacy, like bird’s nest or huitlacoche.

But that’s not the world we live in, the one where old French guys in sabots and charmingly worn-out tweeds patiently massage the necks of prized geese in a dirt farmyard. Anybody been to Paris in the last decade? The restaurant food most French people eat is as industrialized as anywhere else in the modern world, with heavy doses of Burger King and cornstarch-shiny Chinese. And anyway, marrying 14-year-old girls is a cultural legacy, too, but thankfully, we've evolved.

MEAT IS MURKY
Face it, we live in a world of troubled meat, where production is constantly under pressure to scale up. The old French guy has become an underpaid worker from Mexico, and foie gras—even though it’s harvested on a small scale in the U.S., even smaller in California—isn’t from the family farmyard.

Can it be grown and harvested using more humane, more ethical methods? Of course—though sadly for foie fans, the Coalition for Humane and Ethical Farming Standards seems to have waited too long to lobby that point. In a roundup of opinion yesterday on EcoSalon, Vanessa Barrington quoted Charlie Hallowell, chef and owner of Pizzaiolo in Oakland. “It’s a cheap and easy target for animal rights activists. We should f*cking ban McDonald's!”

Yeah, Charlie, we should absolutely talk about fucking banning McDonald's, or at least its worst, most toxic, most tragically inhumane practices. But just because Big Meat, or fast food, or high-fructose corn syrup is all bad, that’s no reason not to go after something that’s bad in a different way. That’s like saying, well, bullying kids to the point of suicide is bad, but since inmate treatment in the California prison system is also heinous but happens on a massive scale, we shouldn’t worry about bullies right now. That’s a nihilist argument thrown up to distract.

WHAT'S SO BAD ABOUT BEING GOOD?
As imperfect as it is, as many issues as it will raise about black markets and lost livelihoods, the foie gras ban is based in an effort to do something good: alleviate the suffering of animals, even a handful of them. Sure, those same animals will be slaughtered for meat and enter the food system, but that’s no reason not to curb a practice that sparks even a little twinge of empathetic revulsion for many of us, maybe even most of us. Talk all you want about the lack of gag reflexes, or how some ducks have been known to gorge themselves naturally, or slippery slopes for animal activists who want to eventually outlaw all meat—I say bullshit. It’s only human to feel—to know it instinctively—that force-feeding is wrong. I’m saying this as someone who eats meat every day of my life, and not just meat that’s had a decent amount of space to move around in before it was dragged off to slaughter. I want meat to be more humane, across the board. I'm willing to accept a small step, like banning foie gras, to get there.

And chefs—I’m talking to you now, as somebody who used to be one of you—aren’t you striving, every day, to cook from the deepest part of your humanity? Isn’t your food the thing that gives you the deepest connection to the world? Isn’t cooking a constant process of evolution, of becoming more enlightened?

The fact that politicians, most of whom had probably never thought about foie gras, or had the slightest understanding of its place in culture, pulled the plug has made a lot of people cynical. Jesus, it makes me—a dude whose gay marriage is a dodgeball for politicians to nail each other with when it's expedient—cynical. But that doesn’t mean that political opportunism, or grandstanding, or taking an easy position against a luxury food with a small constituency, can’t coincide with doing the right thing. If that means Thomas Keller has to find something else to charm or seduce his guests with the way foie gras has, how can that be bad?

Photograph of the foie gras biscuit at Animal by Flickr member djjewelz under Creative Commons

After three weeks and thousands of votes it’s finally down to two! The final matchup in our Best Brewpub in America bracket pits two towns famous for their universities in a bare-knuckle bar brawl. Over here, it's North by Northwest, purveyor of craft ales in the hometown of the University of Texas at Austin. In the opposing corner: Cambridge Brewing Co., whose barrel-aged beers and other brews have fueled more passionate discussions than the Harvard Speech & Parliamentary Society.

Hey, it’s Texas v. Massachusetts, people, the brewpub equivalent of Bush v. Kerry! Except, unlike the 2004 presidential race, this one won’t drag on for months—you've got till May 14 to click your choice for which establishment should wear the crown as the nation’s best. Cast your ballot now, and every day until then!

Photograph by Jennifer Yin

Tom Scocca’s mini exposé in Slate wafted through food writers' Twitter feeds last week like the smell of a single rotting potato reek-bombing a kitchen pantry. The noxious charge: Recipe writers are liars.

In “Layers of Deceit,” Scocca began by calling bullshit on the New York Times food section and Melissa Clark, author of a recipe calling for taking onions from raw to soft, brown, and sweet in only 10 minutes. After taking a lot of other food writers out for making the same lie, Scocca got out the kitchen timer and proved the ridiculousness of the premise (in fact, caramelizing onions takes at least 45 minutes, if not a good, slow hour). In response, the Times garbled stuff about "unusual" secret shortcuts, the equivalent of looking down at your shoes and changing the subject.

Los Angeles Times's Russ Parsons piped up with I-told-you-people-all-along pieces, excavating stories about the true and proper way to caramelize onions. But the thing that went mostly unnoticed in the scramble to accuse or save face was Scocca's larger indictment, which is that professional recipe writers' work can seem as far removed from actual cooking as a cognitive study in the testing lab with subjects wired to electrodes is from actual thinking. Recipe writing occurs under unnatural conditions, conducted by professionals with laptops and clipboards. They pretend they're doing stuff that ordinary home cooks might do, but they're not ordinary home cooks, and many are definitely not cooking at home, under ordinary conditions.

As Scocca notes, “recipe writers approach kitchen time with a stopwatch.” For the rest of us, kitchen time is only one of the currents making up household flow. Cooking happens simultaneously with texting, unloading the drier, shooing the cat off the counter, and moving the lawn sprinkler. It’s about short periods of intense focus and long stretches of distraction, during which you hope you haven’t fucked everything up by burning the marinara.

Look, recipes have to be published, and full-time recipe testers are great—believe me, CHOW’s food team has amazing talent and discipline. It’s just that I crave the loose, imprecise, and inspirational approach of the generation that wrote cookbooks in the middle of the last century, back when James Beard wrote this:

For Steak au Poivre—Press crushed or cracked peppercorns into the steak before grilling or pan-broiling. After it is done to the right stage, flame it with a little cognac. When the steak is pan-broiled, sometimes the pan is rinsed with cognac and heavy cream, which is poured over the steak. (Delights and Prejudices, 1964)

Nobody could have busted Beard for deceiving them about anything as trivial as cooking time. Ladies and gentlemen, put your stopwatches down. It's time to pick up your senses.

Photograph by Christopher Rochelle / CHOW.com

All you dudes pounding double IPAs, triple IPAs, wet-hopped beers, dry-hopped beers, black IPAs, white IPAs? Raise a glass, because that might be all you can raise. According to beer lore, hops cause impotence.

Is the lore true? No. The infamous phytoestrogenic compounds in hops are in too small quantities, even in the hoppiest beers, to affect male erectile function. That said, there are plenty of reasons to push hops out of bed: Their trendiness in the last 10 years has flooded the market with unbalanced, largely undrinkable beers that are overly bitter, cloying, and exhausting. Thankfully, the backlash has begun. Welcome gruit, an ancient style of unhopped beer that is suddenly making a comeback after being dead for hundreds of years.

Long before hops became brewers' favorite bittering and preserving agent, people used all kinds of herbs and spices in beer. Some of these were mildly poisonous, some even made you high, some were both mildly poisonous and made you high. (Read more about this in an interview with Stephen Harrod Buhner, author of Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers.) Among these types of beer was gruit, a hopless brew made with an herb-spice mix that typically included Myrica gale, yarrow, and rosemary.

With the rise of the hop industry, and especially with the passage of the German Beer Purity Law, the “Reinheitsgebot” of 1516, gruit became defunct, and hops became king. But now, gruit is back. It's showing up at a handful of esteemed breweries, like Dupont of Belgium; Midnight Sun Brewing Company of Anchorage, Alaska; The Bruery out of Placentia, California; and Founders Brewing Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There's even a brewing professor in Germany making gruit as part of a series of historic beers in conjunction with Weihenstephan Brewery.

LITERAL ROOT BEER
The taste of gruit varies widely; it's more of a loose concept rather than a specific style with guidelines. Bog myrtle, orange peel, and all manner of twigs and berries have been featured in recent gruits. As one home-brewer who, appropriately, made gruit over a campfire wrote, spice balance can be challenging. Bad ones taste like gross root beer. Good ones taste a lot like normal beer (maltiness, yeast flavors), with an unusual, unexpected herbaciousness in place of the familiar Christmas-tree flavor of overly present hops.

Every year I look forward to the annual tapping of Magnolia Brewery's Weekapaug Gruit, brewed each winter here in San Francisco. It's a dark amber ale that's all at once astringent, meaty, and earthy, with a subtle rosemary tingle. Maybe it's knowing the history of gruit, but whenever I drink it I feel like I've been transported to a lonely heath, a hooded cloak whipping around me in the wind, Mists of Avalon–style.

This spring, I've been enjoying Dupont's new Posca Rustica (pictured), a high-alcohol yet well-balanced beer with a strawberry-blond color and delicate sage flavor. It was a megahit with the CHOW staff at the spring beer tasting.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the same people who say that hops have a dampening effect on male sexual vigor also swear that the herbs traditionally used in gruit have the opposite effect. That claim is equally unproven, although it is true that gruit is stimulating in one sense: It's a welcome respite from a decade of hop bombs. Will gruit be the new IPA, destined to be overspiced and oversaturated? Doubtful, thank goodness. Somehow, "bog-myrtle bomb" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Photograph by Christopher Rochelle / CHOW.com

Clink your glass to the Final Four in our Best Brewpub in America bracket! The penultimate matchups: Cascade Barrel House in Portland versus North by Northwest in Austin, and Cambridge Brewing in Massachusetts toe-to-toe against Revolution Brewing in Chicago. Voting is open until May 7; on May 8, we big-reveal the final brewpub face-off. Don’t miss your chance to click-cast your ballot every day until the bracket closes! Vote now!

Photograph by Jennifer Yin / SF Beer Week

How many drinks did I have? Staggering down a dark and treacherous road in Texas, I’d lost count. My first night at Austin Food & Wine had been a booze crawl, over a topography land-mined with tasting plates of elaborate desserts. In another couple of minutes, I'd discover the best fried chicken I think I’ve ever had. Here’s how.

I'd flown in from San Francisco to practically land in a pint of beer at the New Taste of Texas, the Food & Wine event's opening party, set in a scrubby park in downtown Austin. After that I downed a Manhattan from a plastic cup. I needed to walk over to the Driskill hotel to pick up my press badge, and while there I paused in the lobby bar to order a shot of Willett rye. And when the waitress with the apricot-colored hair asked if I wanted the 20-year-old I said sure. “You’re gettin’ the good stuff, sugar,” she said as she set down the little snifter. When I looked at the bill it—shit!—said $35, which meant I’d squandered my dining per diem on booze, so if I wanted to eat I was going to have to mooch off trays at media parties.

That’s exactly where I headed, with an upper lip still numb from the gold-plated whiskey I'd blown my allowance on: a party at a bar upstairs from La Condesa, theoretically presided over by Marcus Samuelsson. I think I caught a glimpse of his pork-pie hat through the crowd, though mostly I fixed my harder-and-harder-to-focus attention on a margarita, which seemed to have evaporated from my glass.

I’d met a local food blogger who told me about the Texas craft beer scene. She said, “Are you going to the dessert party at Saint Cecilia’s?” I wasn’t sure that I was. Also, I had no idea in hell what, or who, was Saint Cecilia. I noticed that the margarita in my hand was suddenly full again, as I scanned the crowd in the dim bar to see who was smoking the weed I whiffed. “Philip Speer is going to be there,” she said.

Speer is the pastry chef and culinary director at Uchiko. Earlier, at the Taste of Texas thing, he’d been handing out a couple of desserts. One had a mousse flavored with ash—lemons reduced to carbon after hours in the oven, basically, sort of like turning decay into something hopeful, sweet, and shiny. At the same time, a soda made from absolutely unripe strawberries fizzed around the mousse, haunting it like some green and tannic shadow. It was inspired. I wanted to taste more, plus I was in no state to turn down free food.

“Absolutely, that guy’s a genius. I’m going.”

DON'T DROP THE COOKIE BALLS
But it turns out my new blogger buddy wasn’t, so no shared cab to Saint Cecilia’s. She told me it’s a hotel; I figured I could walk the mile-plus on Google Maps. So I did, pausing with wonky balance to pee against the garbage dumpster out back of Hooters.

But the Hotel Saint Cecilia was no place to show up hammered. Four pastry chefs had set up tables on the lawn, serene under the lights, as shadowy groups of elegant-looking people sat around tables on the terrace, watching. Who the fuck were they? I drank champagne, picked up a couple of Christina Tosi’s salty cookie-dough lumps (left), watching the one I dropped roll off the table and onto the grass. A girl in a chef’s coat giggled.

Pichet Ong handed me a plate with a wedge of some warm Spanish cake—I tried to talk up its similarity to a Filipino dessert whose name I couldn’t remember, but Ong wasn’t having any of my bullshit. He smiled politely and turned away. Speer was there: He handed me a skewer with a liquid nitrogen marshmallow s’more thing that dissolved into graham-cracker crumbs on my tongue. I stood around for a while—it must have been near midnight—then realized I just needed to crawl into bed back at my hotel. Wherever that hell that was.

So there I was in the dark, out on the street—more like a two-lane highway strafed by whizzing cars—trying to remember how many drinks I’d had, with nothing solid in my stomach except tiny portions of complicated sweets.

That’s when then I saw them on the side of the road, huge letters in neon lights the color of dirty gold: CHICKEN. They were attached to the longest shiny Airstream trailer I’d ever seen, off on a semipaved lot with some tables out front: a fried chicken truck. Thank you, Jesus.

YOU GUYS SUCK
But when I got to the order window, I heard a woman’s Texas drawl. “No more chicken, darlin’. Just sold the last to those boys over there.” Two college dudes were sitting at the otherwise empty table, with a huge bucket of chicken between them—like, a huge bucket. They looked over; I pointed a finger and yelled. “I fucking HATE you guys!”

They were nice, since either one could have kicked my ass if he’d wanted to. “We could give you a wing, man,” one said with a shrug. Suddenly, the truck woman was standing next to me, introducing herself as Ms P. She was wearing one of those rocker straw cowboy hats. “Shoulda been here earlier, darlin’; we could’ve set you up with chicken and waffles.” She poked her finger into my chest, up against a big berry-colored stain on my shirt that I hadn’t noticed. “Where you comin’ from like this?”

I told her I was a food writer, an editor at CHOW; that I was in town for Austin Food & Wine. “Wait a minute,” she said, and disappeared back into the Airstream. I noticed the name: Ms P’s Electric Cock. I both kind of wanted to ask, and kind of didn’t.

Ms P returned with a basket of a half-dozen fried chicken wings. “Here, found these. Eat up—best fried chicken in all of Austin.” They were probably supposed to be the fry cook's dinner, but I didn't give a crap.

I sat down at what I deemed a respectful distance from the college guys and became one with those wings, nibbling off every last scrap of breading, flesh, and sinew, until pale bones were all that remained. I brandished a $20 bill at Ms P, but she declined to take it. I thought I’d come back the next day, just to order something and pay for it. I never did.

“I have discovered,” the poet William Carlos Williams once wrote, "that most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them.” Had I, in fact, drunk-devoured the best fried chicken in all of Austin? Just after midnight, with an untold number of drinks in my system and a residue of grease and salt on my hands, craving a hotel pillow under my head, I absolutely thought I did.

Image sources: Top, by permission of Flickr member yausser; middle, Austin Food & Wine / Facebook; bottom, Ms P's Electric Cock / Facebook

To inform your voting in CHOW’s monthlong Best Brewpub in America Bracket, we’re throwing the spotlight on individual matchups.

If anyone should know exactly what makes a brewpub great, it’s the beer aficionados who post reviews on BeerAdvocate. In this fourth and final matchup in week two of our Best Brewpub in America bracket, the face-off pits Eske’s in Taos, New Mexico, against North by Northwest in Austin, Texas. Here’s how the BA reviewers handicap the race.

Like any great brewpub, Eske’s is a refuge—in this case, from the crush of tourists crowding Taos. BA reviewer canucklehead notes that it’s 10 minutes off the tourist track, a “funky place that has a good mellow vibe.” If it’s hot, the shaded courtyard is “the best spot to have a beer and eat in Taos.” Grab a bench at one of the picnic tables, and order the signature Green Chili beer. It’s a “good take on the style,” canucklehead says, “and uses those excellent green chiles from Hatch, New Mexico.” The food, too, has some local twists, though htomsirveaux offers a bit of unsolicited advice about one popular item: sushi. “We are in the middle of New freaking Mexico,” htomsirveaux says. “Who orders sushi here?”

Décor that references the Pacific Northwest may be as exotic in the Texas state capital as sushi in Taos, but that’s just what North by Northwest offers. “Everything is in brick and stone with pictures of black-and-white scenes from Oregon and Washington,” wampahoofus writes, calling it all “quite cozy.” Then again, polishing off a couple of beers from the half down on tap might make pretty much any room feel cozy. BA reviewer dragonWhale, though, found the bartender friendly enough to make the whole experience more or less charming, plus the “little artichoke pizza off the happy hour menu” ended up being pretty good, at a price that was “reasonablish.” Sweet.

Made up your mind? Go vote. Remember: This round ends today, so don't wait to cast your vote! And may the best brewpub win.

Top photograph by Jennifer Yin / SF Beer Week

To inform your voting in CHOW’s monthlong Best Brewpub in America Bracket, we’re throwing the spotlight on individual matchups.

What makes a winning brewpub? Great beer: check. Pubby or otherwise beer geeky vibe: double check. Food that’s something more than a fusion of meat, grease, and carbs to keep you from getting too hammered too fast: triple check. With those criteria in mind, we turned to the user-reviewers of BeerAdvocate to see how they rate the third matchup in this second round of bracket voting: Appalachian Brewing in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, versus Chicago’s Revolution Brewing.

As for Appalachian—one of the largest brewpubs in the nation—it’s like a brewpub megamall: The three floors include a huge downstairs bar area with 17 taps going on one recent afternoon, reports BA reviewer beer2day, including 2 on cask and 5 separate IPAs flowing. Amidst the vastness, the place communicates a sense of history, says GodlessWatermelon, with “much of the furniture and floors / walls / beams … from the early 1900s.” The second-floor Abbey Bar (which is also a live-music venue) is like Belgian world, with over 50 of them available in the bottle and on draft. “It is always nice to get a Saison Dupont and sit outside on the deck in the summer,” says orangesol. And at least some of the food is as big as the brewpub itself. “I had to just about dislocate my jaw taking bites of my ~10 dollar burger,” GodlessWatermelon notes.

Meanwhile, in the city of big shoulders, Revolution Brewing is consistently packed with thirsty Chicagoans. The huge space on Milwaukee Avenue has a “nice contemporary (but not corporate) feel,” observes Coldriver. The beer is of “very high quality,” uwmgdman says, noting that “taps [are] served in appropriate glassware.” The food is the other reason to battle the crowds. “The cheddar ale dip is amazing,” uwmgdman reports. Favorites include polenta fries with smoked tomato aioli and the pork belly and egg sandwich. One strategy for making sure you get a seat: blowing off work to hoist a few. BertSugar offers this advice: “Drinking during the day here usually helps to avoid the large crowds that get in the way.” Duly noted.

Think you got it? Go vote. Remember: This round ends today, so don't wait! And may the raddest brewpub prevail.

Top photograph by Jennifer Yin / SF Beer Week

To inform your voting in CHOW’s monthlong Best Brewpub in America Bracket, we’re throwing the spotlight on individual matchups.

What makes a brewpub great is more than the measure of its beers. It’s also food, vibe, and overall pubbishness. What do the experts—the beer-geek reviewers of BeerAdvocate—have to say about our bracket’s East Coast, North-South stare-down between Cambridge Brewing Co. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Atlanta’s Wrecking Bar Brewpub?

Cambridge Brewing Co. has one major advantage over every other brewpub in America: Kendall Square. Hanging outside on a warm spring day in New England can lift anyone’s spirits. But sip a well-made barley wine as you watch the MIT geniuses and Harvard undergrads navigate the square, and it can make you wish spring would never end. The food’s cool, too, especially, writes BA reviewer kinopio, “since … they were one of the first places around here to focus on local ingredients.” Check out the specials board, where the local fish and cheeses are likely to appear. The beer, too, is the equivalent of just-picked. Fliunders57 says it’s “made almost every day and it's always fresh.”

Meanwhile at Wrecking Bar, in Atlanta’s Little Five Points neighborhood, good beer and interesting food are only two elements in a pub whose main draw might be its massive ambiance. It makes BA reviewer coreyfmcdonald practically catch a whiff of barnyard, noting, “I get the feeling of an upscale rural locals bar (in a good way). Inside, there is lots of exposed stone and brick with lots of faded wood.” Meanwhile, mcrowther finds the restored-mansion surroundings “very cozy”—a nice place to sample the “creative cask beer” typically offered on Fridays, along with the rotating Wrecking Bar go-tos, “all so far … spot-on, style-wise.” Turns out the food is equally spot-on, notes Vierenner, especially the schweinshaxe (roasted ham hock), served with kale and poblano grits.

Ready? Go vote. Remember: This round ends soon, so don't wait. And may the best brewpub prevail!

Photograph by Jennifer Yin / SF Beer Week

To inform your voting in CHOW’s monthlong Best Brewpub in America Bracket, we’re throwing the spotlight on individual matchups.

Our bracket’s West Coast beer-off pits Portland against San Francisco, a city of drizzly perma-rain against a city of drizzly perma-fog. But wait, Portland is Beervana, right? Wouldn’t Cascade Brewing Barrel House have an edge over San Francisco’s ultramellow, Phish- and Grateful Dead–vibed Magnolia Gastropub & Brewery? Probably, except that this is a quest for the best brewpub in America, not just the best beer—criteria also include atmosphere, food, and overall pubbiness.

To assess the merits of each, we turned to the ultimate beer geeks: the drinker-reviewers of BeerAdvocate. First up: Cascade, a place the aggregate of BA reviews rate “world-class.” For its sour beers alone, Cascade lives up to the Beervana hype. “The biggest sour ale variety I know of anywhere in the NW,” says BA reviewer Flightoficarus. “The tap list was ridiculous,” writes dirtylou. “My expectations were very high, and this place somehow obliterated them. Nearly 25 beers on tap, with a heavy focus on barrel aged sours.” There’s also a line of nonsours available “for those not down with tart,” notes Matylight. As for the vibe, Matylight pegs it as “overall a pretty typical Oregon brewery tasting room but really well done.” And the food? Good, not great, writes dirtylou, noting a nice meat, pickle, and cheese plate but merely average sandwiches.

Down in San Francisco, in the neighborhood that gave the world the Summer of Love, BeerAdvocate reviewers love Magnolia enough to rate it overall as “exceptional.” The one-time pharmacy has a look and feel that register as neo-hippie, the kind of funky that comes from minimal rehabbing. “It looks like they bought the place ‘as is’ and just left it as the wonderfully charming time capsule that it is,” writes NeroFiddled. The English-style beers strike the same old-timey note. “I had a couple saisons and cask pale ales,” reports ElectricBoogaloo. The verdict: tasty. “The focus on the English side of beer was a refreshing stop from the hopped-up extreme beer West Coast scene,” ElectricBoogaloo adds, noting that the food was good, but “definitely overpriced for my slim college budget.” That didn’t stop NeroFiddled from busting out an exclamation point. “It's not often that I find a brewpub that can impress me with every beer that I taste, but Magnolia has done it!”

Think you got it? Go vote. Remember: This round ends soon, so don't wait. And may the best brewpub win!

Photograph by Jennifer Yin / SF Beer Week

The fighting in CHOW’s Best Brewpub in America Bracket's first round of 16 contenders was anything but sweet. Now, 8 have emerged to brawl again. Congratulations to the winners, and let the voting for week 2 begin!

The local matchups in the last round produced four new battles spanning broader regions. On the West Coast, it’s Portland’s Cascade Brewing Barrel House facing down San Francisco’s Magnolia Gastropub & Brewery. The Southwest showdown pits Eske’s Brew Pub & Eatery in Taos against North by Northwest in Austin. Up near the mighty Great Lakes, Chicago’s Revolution Brewing is throwing it down with Appalachian Brewing in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. And Atlanta’s Wrecking Bar is locked in an Eastern Seaboard death tussle with Cambridge Brewing on Harvard’s home turf.

The voting for this round closes April 30, and there's no rule against casting a ballot every day of the round. Running tallies appear as percentages on the bracket, so you can see how the voting is going.

Ready? Go vote. And may the best brewpub kill it!

Photograph by Jennifer Yin / SF Beer Week

Women can't seem to go one day without some form of media reminding us of what a drag it is to be saddled with a double-X chromosome. The latest PSA comes from CNN, which yesterday recounted the launch of a new website geared towards women travelers who dread the withering societal judgment they endure while crying alone into their salads.

Called Invite for a Bite, it's the creation of Cressida Howard, a British woman who was inspired to take to the Internet after hearing a radio program about female business travelers who hated eating alone. On the site, which is for women only (otherwise, Howard says, it would be just another dating site), users create free profiles that allow them to post invitations to dine with fellow females anywhere in the world.

Though there are plenty of women who will appreciate the concept of the site and use its services, those quoted in the CNN story shed more light on the real issue looming over Invite for a Bite, which is the question of why women feel so insecure and self-conscious about dining alone. One told CNN of the time she faked a cellphone conversation in a restaurant, only to be busted when the phone rang. "When I walk into a restaurant or bar alone," she said, "I feel others see me as either a woman out to pick up men or a sad, lonely spinster."

This indicates that what female diners really need is a site designed to help them avoid eating in the vicinity of the horribly rude and clearly insane, or better yet the simple wherewithal to tell the busybodies of the world to mind their own damn business. It also illustrates that shopworn double standards don't get left at the coat check: Men, apparently, aren't in need of a site like Invite for a Bite. "My husband happily walks into any place in any city for a drink or some food," said the same woman who got caught fake talking into her cellphone.

Maybe what's saddest about Invite for a Bite is that it reduces the restaurants of the world to your worst high-school cafeteria flashback, where nobody had anything better to do than sit in judgment of who ate where, and with whom.

One woman told CNN that if she doesn't have any colleagues or business partners around, she just doesn't eat, which suggests that solo dining is the least of her problems. And one hospitality company executive recounted the experience of overhearing customers at a neighboring table remark on how sad it was she was eating on her own: "They even went so far as to comment that I was single, because I had no ring on and I was obviously trying to stay in shape by eating a salad so that I could attract a man."

Image source: Flickr member wintersoul1 under Creative Commons

To inform your voting in CHOW’s monthlong Best Brewpub in America Bracket, we’re throwing a daily spotlight on individual matchups.

No, the Grumpy Troll isn’t that mean dude trying to pick you up at the bar: It’s the name of a fantastic brewpub in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, just west of Madison. Don’t miss the award-winning Captain Fred lager, named for Frederick Pabst, who went on to macrobrew fame (or infamy, depending on your point of view). After a couple of those, you shouldn’t drive, but when you sober up (after munching on cheese curds and Grump Chips), make the three-hour drive to Chicago’s Revolution Brewing, located in charming old Logan Square. Revolution has some three dozen beers in its repertoire, including Anti-Hero IPA and the four-hops Iron Fist Pale Ale, which goes down pretty easy with a bowl of bacon fat popcorn.

Up next, an all-Pennsylvania throwdown. They do things bigger in Harrisburg—when it comes to building brewpubs, anyway. Harrisburg’s Appalachian Brewing Co. measures 50,000 square feet. It’s huge enough to bring everyone you know to sip the Trail Blaze Organic Brown Ale, which has its own ingredient-handling system to ensure it can be called “organic.” Thankfully, Appalachian has the room to accommodate it. Travel east to Philadelphia and you can’t miss Nodding Head Brewery. What it lacks in size, it makes up for in reputation—especially for its Ich Bin Ein Berliner Weisse, a low-ABV sour wheat beer.

Since it’s in the Twin Cities, maybe it’s only fitting that Minneapolis Town Hall Brewery was founded by two childhood friends. IPA and Scotch ale are the house specialties, as well as seasonal gems like the tropical fruit–infused Mango Mama. When it’s nice outside, you can chill on the sweet outdoor patio. Meanwhile, about 1,200 miles south on I-35, Austin’s North by Northwest serves an eclectic mix of beers that look to Germany and the Pacific Northwest for inspiration (cases in point: the Pyjingo Pale Ale and Okanagan Black Ale). Keep up your strength with the roasted garlic bulb appetizer and salmon with blue cheese scalloped potatoes. Yee-haw, cowboy.

Think you got it? Go vote. Remember: This round ends today, so don't wait. And may the best brewpubs kick ass!

Top photograph by Jennifer Yin / SF Beer Week

Is Ronald McDonald the new Joe Camel? That's the question posed in an Ad Age story exploring how fast-food mascots have become targets for antiobesity activists. The question of whether Ronald is flogging a product as deadly as tobacco raises questions about the future of fast-food advertising (will it follow tobacco ads into extinction?) and how much credit mascots really deserve for brainwashing little minds and tastewashing little palates. But one question the story doesn't address is why McDonald's chose such a creepy icon to sell hamburgers in the first place, and why the chain has stuck with him for five decades.

Few commercials pack the fantastically freaky punch of that 1960s spot starring Willard Scott as the clown, roller-skating through a park and plying a young boy with free burgers to prove that he is, in fact, Ronald McDonald, and not just some random perv. With his striped pajamas, red face paint, and paper cup strapped to the end of his nose, Ronald looks less like a boy's best friend than a parent's worst nightmare. You half expect the commercial to end in a parked van.

Although Ronald soon lost the paper cup and traded his straw hair for the kind of sculpted bouffant Liberace would have killed for, he's never been able to overcome his greatest handicap: the fact that he's a clown. As Stephen King well knows, there's nothing like penciled-in eyebrows and a demonic grin to inspire visions of grisly death.

McDonald's, of course, doesn't quite see it like that, particularly now that it's using Ronald more to promote literacy and exercise than to sell Happy Meals. And when it comes down to it, most fast-food mascots are creepy. Even those early McDonald's ads can't compare with the surreal specter of Jack, the Jack in the Box spokesthing with a human body, giant ping-pong-ball head, blank eyes, and an eery smile. It's hard to imagine the boardroom conversations that led to Jack's creation, though I wouldn't be surprised if at some point some exec uttered the sentence, "He should look like he's familiar with the taste of human flesh."

While it's hard to fathom why fast-food companies would find allure in the grotesque, you could argue that their products have gotten the mascots they deserve: Who better to push disturbingly unnatural food than a disturbingly unnatural clown? Call it truth in advertising.

Image source: Flickr member clayirving under Creative Commons

To inform your voting in CHOW’s monthlong Best Brewpub in America Bracket, we’re throwing a daily spotlight on individual matchups.

North Carolina’s Asheville Brewing Company has a huge menu of pastas, burgers, salads, and pizza, plus a dine-in movie theater. The brewers have experimented with jalapeño beers, but their signature brew, Shiva, is a citrusy, 6 percent ABV IPA. Down in Georgia, Wrecking Bar Brewpub’s a new spot in Atlanta that brews in the basement of a century-old building and serves a different cask beer each week. The menu includes German schwienshaxe and Southern comfort food like pulled pork sandwiches.

Denver’s Wynkoop Brewing Company is Colorado's oldest brewpub. It serves comfort food such as freshly baked pretzels and Colorado lamb. Its flagship beers are Rail Yard, an amber ale, and the award-winning unfiltered B3K Black Lager. Eske’s Brew Pub & Eatery (the oldest brewpub in New Mexico) serves a signature Taos Green Chili beer and homemade draft root beer. Here, the traditional pub fare often has a Southwestern twist, like vegetarian green chile stew.

Think you got it? Go vote. Remember: This round ends April 23, so don't wait. And may the best brewpub kick ass!

Top photograph by Jennifer Yin / SF Beer Week

To better inform your voting in CHOW’s monthlong Best Brewpub in America Bracket, we’re throwing a daily spotlight on individual matchups.

With MIT and lots of tech and biotech firms, zip code 02139 is one of the nation’s brainiest. Maybe that’s why Cambridge Brewing Co.—located in the hart of Kendall Square—has had a long run, in brewpub years (the place opened in 1989, making it the oldest in Bostonland). It opens onto a pedestrian plaza, with outdoor tables in warm-weather months.

The space feels relatively mod, despite the historic-ness of the brick surroundings. CBC is known for barrel-aged beers, housed in the cellar, and—thanks to a liberal use of beer—the menu turns locally sourced ingredients into comfort-y dishes like beer-braised oxtail poutine.

The South Fork of Long Island isn’t only the place where stressed-out Manhattan residents pay tons of money for the yearly ritual of sitting in traffic on Route 27 to get to the Hamptons for a partial summer share. It’s also where you can get amazing Belgian-type farmhouse ales at the Southampton Publick House. It’s located in a historic tavern, though you probably knew that from that cute extra “k” on the end of “publick.” The must-sip beer is Southampton Double White, a hefty take on witbier, which you can enjoy with classick classic LI grub like crab cakes and chowder.

Ready? Go vote. Remember: You can vote once a day in this first round, ending April 23. So don’t forget to come back often to give your thumbs-up for your favorite spot. May the best brewpub kick ass.

Top photograph by Jennifer Yin / SF Beer Week

The latest in an occasional series by San Francisco pop-up chef and blogger Richie Nakano.

It’s late after a particularly busy pop-up, I’m about three whiskeys past my comfort zone, and I have to start all over again eight hours from now. I switch into auto mode and wash my station down, the still-hot French-top range hissing at me every time I scrub anywhere near it. I just want to wrap it up and go cry in the shower a little, but my cook has been hounding me about an idea for a dish, and now I’ve got no choice but to hear him out. He hands me a piece of paper scrawled with columns and arrows and drawings and ingredients and for fuck’s sake what am I looking at?

All told there are 18 ingredients spanning proteins, dairy, pickles, and a healthy sprinkling of Activa: meat glue. He describes it to me nervously, his words pouring out so quickly that I only catch every third disclaimer about how he’ll need to test it four ways until he nails down the right way to make it. My eyes glaze over a little, and I start with the most glaring question.

“So—18 ingredients?”

“Well, I mean, it’s just a list. I’ll try to simplify, but I was thinking—”

“Eighteen. It’s a lot. We don’t really do dishes like that. And Activa? Really?”

The conversation goes on for another 20 minutes, during which I drink two more whiskeys and a glass of very sugary Riesling. Eventually I’ll ask him to make the dish so we can taste it, but in the days that follow I end up shooting it down completely. He’ll quit, after saying I’m not open to new cooking techniques and that he just wanted to make my food “better.”

And I will realize that—shit—I’ve been here before. Only last time, I was the one who felt betrayed.

GROUP FAIL
It’s three years earlier, and I’m standing in a cluttered pastry station at 3 a.m., locked in a screaming match with the restaurant’s other sous-chef. The low ceiling and fluorescent lighting are only adding to the tension of our menu-writing face-off. He’s doing his job: sticking to the formula, figuring out the best way to highlight new ingredients from the market, etc. But with every retort and rebuttal, my voice gets a little louder, my flailing arms a little more out of control.

Coming off a stunning meal at Aziza, I’ve been obsessed with all things Moroccan. I make the argument that our salsa verde steak garnish is played out, but charmoula: Now that would be some next-level shit. I bark about preserved Meyer lemon purées and ras el hanout, and while we’re on the subject, shouldn’t we really be sous-vide-ing that pork chop?

Sitting down with my chef the next day I expound on the importance of collaboration. I tell him I feel like I’m not being heard, and moreover that I think we’re going to start losing cooks if we don’t allow them to have more input. He nods and listens, then does something I don’t expect: He calls the entire kitchen staff in.

“The lamb sausage: Who has an idea for that set tonight?”

I look around, expecting an outpouring of ideas, polite debate, shared inspiration. I halfway expect this meeting to be the genesis of some Alinea-type collaboration shit. Instead the grill cook says we should sauté the sausage. “I’m pretty overloaded with items right now.”

The sauté cook protests. “I’m already picking up chicken, fish, pasta, and two sides. Speaking of which, I don’t understand why pantry can’t fry their own peppers ...”

The meeting devolves into a bitch session right out of Hell’s Kitchen. Above the arguing I manage to yell: “DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY IDEAS ABOUT NEW SETS FOR THE MENU?!?”

You could have heard crickets chirp. I look at my chef, expecting to see a knowing smirk, but instead he keeps working on the menu. He knew it was going down like this, and he’s moved on.

THE CREATION MYTH
What my chef knew that day is that cooking isn’t about having the brilliant idea. It’s the craft of feeding people. It's about repetition, and the monotony of prep. It's coaxing your ingredients into an expression of care for your guests. And it has almost nothing to do with creating.

I won't completely absorb this lesson, though, till several years later. Eventually, when I leave to become my own boss, I'll still carry the idea of the idyllic, collaborative kitchen where everyone's ideas matter and where everyone gets a say.

Looking back on the weeks and months leading up to the fateful 18-item-dish conversation with my cook, I realize that serious cracks were already starting to show. His prep was painfully slow. He had pathetic shifts operating the fryer that usually ended in me taking over his station. There were mutters about how he felt like he got stuck with the bitch work; that he was above vegetable prep and breading chicken. His feelings of entitlement about being allowed to create something outweighed his urge to learn.

There’s an epidemic in the restaurant industry of young cooks who’ve seen too many reality shows asking chefs for their "signature dish," too many culinary schools that exist to help students define their "cooking style." Before you know it they’re gone, taking the first job that offers an avenue to flaunt the latest recipe in the modernist tool kit. I can only imagine the dishes these "chefs" are dropping on their guests at the country club or hotel bistro.

It's hard not to worry about the future of cooking. The pressure on young guys to be stars is leaving restaurants without cooks to build a team with, and ultimately lowering culinary standards as a whole. But things aren’t all bad.

For every cook trying to learn spherification before they know how to carve a chicken, there's another one putting in long hours picking herbs and sweeping floors. The recent rise in specialized cooks who just want to make the best bread, or jam, or charcuterie could be just the shift that keeps us all from drowning in a sea of mediocrity.

Now when I interview cooks, I don't talk about how great it is to work for me, how collaborative my kitchen is. Instead I offer this: "We feed people here. A lot of people. You into that?"

Also by Richie Nakano: Why Chefs Sell Out

Photographs by Christopher Rochelle / CHOW.com

Veganism seems to be on a few minds this week. The New York Times devoted a big chunk of its Well blog to the topic, pondering the challenges of adopting a vegan diet and asking a group of people who think about food for a living to debate whether veganism is for everyone. Starbucks announced it would stop using mashed-up beetles as food coloring after vegans went DEFCON 1 on the coffee chain. Here at CHOW we launched a Chowhound Vegetarian & Vegan discussion board. And, as ABC News reports, the children's book world got what may be its first title dedicated to encouraging the pre-K set to eschew animal products.

Called Vegan Is Love: Having Heart and Taking Action, it's written by Ruby Roth and explores, according to Amazon, "the many opportunities we have to make ethical decisions: refusing products tested on or made from animals; avoiding sea parks, circuses, animal races, and zoos; choosing to buy organic food; and more." Or, as Roth says in a video on YouTube, "This is a kid's book of simple ideas, but at its core it's really about democracy, supply and demand, and engaging ourselves in the public realm." (Roth's previous book was about factory farming, and is titled That's Why We Don't Eat Animals.)

Roth's vegan book is illustrated with pictures of adorable animals languishing in medical laboratories and zoos, and has drawn criticism. A registered dietitian told TODAY that "children are impressionable, and this is too sensitive of a topic to have a child read [about] ... It could easily scare a young child into eating vegan, and, without proper guidance, that child could become malnourished.” The only thing that seems to freak people out more than the idea of veganism itself is the idea of child vegans, those little soldiers involuntarily conscripted into the ranks of tofu-chewing radicals.

Given how picky most kids already are, and how readily they absorb the messages of soda and junk-food conglomerates, malnourishment isn't a risk exclusive to veganism. And as Kirkus Reviews notes in its mild-mannered assessment of the book, Vegan Is Love's larger point is "that our choices influence the world around us." Again, that seems like a message that could be of use to, well, everyone.

Image source: Amazon.com

Everyone has some foods they just can't stand—broccoli, eggplant, cilantro. (For me, it's shredded coconut and its horrible toenail texture.) But there are two foods that pretty much everybody likes: french fries and bacon.

Author (and former CHOW contributor) Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic backs that up in her upcoming book, Suffering Succotash, due out in July. Lucianovic writes that her discussions with researchers about the foods people can't stand revealed two almost universally loved ones.

"French fries ... are a friend to everyone," she writes. And "even the [picky eaters] who shudder away from all other meat—be it cow, lamb, or chicken—like bacon."

Could she be right? Bacon, of course, is off limits for vegetarians and those whose diets proscribe the eating of pork. But bacon is a well-known "gateway meat" for vegetarians, famously sneaked by "cheating" vegetarians, or the "ba-curious."

On NPR recently, Monell Chemical Senses Center's Johan Lundström theorized that bacon's high level of fat "speaks to our evolutionary quest for calories." Meaning the cavepeople in us just want high-calorie food, and they want it now. So why don't other high-fat, high-calorie foods (foie gras or avocados, say) have the same universal appeal? Maybe it's bacon's smell. Lundström again: "Since 90 percent of what we taste is really odor, bacon's aggressive smell delivers a powerful hit to our sense of how good it will taste."

Does that apply to fries, too? In 2009, English researchers working under the auspices of the Potato Council for National Chip Week analyzed the odor of fries and found that the scent was curiously complex. Like chocolate, the scent of which notoriously contains compounds that smell like sweat and cabbage, the french fry smell is actually a complex combination of scents like butterscotch, onion, cocoa, flowers, cheese, and—the list's head-scratcher—ironing boards.

Then again, perhaps fries are so popular because potatoes are so bland. "Potatoes are calming, soothing," Lucianovic writes, "and ... don't challenge the eater with flavor too large." But if gentle flavor alone determined popularity, wouldn't tofu be more popular than it is?

Image source: Photo of bacon fries by Flickr member aneil4lom under Creative Commons

To better inform your voting in CHOW’s monthlong Best Brewpub in America Bracket, we’re throwing a daily spotlight on individual matchups.

A classy Grateful Dead–inspired gastropub may sound like an oxymoron. But trust us here: Located in the sticky heart of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, Magnolia Gastropub & Brewery proves hippie-haters wrong with incredible beer, food, and décor—they even have real linen hand towels in the bathroom! Inside the cozy space—all antique brass fittings, black and white subway tiles, and warm wood—you can take your pick of a variety of award-winning beers.

Magnolia specializes in low-alcohol, English-style session beers, and there are always a few cask ales available on hand pump. The menu is a little upscale: house-made sausages, oysters, chicken liver mousse. But you can still get a good burger and incredible fish and chips. The staff is nice to kids, and there's often something fun going on, like Strong Beer Month in February, or Thursday fried chicken nights.

But before you make a decision, also consider the esteemed Pizza Port Ocean Beach. Pizza Port is a famous chain of microbreweries based in or near what some would call the best craft beer city in the country (San Diego), and its newest location is the neighborhood hangout. A block from Ocean Beach, it's packed with twentysomethings and families, squeezed onto benches at the communal picnic tables that line the place. The food isn't fancy, but elemental and satisfying: giant slabs of gooey pizza and pitchers of well-made beers that you order at the counter. It's all about IPAs: biting, fragrant, hoppy, and fresh. The atmosphere is a cross between a loud, crazy video arcade and a raucous house party. You'll end up talking to your neighbor and drinking a few more beers than you'd anticipated, and you'll leave wanting to go back immediately.

Ready? Go vote. Remember: You can vote once a day in this first round, ending April 23. So don’t forget to come back often to give your thumbs-up for your favorite spot. And may the best brewpub win!

Top photo by Jennifer Yin / SF Beer Week