‘Bars’
Remember when Hooters was as exciting as restaurants got? Not food-wise, of course, but ummm boob-wise. Well, those days are as dead as the Cold War. Last year I learned this firsthand at the Tilted Kilt and on my recent visit to Las Vegas the point was driven home, hard, at Twin Peaks. It was at Twin Peaks that we basically established our base camp for our time in Las Vegas. The only trouble was it was hard to concentrate on the basketball games with so much else to look at.
Airport food is typically pretty terrible. There is a distinct lack of creativity and the prices are often ridiculous. So it was with a great sadness that we realized we would be stuck in Johannesburg’s O.R. Tambo airport over dinner. But the airport gods were looking favorably upon us on this day, as they guided us to KEG & Aviator. KEG is a pub chain in South Africa and each one has a cutesy name reminiscent of its location, hence the aviator thing.
Deep in the recesses of my To-Do Lists, I maintain a list of places I want to eat if I find myself in a particular city. Of course, the list doesn’t get much play, but when I found myself in Atlanta for the Final Four, I whipped out the list and found some delights I had only dreamed of. The first place I went to was the Edgewood Corner Tavern. I didn’t go because of some suggestion that they might have good food, I was there for one thing only.
There is a certain awesome feeling that comes with flying thousands of miles and arriving in a place with the food comforts of home. Such is The Waterfront of Cape Town. The place has just about every type of food imaginable, and on our first day we made our way to Ferrymans for a drink and a bite.
Hot’s Kitchen in Hermosa Beach recently made the news for finding a loophole in the California’s foie gras ban. And while this reminded me of the place, it had originally made the news to me a year or so ago when my buddy told me they had an awesome selection of burgers and wings. Not knowing totally what to expect of the place, I set out with the wife on an adventure and found the city of Hermosa Beach as dead as the zombie apocalypse.
While mzungus (foreigners) in Arusha can usually be found in or around their hotels, a walk across the city revealed to me where they also tend to hang out: the strip mall. Of course, Arusha’s strip mall is quite different from what I’m used to, there is no doubt that finding a place to eat there was a lot easier for us mzungus. I opted for a place called Empire Sports Bar which is a great place to watch sports while betting on sites like rolet online.
There are few things in this world that go better together than football and wings. So when I was taken to Zipps Sports Grill in Scottsdale to watch Michigan play some football, I decided that wings were the only things fit to go in my mouth. Well, wings and fries. Zipps offered a few different wing flavors, and I ended up going with one that looked pretty interesting – Golden Spicy.
Over the weekend, I was invited to the St. Felix in Hollywood for a free Bloody Mary brunch. Ordinarily, I would have dismissed such a notion. After all, Bloody Marys consist of many of the things I hate most in the world in drink form. But something caught my eye and pulled me in: Bacon Vodka. I figured if anything was going to get me to try a veggie-based drink, bacon would be it. Some say it makes everything better, and this would be quite the test.
After my team posted a huge victory in our rec basketball league, we decided to grab some burgers to celebrate. This led me to San Francisco Saloon, which is not located in San Francisco at all, but rather in West LA and has been serving LA since 1934. The place is more sport bar than saloon and actually has a good sports bar vibe. The burgers are named for LA and San Francisco sports teams like the Giants and the Trojan, with a few non-sports names like Hickory to join them.
There’s something about a gimmick that alienates people. You go to Hooters and while they have good wings, a small part of you feels dirty because it was a gimmick that brought you in in the first place. Many times I drove by Tinhorn Flats in Burbank and wrote it off because it looked like an Old Western saloon, which to me screams out gimmick. Little did I know that Tinhorn had been around since 1939, which makes it one of the oldest things in LA. If it was simply a gimmick, it never would have lasted these 70+ years. So when my coworker encouraged me to check it out, I roped in the troops at work to head east on Magnolia – straight for the Old West.