For a night in Toronto, I really didn’t have much of a clue about where to eat. Finally, a buddy of mine told me to check out the Mill Street Brewery. I am always up for a microbrewery since that seems to be a lost art in LA, so I looked it up. It turned out that the place was actually pretty easy walk from our hotel, so we headed to Mill Street to see what we could find. After a twenty minute walk through a mildly sketchy part of town featuring a homeless pirate watering plants with a two-liter of Canada Dry, we arrived at the Distillery area. This part of town was once some sort of huge brewery, but now had shops, restaurants, bars and people testing Smart Cars and Segway Scooters. Even before we started drinking, our goal was to take a drunken ride on/in one of these (no, we did not achieve our goal).

When we got to the Mill Street Brewery, we found that there was about an hour wait. No worries, we were at a brewery and needed some beer before doing anything else anyway. We sidled up to the bar and started to test out their beers. Before we were even seated, I downed their Helles Bock, Tankhouse Ale and Stock Ale. The Tankhouse was my favorite, although the Helles Bock was also pretty good. They had a good amount of options, including rotating taps, so I could definitely see myself returning and having a whole different experience.

After about an hour, the table was ready and we took our seats. A look at the menu revealed some good microbrewery food. Hoping to have a Grizzly Peak-style experience, I set my sights on their burgers. Of these, the Distillery Burger looked the best to me. It came with Mill Street Coffee Porter BBQ sauce, crispy pancetta, Swiss cheese and crispy onions, which sounded great except for those dastardly onions.

There was also something on the menu that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get in Toronto: poutine. Poutine is definitely more of a French-Canadian specialty, so we weren’t sure if it would be any good, but we ordered it anyway as an appetizer. Mill Street had put a bit of bit of a brewhouse twist on the poutine, called Pulled Short Rib Poutine. It was made with fries, alfredo, Tankhouse Ale braised Angus short ribs, green onions, Ontario cheese curds and gravy, of course. I couldn’t convince my compatriots to get it without the green onions, so when it came I had to dig around with my fork to avoid them.

The poutine here was pretty good, but it wasn’t poutine in its truest form. The cheese curds were fully melted by the time it got to the table and the gravy was thick and had soaked through the fries so much that it was pretty much an amorphous blob of gravy, cheese and potatoes. The ribs seemed kind of out of place, although it tasted just fine.

When the main course came, I was glad to see it had been made without vegetables like I asked. You never really now how an unvegan is going to be received in a foreign country. Sadly, despite being free of vegetables, this burger could have used a bit of work. It was a bit overcooked and quite dry. This could have been somewhat compensated for if there had been a lot of BBQ sauce in between those buns, but there just wasn’t enough of that sauce on it. This was too bad, because if it weren’t for this patty, it could’ve been a damn good burger.

Mill Street Brewery was a cool place in a cool part of town, but go for the beer, not for the burgers.

Everyone in LA seems to know that the place has no good beer culture, yet no one has really done anything to fix that. Sure, there’s BJ’s (no good) and a couple other microbreweries that are difficult to get to, but come on, LA is a huge city that deserves more. So when I left LA for Ann Arbor for a bit of a bachelor party, we headed to the Grizzly Peak Brewing Company. I’ve loved the Grizzly Peak for a long time, even dating back to before I could drink their beer and drank their micro-brewed root beer. I have a lot of great memories of the place and hoped that my most recent visit wouldn’t be a disappointment.

While their menu switches things up every once in a while (ooh Bison Sloppy Joes?!), their burger has been a constant source of satisfaction for me. Not wanting to be risky, I stuck with The Grizz Burger, which starts out with lettuce and tomato for $8.50 and goes up about 35 cents per topping. I ordered without the wasteful lettuce and tomato, then topped it with bacon and smoked gouda. I had it cooked medium and then got some fries for an extra buck fifty. As for the beer, they have some great staples and some seasonals to go with them. I stuck with one of their staples, a golden ale. It was 4 bucks for a pint or 4.95 for a 22-ouncer, so I opted for the 22.

The beer came first and was just like I remember it”¦smooth, crisp and tad bitter; the kind of beer you could bring home to mother. Then came the burger. I’m pretty sure Grizzly Peak either changed how they serve cheese or I’ve never ordered it with gouda before, because I was surprised to find the cheese was shredded. I’m typically threatened by change, but I actually kind of liked the idea of this shredded cheese. It fit perfectly on the burger and didn’t cause any cheese to leak over the side. I also noticed that there was no bacon, so I immediately told my server who immediately grabbed some for me. Now I was ready to eat.

Just like I remembered, the Grizz Burger was the perfect microbrewery burger. The meat was cooked just perfectly and was slightly juicy. The smoked gouda and bacon added nice flavoring and the bun was just the right size. It is the pub burger by which all other pub burgers are judged. I say pub burger because I kind of feel like pub burgers fit into their own class. They don’t do anything crazy like load up with chili or extra patties. They aren’t huge, but they are definitely bigger than fast food. Essentially, they are made for good beer and good company, and by these standards, the Grizz Burger is just awesome.

I was especially excited when a BJ’s Brewhouse opened in Culver City. Los Angeles is known as a city short on craft and microbrews, and although BJ’s is a big chain, I hoped it would fill a much-neglected gap in beer and microbrewery food.

To start out the meal I ordered their Harvest Hefeweizen. Hef has never let me down in the past, so I expected it wouldn’t again. I was wrong. This was the sweetest beer that has ever tried to pass for a real beer. Don’t get me wrong, I think a Strongbow Cider or a Leinenkugel’s Berryweiss can be very refreshing on a hot summer day, but those beers are composed of fruit and you know what you’re getting when you order them. Sure, hefeweizen isn’t the most bitter beer, but BJ’s attempt at it tasted like they accidentally spilled a carton of sugar into my beer.

Next came our appetizer. We didn’t go the conventional route with the appetizer and instead ordered a mini deep-dish pepperoni pizza. The waitress was gracious enough to ask us if we wanted tomatoes on the pizza, since they came on it despite the menu not saying so. We said no, of course, then waited for the pizza. I had read on the menu that BJ’s was originally founded as a Chicago-style deep dish pizzeria, so I was pretty excited at the prospect of getting that delicious pizza in LA. Once again, I was greeted with disappointment. The pizza seemed sloppily tossed together (which in and of itself I don’t have a problem with), but the only thing that made it deep dish was the fact that it had a lot of dough. That is no way to make a true deep dish pizza. It tasted fine enough, but I expected more.

Finally, for my main course, I ordered the BJ’s Burger. I have always expected microbreweries to have good burgers and I expected nothing less of BJ’s. The BJ’s Burger was on the menu under the heading, “Awesome Burgers,” so that was a good start. According to the menu, it was an Angus burger on a toasted garlic cheese French roll with pickles, tomatoes and lettuce. Of course, I ordered mine without those last three items and also got some bacon, cheddar and BBQ sauce. I was especially intrigued by their garlic cheese roll.

When my burger came, I found that my disappointment for the evening wasn’t quite over. The burger was overcooked and dry. And I couldn’t even rely on a good beer to wet my mouth after each bite, for fear of over-sweetening my palette.

The burger was really a microcosm of my overall experience with BJ’s. A great concept, but poorly executed. Had this been the first night, I wouldn’t have minded, but a few weeks into operations, they should have already figured out how to make some good beer and food.