Motor City Eating: Parker's Hilltop Brewery/Bigalora

The Village of Clarkston, MI, where beauty is in the eye of the Beer-holder

A quick little weekend jaunt up to the Detroit area found my spouse and in the company of long-time friends. Even as short as this visit really was (not much more than 24 hours), we as a group got to feast quite nicely, not only on home-prepared Indian delights courtesy of our hosts, but also a couple of culinary jaunts on the town to a popular area brewpub as well as Italian eats from a James Beard nominee chef.

South x Southwest (Pt. 2): Creme Clouds and Gringas

A metal die-cut plaque details the family roots of Columbus' Merion Village

As mentioned in my previous post, my coffee at Das KaffeeHaus was meant to put some caffeine into the system to get me fully awake for the day. It also had a secondary purpose of slowing me down so I could digest the rich Beehive Bite sweet treat that I had acquired from My Old World Bakery, an old-school neighborhood shop located in Southwest Columbus. By the time I departed the space, I was ready for some more exploring the city's south and west sides.

South x Southwest (Pt. 1): Bee Hives and Blitzes

The Big Room at local favorite/independent radio station CD102.5 in the
Brewery District, which provided a nice stopover point in my latest crawl

As it turned out, my cinnamon-quest food crawl turned out to be a wonderful experience for me, both in the treats I found and in the places in finding new places to explore. As I figured out shortly afterward, I enjoyed the experience so much that I wanted to repeat the quest to another part of the metro. On this latest journey, south and west were the watchwords, with a general goal of trying out the best that each of my destinations had to offer.

Firkin Awesome for 25 Years: Barley's Brewing Ale House

For both my spouse and I, the venerable Barley's Brewing Company, the oldest brewpub in the Columbus area, acted as a gateway into craft beer.  For me, this brewpub, which opened its doors in October of 1992, was my first real introduction to Columbus-area craft beer, when a growler of their Scottish Ale (an unusual beer in that they take pale malt and actually scorch it in the mash tun before brewing the beer to achieve the caramel notes) went up with us to take to my wife's family for Thanksgiving Day libations.

As for my spouse, her brother, who made the brewpub a regular destination when it opened its doors, introduced her to its craft beer charms. That very same Scottish Ale was also her first Barley's brew back in 1994, followed by a brew she thought she would never enjoy in the future in the Alexander's Russian Imperial Stout (this notion was proven to be quite wrong, as we shall detail later.)

Life on a Cinnamon Whirl (Pt. 2) - When the 'Ssants Come Rolling In

Yes, nice layers of cinnamon lie underneath the icing in these
beauties from Italian Village's popular Fox in the Snow Cafe

My cinnamon/new places in the metro quest mentioned in my last blog-related post brought me to a coffee cafe I hadn't visited since my early days here (Olde Towne East's Upper Cup Cafe), the granddaddy of bakeries in the metro (Resch's), and the only full-service Kosher bakery in the area (Matt's Bakery.)  But I was only halfway done on this day, as my travels took me into the tony community of Bexley and to another city bakery institution whose original location I had never visited prior to this day.