Well, it wouldn’t be a Saturday without checking out some serious shit in Buffalo.
Saturday was a serious day of activities that left me exhausted, but let’s get through it. First on deck, around lunchtime, was soup fest:
My wife and I have been going to Soupfest every year for the past 4 (5?) years. We love soup, and we love that there’s an event that is completely dedicated to it. One thing you need to know about soup is that when your stomach gets full of soup, when you hit the soup wall… that is a very adhesive wall, you do not come down off that wall for a while. When you eat normal food, sandwiches – vegetables and stuff, it starts breaking down when it gets into your stomach. Soup? It’s already broken down for the most part – you fill your stomach with soup – it’s staying full… it’s awful, so always be careful when you Fest on Soup.
Let’s see the options:
Soup Fest is similar to Taste of Buffalo in that you gain entry, then purchase tickets to then purchase food. They do that to avoid people having to make change for money, so transactions move faster, lines move faster. Then they weigh the tickets at the end like when you go to Dave & Buster’s and I’m assuming the restaurants get paid.. Who knows.
Pretty good turnout – more space in the convention center than last year, which allowed for less bumping into people with your mini-bowls of soup and spilling. Look at those bowls. They’re designed to spill if you move to fast or bump into someone:
I wish they would sell little cardboard trays with little holes cut out so the bowls could sink into them, then easily be carried around. Whoa-wait! here we are!
Say hi to us if you see us at a Buffalo event, we like strangers.
That’s probably a 3rd of the cups that I actually decimated. I tried a lot of soup, don’t ask me to tell you which one I liked the best. I CAN tell you there was a beer cheese soup that I tried that was horrible. I’m not telling you who made it though.. not fair.
Well, it was time to leave, but obviously the day wasn’t over. What was next on the list? Well, you’d be surprised, but it didn’t have to do with food or booze – it had to do with: GUNS!
That’s right, my friend and I have been getting into the idea of owning handguns. Not for carrying or killing people, but to be able to go to a shooting range and blow off a couple rounds into some targets, and take on another hobby. I’m not looking to go wild with this and purchase gun magazines and just oil guns all day, I just want to get into that range and enjoy my 2nd amendment. So we signed up for our Pistol Permit Classes!
Then we looked at some pretty awesome pistols.
That was that – super easy, simple to sign up, we’ll be going to that class this upcoming Wednesday.
Well, after that, we needed to chill, so we went back to Chris’s place to listen to some oldschool records he got from a guy he worked with, and drank some coffee. It was Chris’s birthday weekend, so despite the shabby weather, we were trying to assemble some crew for a good time. We started things off at Community Beer Works – They had a live jazz band that was playing some good shit. Palm tree is kind of in the way:
But yeah, they had some kind of Christmas in January, Hawaiian Shirt party going on. It was pretty low key, but pretty cool.
That ‘2017 the Snow’ imperial stout was something special. Super tasty. I need to get in the habit of having a growler with a splash of sanitizing solution in it so I can take advantage of the occasional growler fill at some of these locations.
Community Beer Works has begun this ‘Embeer it Forward’ board – where you can buy beer for an individual. I’ve seen this before out of town, it’s a pretty cool idea. You can also just buy a beer for some random people if you want. Also, you should read the board when you go in, so you can see if anyone has pre-bought a beer for a ‘random person’. You could technically capitalize on that. For example, if you look at the picture below, about half way down on the left column, written in yellow it says “2 nice folks”. That could have been me and my wife, but we were getting ready to leave and head to ThinMan next.
Our next stop being ThinMan, you know what I’m already going to say- I’m getting that French Onion Soup. That stuff is so good.
But first, let me pick a beer:
There was another page to this, and on it was a beer called “Idaho” by ThinMan, and that was going to be the one I was going for, until I heard they had their flagship ‘Bliss’ Imperial IPA on cask. Cask beer is a naturally carbonated in a keg (cask) which is usually set up on or by the bar, not refrigerated on its side. The cask pours beer via gravity (And a little air pressure from the carbonation). There is a little plug in the top, so as they allow beer to come out of the cask, they need to occasionally let air in. So as time goes on, and this is why everyone has a boner for Cask beer – the beer warms up, and due to letting air in to let beer out, it changes in character. The goal to anyone opening a cask would be to kick the cask before the day was over, so usually cask beer is on special to move it quickly – I was lured into this cask beer with the $5 pricetag.
Ok, so what was I going to EAT!
I have yet to get anything here that I haven’t enjoyed. I think I have said that in a previous post, but it still remains true. This place is great – it has become a hot spot, and the fact that I got parking right in front of the door – primetime on a Saturday night? The stars were aligned.
Whoa! check it out, I got a picture of the cask! That dude with the popped(?) collar, directly to the right of his collar if you look down the bar – there it is! Yummy!
As always, when Chris and I come here, Chris lets his buddy know he’s here, and we catch a visit from one of the guys who’s making all the delicious food back there. Dustin!
We grill him about what’s good, and how shit’s going, and you’ll never meet a nicer guy, who definitely has a passion for what he does. He sent out a plate of some scratch charcuterie items that he’s been working on; and of course, I got some onion soup.
That onion soup wasn’t as good as I remember, it could have something to do with the fact that it was one of the last 2 in the house, and they may have had to stretch some ingredients, but It would still have kicked the dick off of anything else happening in this town that I’ve had in the past.
Well, we were all getting exhausted at this point, but weren’t quite ready to roll home yet – it was still early. 10 maybe?
to Essex it was – !
we decided to sit in the back and chill out. there were some random bags on the ledge, and we were like “the fuck’s in those bags?!” So Chris said ‘I dunno’ and grabbed one to look inside. These women started FREAKING out that were on the other side of the bar – ‘They’re stealing our food!!! they’re stealing it!!! ahhhhhhahahahah! ” — I remember my first beer. lol
Essex was low key too, had a pickle back, had a rolling rock (yeah, I can drink macro brews, I ain’t scared) Then just kind of chilled. Gotta respect a place that has a traditional metal tip dartboard setup with an interesting score keeper.
Also like the brick in the men’s bathroom:
Well, exhaustion was setting in, and we had a long day of excitement.
Buffalo is fun y’all. plenty to do around here.
Come visit!