A New Contender

I apologize for the lack of posts lately. I've been sick. BUT I'm back with good news. I have found a great new patio. Actually, I need to credit Jocelyn with this discovery. She lives right down the road and had already told me it was her new favorite bar. We went there for her birthday last week. I would hate to take all the credit, especially from a recent birthday girl.

Side note: I could have discovered Maui's. A few months ago, Sam and I went on an ill-fated adventure that took us past Maui's newly opened doors, but we decided to avoid the tiki theme and went straight to little Ethiopia. That turned out to be a wonderful but also unfortunate choice.

Maui's on Williams (otherwise known as Maui's)

Drinks: Cheap! Great deals! Happy hour provides you with $2 pints of microbrews.

Food: Not bad. Jocelyn hadn't eaten there yet, because she didn't want to spoil the illusion that this was her favorite new bar. Fortunately for her, the mac n' cheese was actually really tasty and it had bacon. Kyle ordered a corn dog and the mac n' cheese and I sampled both. I would eat there again.

Service: Pretty good. The bartender remembered what I had ordered when I went back for the second round. It's a small detail but aren't small details what separate the horrible bartender from the good?  

Patrons: Melting pot. For once, you can hang out and pretend you don't live in the whitest city ever.

Patio: 10 points for safety: patio was covered in a thick layer of bark chips,  10 points for ample picnic table distribution, 10 points for ping pong table.

Random points for sparkle wire. We were sitting at a picnic table talking about how much we liked the patio, and then noticed that the barbed wire-topped fence had white christmas lights wrapped around it. Festive. After making various jokes and comments about this, christening it "Sparkle Wire" and basically running the conversation into the ground, Kyle Carnes piped up with, "They should put christmas lights on the barbed wire." He was sitting right next to it. He had been there for the entire conversation. "Kyle," I said, "They have." (Despite abject listening skills, Kyle is a talented photographer and has a really great blog).

Also, random points for extremely spirited game watching. There was yelling and screaming and arm waving going on when I got there. It's always nice to find a new place to watch a sports game. Because, you know, I do that all the time.