Save for the occasional bag of peanut M&Ms, I avoid eating at airports and on airplanes. And it’s not only because the food generally makes me feel like the before picture in an ad for heartburn and the price gouging is as absurd as the size of a large popcorn and Coke at the cinema. No. I avoid eating in transit mainly because I prefer to arrive in a new city with an appetite. Isn’t eating local — and no, I’m not on a farm-to-table motif here — the best part of exploring a new locale?

Jeremy Hebert is a Vermonter through and through — born in Burlington, raised in Berlin, schooled at the University of Vermont (UVM) where he took a few political science classes with Vermont legend Mike Gordon of the Northeasterner’s birthright band Phish. After graduating from UVM in 1988, Hebert started home brewing. “The first beer I brewed was an English Northern Brown Ale,” Hebert said. “It was over carbonated, but once the fizz settled bit, it was pretty decent.” In 1996 he landed a job at the now-defunct Golden Dome Brewing Company in Montpelier. These days you can find Hebert in the brew house at The Norwich Innbrewing ales and lagers, jamming on Phish, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and Johnny Cash. “I consider music my assistant brewer, so it is always playing in the brew house.”

Stepping into Unity Vibration’s tasting room is a trip—a George Clinton P-Funk Mothership kind of trip. The room, chrome-walled and colorful, could pass for the cockpit of a UFO, and what owners Tarek and Rachel Kanaan are creating in their funked-out, Ypsilanti UFO looks like the future. 

At 11:45 am, one month after ricewood’s opening day, a line of people, fifteen deep, queued up for an American experience: cheap cuts of meat and wood combined into a moist, rich meal more delicious than anything that lands on white table linens. BBQ. The red and white gingham basket liner, the smokiness, the black crust, the translucent fat—what Chef Frank Fejeran, formerly of The Ravens Club, Tribute, and Alinea, is creating at the front of that line makes waiting worth your time. 

We sit at one of seven diner-style booths and the waitress promptly brings the menu and tea. Across town, main street diners circle the block for parking while others huddle in cold entryways before sitting down to spoon pureed root-vegetable soup and fork cheap meats from a menu designed to meet a 30 percent food cost for a $25 meal—that’s $8.75 per meal—while the waitstaff races around for less pay. It’s January. It’s restaurant week in Ann Arbor. It’s time to venture out. 

After living in Ann Arbor for three years, setting a course for downtown—at least knowing the difference between Washington and Liberty—should be a cinch. Yet somehow I still manage to get it wrong on most occasions. Walking a few extra blocks through freezing temperatures, my date and I lamenting not looking up the address for Mezzevino, I was hopeful that the new restaurant on the block would navigate the cuisines that call the wide-reaching Mediterranean region home better than I navigate Ann Arbor’s small downtown on a Thursday night. 

Knight’s is currently tied with Grange in the ongoing “what’s my favorite bar in town?” debate. The Maize and Blue martini paired with their All-American burger—you need to eat something substantial if you’re drinking Maize and Blues—is one of the simplest, yet best, eat-and-drink options anywhere. But a quality restaurant without quality service is like a lotto ticket that missed by one number—a small payout considering what could have been. Knight’s, however, is the full ticket.  

Rushing into a restaurant during the first few weeks of its run usually results in long waits, unstudied service, and food still far from hitting its stride. But if you had gone to Taste Kitchen, A2’s latest top-shelf culinary venture, on the same rainy Monday night in mid-October as I did, you would have experienced, for the most part, the opposite. And I would have seen you there. My date and I sat in the 30-seat room—colored with grays and browns and maroons, decorated with a few bright mosaics hanging on the walls, some delicate orange lanterns above the bar, and a number of switched-off televisions, all amounting to the feel of a fancy hotel bar—my date and I sat in that 30-seat room alone. 

Few things stave off the cold like a hot toddy or a glass of warm mulled wine. For the scarf-wrapped public, area bars have modern takes on classic winter cocktails. Sample these three warming libations to stay toasty. 

At the state-run SoDo liquor store on 4th Avenue South, long a bottle-buying destination for bars and restaurants around the city, the shelves have gotten barer by the day—the selection now picked over so that only dusty bottles of 99 Bananas and DeKuyper Pucker Peach Schnapps remain. On Friday, the date Washington officially hands over the business of liquor sales to actual businesses, stores like these will be a thing of the past.

Ever wonder what your server eats for dinner? Surely they can't stay at the top of their game surviving on housemade bread alone.

Family meal, also know as staff meal, is a time for servers, chefs, line cooks, bussers, dishwashers, and hosts to eat and plan before opening for business. From inspired uses of surplus ingredients to entirely off-menu dishes like tacos or hot dogs, the idea is basic: A well-fed and organized staff is an effective one. This is the first of Nosh Pit’s occasional looks inside restaurant family meals around the city.

As busy servers wrapped silverware and polished glasses, preservice at the Brave Horse Tavern, Kayle Thompson pulled a single can of beer from her purse and handed it to the barman to keep so general manager Scott Whited can sample it. “Don’t drink it,” she instructs the middleman.

The beer, a Caldera IPA, is one that Thompson picked up from the little beer store by her house in Fremont. Thompson, ever the sampler, doesn’t usually buy beer more than once, but she’s taken a shine to the IPA from Ashland, Oregon, buying two six-packs. Beer enthusiasts take a tip; this woman is new to the game, but she knows her stuff.

I met Matt Cannelora three years ago in the party loft above Grim’s (which at the time was Grey Gallery and Lounge) and The Crypt. He’d just gotten back from Quinn’s with a second, third, and fourth bottle of tequila as requested by the half-naked pilates women party hosts.

He’s just the type of person you want to drink with, which, in my book, is exactly the type of person you want as your bartender.

It was 20-something years ago at a Ritz Carlton when Lark chef and owner John Sundstrom, then fresh out of culinary school, had his first-ever taste of foie gras, that mouthwateringly fatty goose/duck liver delight hated by animal rights activists, hailed by gastrophiles and chefs, and banned in California as of July 1.

Seattle native chef David Hatfield recently returned to his home state to head up the kitchen at Library Bistro and Bookstore Bar. At his previous digs, Cafe 3456 in Bend, the chef followed a locavore, minimum-waste imperative. Now Hatfield is busy establishing those same practices in his new environs, including making breakfast granola using spent beer grain from nearby Pike Brewing Company.

Back when Ian Cargill was punching the clock as a line cook and server at Lola, one of the bartenders asked him why he didn’t try his hand at bartending. “Err, I don’t know anything about drinks,” says Cargill. “It’s not about the drinks,” responded said bartender, “it’s about personality, presence.”

When you belly up to Cargill’s bar you get the feeling anything can happen. He’ll tell a joke or an anecdote about making new friends from randoms at Zig Zag. The guy next to you will fall into the conversation; and before you know it, the three of you are drinking gin and playing roulette at the Muckleshoot Casino after hours. Cargill is a charmer, and it’s no surprise he’s made a name for himself.

The Central District’s newest resident, The Neighbor Lady is slated to officially move in (well, open) on April 13. Twilight Exit owner Stephan Mollmann has partnered up with Twilight bartender Shira Bray to bring to the block an Amsterdam-inspired, bordelloesque lounge serving up housemade vegetarian dishes and stiff drinks.