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Good beer and great food go hand in hand at Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant
By Dan O'Heron 07/27/2006
As I sat on Gordon Biersch’s front porch the other evening, slack-limbed, my second glass of Blonde Bock hit bottom. But I was feeling fine.
How much easier it is to get a sense of well-being from a beer containing 7 percent alcohol than it is from jogging three miles for an endorphin rush — and healthier in the long run. Hard jogs are steppingstones to arthritic knees, I prefer to think.
A strong beer like this can save you a trip to the streets and the price of a dinner. Medium-hoppy, but rich and malty, Blonde Bock hits deep in aftertaste and confirms what the menu says about how ancient monks brewed bock to “minimize hunger pains during fasting.”
Still, I thought about food. It should come as no surprise that some people come here just to eat. I toyed with the idea of ordering the same dishes I had enjoyed at dinner a day or so before: chicken wings and ahi tuna salad. Remembering I still had some of the generous portions left over in the fridge at home, I let it pass.
Now sipping a dry Marzen (5.7 percent alcohol), I pictured the dishes instead. Each wing (a dozen for $8.95) was overly plump, like an airbus of the chicken fleet, and chestnut-browned with a sweet and sticky ginger-and-chili glaze.
The mountainous green salad was accompanied by several big slices of sashimi-grade ahi tuna — blackened and seared rare — and peaked with tortilla chips. Underneath: carrot and sprout slivers. Soaking it all was a Marzen beer vinaigrette and chilled Cajun rémoulade ($13.95).
I was getting a little fuzzy about well-being when a familiar face approached from the One Colorado Courtyard. Not a beer drinker, Morgan said he liked to come here for Mai Tais and Bloody Marys. When he said that he loves the bar’s freshly squeezed orange juice, tomato juice and milk with Scotch, I remarked that he seemed to require the reassuring tastes of infancy. He left before I had a chance to say how proud his mother would be if she knew what he was drinking.
Adjourning to the bar to quaff a sparkling crisp Hefeweizen (5.23 percent alcohol), I thanked heaven for a place where serious drinkers can forget about schmaltzy, fruited beers — raspberry, mango or passion fig — the kind of beer you never see anyone ordering two of, unless they are ordering for someone else. (GB follows the rigid German Purity Law that restricts the raw materials used for brewing to malted barley, yeast, hops and water.)
Later, with a dry Golden Export in hand (5 percent alcohol), an immodest proposal came to mind, but the room was too busy to put it to my charming waitress, Jill, or the barkeep.
Then came what Biersch co-founder Dan Gordon calls the “Seven Minute Pour.” In this, a beer is poured with a firm head that rises up and over the rim of a tall glass without dripping. It is a head that never dies. When the glass is drained, puffed foam remains intact at the bottom or bubbles along the sides.
Over the course of a few more beers, I met some interesting people. Unlike some bars, where the person next to you is apt to have a personality that encourages birth control, all the company here was welcome and the conversations meaningful, as I remember. And we discussed all things from cabbages to kings.
A companion raved about dinner, saying that many of Chef Villanueva’s meals belong on white tablecloths. From the menu, he selected an 18-ounce, bone-in, grilled rib-eye steak, and said he loved its Gorgonzola butter gravy ($24.95). He got me interested in a $14.95 pecan-crusted chicken, but not before I ordered a dark, smooth Dunkel (DOON-kel) beer (5 percent alcohol).
Another conversation on the history of beer started with how drinking 4,000 years ago in Egypt interfered with pyramid production. On the subject of baseball trades, we had the Dodgers swapping Odalis Perez for Mariano Rivera. That’s the great thing about bar talk: For a time, what people want to happen does happen, just because they say it.
Owning up to what I do for a living, I started rambling on about some trade secrets that Michael Key, GB brewmaster, once revealed to me, like, “from grain to glass, cleanliness is the key to great taste.”
Then I yapped on about matching food and beer: How high-alcohol beers and the bitterness of hops cut through the fattiness of roast duck. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
My good buddy should have been bored, but he seemed to hang on to every word. He was nonjudgmental. It was like sitting next to my dog.
With that thought, I figured it was time to go.
“Taxi!”
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