Hey, I've got an idea! Let's see if we can get Brasa to have sex with a taqueria, and then they can have a counter-service baby that can live in the Midtown Global Market, where it can compete for my infrequently-visited love with Manny's Tortas tortas, Los Ocampos huarachazos al pastor, and the fries from Andy's Garage.

Oh wait, fuck, someone beat me to it.

Burgers! Ain't nothin' wrong with that.

I do love burgers. And the burger has gotten a lot of culinary attention over the past few years. Locally, we got Burger Jones, we got our first few Five Guys, we got some Smashburgers... even the fast food places are pretending to step up and offer better burgers.

And now we have MyBurger, down near the Whole Foods just west of Lake Calhoun, on Excelsior Boulevard. And if you've been anxiously awaiting a sort of middle ground between Five Guys and Smashburger, you are fucking well set.

Goddamn, I'm behind on this stuff.

OK. Set the stage. Two Thursdays ago. Cathy's birthday. We really want to hit up Victory 44 for dinner, but there's a problem, because Thursday is CSA pickup day between 5:30 and 7:30. CSA pickup is in Linden Hills, V44 is in Robbinsdale. If we get the vegetables first, we'll hit Victory at sometime like 6 or 6:30, which means not getting out of there until 8 at the earliest. Impractical.

So, I finally went to the Smack Shack.

Smack Shack is, of course, the progenitor of the Twin Cities food truck scene, famed for it's lobster roll, known for its appearances on several deep-cut Food Network / Cooking Channel shows, and because I forgot to bring my lunch to work one day this week, I went there.

I did not get the lobster roll.

At the end of the day, there are only three heat levels for food: Not Enough, Enough, and Too Much.

Since biology granted us all with different numbers of taste buds, different pain tolerances, and different reactions to capseicin, that means that choosing a spice level at a restaurant that offers it, usually an Asian restaurant, is a guessing game.

I spent Saturday going out to eat. Now, I freely admit this may have been less than wise given the amount of farm produce in my fridge that needs cooking, but lunch was deliberate and planned, and dinner was the result of laziness and cravings, so that makes it OK.

Lunch found us at "India Garden", which is both old and new. New in name, but old in that the same building has been offering roughly the same southern Indian vegetarian/mostly vegetarian menu for years. You last knew it here under the name Nala Pak, it's changed twice since then and is now Inda Garden.

The main reason I put up with all the bullshit from the Huffington Post's RSS feed is that they occasionally aggregate a little gem I never would have seen otherwise. For example.

Some financial website performed some financial analysis on a bunch of restaurant chains, and made a list of the 14 chains most likely to go bankrupt in the next two years. I'm not going to discuss all 14, but I would like to explore the possibilities of a world without the top five chains on the list.

#1: Denny's

Wow, Subway! What an amazing, innovative idea you've had! This is the most original concept you've come up with since toasting your sandwiches:

"Subway is eve loping a more upscale concept that would function as a cross between a sandwich shop and a coffee bar... Subway Cafe offers baked goods and a range of coffee products."

Also shown in pictures - earth tones, rugs, and comfortable, coffee-house style seating.

While I'm here, a couple of quick updates to a couple of local restaurants I've already talked about, plus one I haven't.

Thanh Do recently added steamed-bun, braised-meat sliders to its menu - oxtail, chicken, and... some third kind I can't remember and isn't on their online menu. The oxtail ones were really good. I'd seen these on various street-food type TV shows, and I'm sure other places in town sell them, but I hadn't run across them before now.

True story.

We walk into Crossroads Deli, and we are, in a half-to-two-thirds-full restaurant, I shit you not, the youngest single table in the whole place, bar one. It is a vast expanse of gray and silver, with more hip replacements than hipsters. There is one table near ours with a young lady sitting alone at it.

Fifteen minutes after we sit down, she's joined by her parents.