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.

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.

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.

Brasa insinuated it into my life over the course of two days last week.

Lambert family birthday tradition, in case I haven't mentioned it before, involves going out to dinner at the aging individual's choice of locale. Which is fine, unless your birthday happens to fall on Super Bowl Sunday, which is what happened to my brother this year.

I probably whould have had a post up about Panera about three days after I started Forkbastard, but I kept putting it off. Someday, I thought, shit was gonna dry up. And I'd need something I could go to in a pinch to keep the general flow of content on the site.

Well, it's January in Minnesota. The non-stop cavalcade of suck that is Minneapolis winter is in full swing. Nothing but gray skies and limp grocery store produce. Plus being sick for a few days plus a hectic, non-cooking weekend ahead. I'd say shit has officially dried up. So. Panera!

I know "pizza" is more of a category than a specific dish, and encompasses food as disparate as crappy takeout square-cut crackers with grease on them all the way to Chicago stuffed pies, but to me, if there is a pizza ideal, it must live in Naples, because Punch's version that they claim is pure Neapolitan is, to me, what pizza should be.

Sauce Pizza and Wine

I finally ate something at the Shops At West End.

For you non-locals, or even you locals who don't partake of the western border of Minneapolis / eastern border of St. Louis Park, the Shops At West End is a new, huge retail complex installed at 394 and 100, where the Costco and the new, frequently irritating, St. Louis Park Rainbow are.