Bar Food
As long as there have been bars, there has been bar food, in the form of snacks given away for free or entire meals that can be eaten while quaffing your favorite libation. (It’s said that the concept of tapas began when bartenders would cover a drink with a plate to keep bugs out, and then they began putting food on said plate.) Today, many five-star restaurants allow you to dine on their complete menu while sitting at the bar, stretching the definition of what “bar food” really is. At Drinkhacker, bar food means any number of things, including sweet or salty snacks that pair well with drink, food designed by chefs to pair with certain beverages, and (especially, since these are the most reviewable), foodstuffs that are made with alcohol as part of the recipe. A sampling of all of the above can be found below.
Top Bar Food Posts:
Bokksu Japanese Snack Box Subscription
MarieBelle x Reserva de la Familia Chocolate Box Set
Homemade Beer Cheese
Cheese and wine (and beer) go hand in hand (in hand), so putting these together on a balmy March evening in Petaluma, California, made perfect sense to me. Recently I attended the California Artisan Cheese Festival’s “Chef vs. Chef – The Best Bite” competition, where about 20 restaurants vied to woo the public each offering…
Bitter. Salty. Sour. Sweet. More recently, umami. The tastes science has blessed. This week researchers branched out, publishing findings in Flavour: Fat is the sixth taste. (Not to be confused with the Sixth Sense, which flattens substantially once the surprise is over.) Chefs and bartenders beat science to the bench — we’ve seen a resurgence…
More and more consumer products are using beer and spirits in their creation, including these two artisan offerings, both of which rely on Victory Brewing’s Storm King Imperial Stout in their ingredient list. Some thoughts on eating your beer instead of simply drinking it follow. Victorious B.I.G. Beef Jerky is an artisanal, all natural jerky…
Chocolate and wine are a classic match — but which chocolate, and which wine? Chocolatier Lindt and California winemaker J. Lohr have been working on figuring that out, and they think they have it down, now. Among the half-dozen pairings they have devised, the duo sent this one for me to try out for myself: 2013…
Sake is traditionally thought of as a pairing for Japanese cuisine… but how about cheese? SakeOne put together a little sampler in conjunction with the Marin French Cheese Company (plus friends) — an amazing producer that’s all of 8 miles from my house here in Northern California. We’ve reviewed most of these sakes before, so today…
Autumn wasn’t technically with us in late August, but that didn’t stop the folks at Northstar Resort in Lake Tahoe, California, from putting on a grandiose wine and food festival. Now in its 29th year, the Lake Tahoe Autumn Food and Wine Festival is a multi-day event that combines a walk-around tasting with focused events…
Now here’s a fun item I never thought I’d see in my local supermarket: A gelato popsicle flavored with St. George Spirits Single Malt Whiskey. Both companies are local to NorCal: Gelateria Naia is based in Hercules, St. George in Alameda, both in the East Bay. This popsicle is quite a little delight, flavored with…
A recent trip to Monterey, California took us to Peter B’s Brewpub, back behind the Portola Hotel. A rowdy place full of pool tables and TVs blasting sports, it’s also home to Monterey’s biggest brewpub operation, with about a dozen beers on tap at any one time. This time we came in search of something…
Whiskey chocolates? Been done. How about chocolates studded with caramel and apple cider? Lake Champlain Chocolates’ latest concoction brings in apples from Happy Valley Orchard and cider from Citizen Cider to create an all-Vermont seasonal confection sensation. These dense caramels start with silky milk chocolate and burst open to reveal intense apple pie flavor inside,…
But allow me to explain. Lake Champlain Chocolates has made this oddity by wrapping a solidified blend of milk and dark chocolate around a molten core that’s made with hop-infused caramel, which is sweetened with malt that’s been reduced from Long Trail’s brewing operation. Hops, as in beer, that’s right. While “hop oil” is the…