Buffalo Wild Wings

The BWWs in C-ville has made some wonderfully welcome strides. The bar manager there has taken it upon himself to gather a respectable collection of local craft brews on tap, including (currently) Flat 12's excellent Half-Cycle IPA. This gives it, by far, the best beer selection in Montgomery County, and that alone might make it the best bar in town ... if only it was walking distance from, well, anything.

The one lamentable aspect of the beer selection, however, is that you still have to do a fair bit of work just to take advantage of it. The servers are woefully and persistently ignorant of the offerings -- and even if you know what they have, and even if you know that they have it, and even if you order it by name (yes, really!), there's still a decent chance that you won't get it.

Allow me to explain: Say, for example, that you want "Upland Brewing Company's Dragonfly IPA". Don't ask if they have any "IPAs" ... your server will say that they don't. Don't ask if they have anything from "Upland Brewing Company" ... the answer to that is "no" as well. The same goes if you ask for anything "local", anything "made in Indiana", or even "anything good". Basically, if you don't say the magic word, "Dragonfly", you won't get it.

And even that depends on the server. You see, each server seems to have her very own 'cheat sheet' in her order book. Thus, if your server knows the beer as "Upland" rather than as "Dragonfly", the secret password is "Upland" ... but again, only for that individual server -- who, incidentally, wouldn't likely know if the "Upland" they have is the "IPA" or the "wheat". You see, "IPA" might refer to Flat 12's Half-Cycle ... or it might even refer to the Sierra Nevada, since, after all, it has the words "Pale Ale" in it.

So, to make a long story short, if you want to get the good beer that the management has worked so hard to acquire, tell your server you need a minute and walk up to the bar yourself.

Despite these recent improvements to the beer selection -- and the servers' ignorance of this, notwithstanding -- there's still enough corporate hellishness to make BWWs a source of serious concern for our future. The good management at B-dubs must be shackled with countless corporate regulations, from the server's obligatory "Welcome to B-dubs/We sell Pepsi products"-welcome, to the menu itself, which is so littered with insets and cutouts and inviting pictures of placed-products and icons and logos of its corporate partners that it can be hard to figure out what they actually have. Even the beer selection is tightly controlled by what Corporate and its distributor-partner allows, meaning that the admirable craft beers can be hard to find among the throngs of tasteless and characterless wheats and lagers from the more-familiar, nationwide brands.

But maybe the most intense cacophony arises from the constant audiovisual stimulation that greets you from absolutely every corner of this cavernous space. There are more TVs and screens in front of you, around you, above you, even ON YOUR TABLE, that it can be hard to find the food.

Yes, B-dubs has managed to acquire some quality stuff. But you have to work hard to find it.

Not the best, but better than applebee's

The food here is good. I had never had a bad wait time for my meal. Not being a sports fan it is annoying have to listen to people scream at the games but that is to be expected here.