Raleigh Roadfood Trip, Feb-18-2010: Bavarian Brathaus

Lori and I got invited to join other Roadfood friends in a weekend gathering in and around Raleigh, North Carolina. The folks gathering are among the most passionate of Roadfooders, and I expected that this might be the sort of debauch that gets exaggerated into weekend-in-Vegas movies - although instead of hangovers and inexplainable hickeys, the aftereffects of our bacchanal would be gravy stains and crumbs.

Our first stop upon landing in Raleigh was Bavarian Brathaus of Cary, selected by Poverty Pete because it served pork knuckle (schweinshaxen), which is common in Germany but rare in the US. The pork knuckle required a one-day advance notice, which we declined because we thought that the dinner would be before we landed. But the dinner got rescheduled for later, and we came along.

The first course was a tomato salad. This was very tasty, and the tomatoes were pretty good - I liked this a lot.


Through a miscommunication with the waitress, I ended up with ChiTownDiner's Braumeister Gulasch appetizer, when I had intended to order the gulasch dinner. The gulasch was not what I expected from goulash; it was just broth and beef, without any vegetables. But it was delicious; the broth was very savory and rich, with a touch of paprika.

I finally got some of the sides that came with the gulasch dinner: a pair of Semmelknödel. The menu called these bread dumplings, but they didn't have the wet texture I expect from dumplings; they were hemispheres of dense stuffing-like bread, with a crust that made me wonder if they had been deep-fried.

Poverty Pete had ordered a pork knuckle for himself and one for the table, and pork knuckle was by far the most dramatic meal of the table, mostly because it was so large. I sampled a bit of it, and it just tasted like roast pork to me, though it was tender and juicy.


Even after four people had helped themselves to the pork knuckle, the leftovers were still half the size of Chris Ayers' head.

We made lots of jokes about the pork knuckle, such as suggesting that it would need a helmet when Poverty Pete took it home.


Many of the other dishes didn't impress me that much; Gregg's sauerbraten seemed a bit below par to me, as did Lori's bratwurst. I also wasn't wild about the apple strudel for dessert; part of that is that a crust that is not extraordinarily tender will squoosh out the filling under the pressure of a fork, but I also felt that a strudel should have smaller, more tender apple chunks than this contained. Even so, we were off to a good start.

And as an extra bonus, we got to hear the oompah band playing "Puttin' on the Ritz".

Pandemic Feb-23-2011

Another game that seems as if it should be easier than it was.

Five Epidemics plus Mutation; Operations Expert, Dispatcher, Containment Specialist, Researcher.

We managed to get a cure for the red disease fairly early, and used Rapid Vaccine Deployment and Remote Treatment to eradicate it. This turned out to be enormously effective, because three of the cards we drew during Epidemics were in the red zone. We also managed to eradicate the black disease, blocking an Epidemic infection in the black zone. For many of our turns, we had no great worries at all about cubes on the board.

We had a plan for a yellow cure a turn or two after the red cure, but we took one of those yellow cards for a cure for the purple disease instead. But then we didn't eradicate the purple disease, and we were worrying about running out of purple cubes by the end of the game. And the deck dried up with yellow cards; half of the yellow cards were among the bottom six cards. Because of that, we didn't manage to win until the antepenultimate turn.

We did manage to win with no outbreaks whatsoever, which we haven't managed in a while.