AYCE Pizza, Beer Flights, and More at Mohawk Bend

Mondays are happy days at Mohawk Bend with their all-you-can-eat pizza nights for only $15. But wait! For the rest of the year (2010), the AYCE pizza is only $12!! Even better!
The AYCE pizza nights take place in the Ramona Room which, when it isn't packed, makes for a good date night with its fireplace and arching tree (I'm not sure how crowded Mondays are now, though).

Instead of ordering, servers with trays of thin crust pizza fresh from the oven walks around and offers you a slice. Most of the pizzas on the menu will make its way out during the night, except for the Pig Newton (since Serrano ham is expensive, yo).

We tried quite a few that night, including a vegan pizza, a Thai chicken pizza, the Private Idaho (with potatoes, bacon, caramelized onions, creme fraiche), and the Abe Froman (house-made Italian sausage, peppers, fennel, mozzarella). The vegan pizza made with Daiya cheese was not too bad, but of course I will stick with the spicy Thai chicken pizza. You can also get a green salad for $4 extra.

Mohawk Bend is all about beer, of course, so you'll need some to wash down the pies. 5-7pm are flight hours at Mohawk, featuring two beer flights at $9 each, but you can get these beer flights in the Ramona Room all night. If you're not into the flights, you can also get specially-priced cocktails.

While waiting for the rest of our party, LA OC Foodie and I got one each of the available flights: the Bitter flight and the Dark. As LA OC Foodie said, we were dark and bitter people.

Point the Way, Picket Fence Wheat IPA, Stone Cali-Belgique,  Mongo DIPA

Brekle's Brown, DDH 15th Anniv, Navigator Doppelbock, Stone IRS 2010

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Sunday Brunch at Nola's (Downtown LA)

LA needs more Cajun places and Nola's in Downtown LA moved in to fill part of the gap. I was pretty excited to try it when they invited me in, but my schedule only allowed to come for Sunday brunch.
I didn't realize that the Sunday brunch was a champagne buffet until I got there. I was planning to try their jambalaya, gumbo, and po'boy but they weren't offered at the buffet. Oh well ...
The buffet offerings included fried chicken, fried catfish, shrimp Étouffée, red bean and rice, beignets, and fruits. Oh, and of course, free flowing mimosas.

Both the fried chicken and fried catfish were great, I went back for seconds for both of these. Since the beignets were put out buffet style, they were unfortunately not that fresh and kind of hard. I liked the shrimp Étouffée too - the good thing about having the buffet style is that I could get as many shrimp as I wanted.

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Foie Friday #5: Foie Gras Wars, Ethical Foie Gras in Spain

I started reading Foie Gras Wars, by Mark Caro. The first chapter talks about the beginning of the foie gras ban in Chicago. Supposedly, the controversy gained significant attention from the masses because of a comment Charlie Trotter made about another chef, Rick Tramonto. Trotter had silently removed foie gras from his menu for two years and slowly it became known that he had refused to serve foie gras because of what he had seen at foie gras farms lately disillusioned him. Fellow chefs' responses ranged from support to acceptance to disapproval. Rick Tramonto had the latter view and apparently Trotter said that they should just eat Tramonto's liver because "he [was] certainly fat enough." Since people love scandals and fights, this of course made the news and garnered the foie gras controversy a lot of traction. According to the author, even people who had not heard of foie gras before were then either going to restaurants to eat the stuff or camping out in protest.

I also wanted to share the following video from TEDTalks, which foodiebuddha had also shared with me. In it, Blue Hill's Chef, Dan Barber, talks about an ethical foie gras farm he visited in Spain. The farmer, Edouardo Sousa, allows the goose to roam around and eat whatever they want. No gavage here, and the resulting liver beat its force-fed counterparts in 2006, when it won a prize for best foie gras.

If foie gras farming can be this ethical, then we can have our cake (foie) and eat it too!