The Hippie Bracket features perhaps my most frequented restaurants of all. These two contenders may be the top two most visited restaurants, as Bear Tooth and Middle Way Cafe do a ton of things I like and they do them well. But who is better overall? Who earns my choice when it's on the line.
Bear Tooth: The key to this restaurant is its versatility. Nearly everything it does, it does VERY well. Lunch? Awesome. Dinner? Superb. Bar? Love it. Diverse menu? Hell yes. Two different restaurants with entirely different menus? Why not. Great beer? Of course. Liquor? Let's get drunk. Movies that are inexpensive? You're kidding me?! Occasional awesome concerts? Now this is unfair.
This is a restaurant with more faces than the Dodecahedron from The Phantom Tollbooth. It's like that old "anything you can do I can do better" song, but in song form. I feel like at times this restaurant taunts others with its versatility, menu, and reasonable prices for the meals. It's pretty crazy really.
Middle Way Cafe: This place houses my favorite breakfast item as well as my favorite sandwich in town. That's pretty much all I'd need to say usually, but with such stern competition more has to be said. They also have a diverse breakfast and lunch menu, along with coffee to order and delicious pastries and desserts made in house.
It also has a lot of appeal in that they nearly always have cool (or at the very least interesting) art on display, as well as cool and friendly wait staff. It's incredibly popular, so you can expect occasionally long wait times and sometimes them forgetting about your food entirely (which is a big problem).
The Showdown: What did I say yesterday? Versatility vs. selective dominance...dominance always wins? Oops. I'm already breaking my own rules, but I guess Bear Tooth just dominates pretty much everything. They have no real negatives and a ton of major positives, to the point when I'm not eating there I'm thinking of eating there. While I may frequent Middle Way more often, I prefer the dining experience at Bear Tooth.
Hippie Bracket Winner: Bear Tooth