Hippie Bracket Final: (8) Bear Tooth vs. (3) Middle Way Cafe

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

Hippie Bracket (Round 2): (8) Bear Tooth vs. (4) Tap Root Cafe PLUS (2) Middle Way Cafe vs. (3) Snow City Cafe

My laziness knows no bounds, and I'm going to wrap this up a bit speedier than I intended. Thus, you'll now get two matchups a day for the rest of the campaign until the final!

Up first, we have giant slayer Bear Tooth versus the sneaky good Tap Root Cafe, along with the battle of the esteemed midtown/downtown hippie cafes as Middle Way Cafe squares off against Snow City Cafe. Who will win in these epic showdowns? There is only one real answer...our stomachs and taste buds.

Matchup #1
Bear Tooth: This restaurant is the number one giant slayer in the tournament, playing the Northern Iowa to Moose's Tooth's Kansas. While Bear Tooth doesn't have anything as hysterical as a six foot tall guard from Iowa with brass balls named Ali Farokhmanesh, it does have a lot of things that make it every bit as awesome. A diverse and delicious menu, great beer and liquor, fantastic service, the option to watch a movie while eating anything on their menu (in the words of Marv Albert...YES!!!), and just a great set up all together.

This place is the bees knees, and from this industry analyst to you, I think them taking out the Tooth was just the tip of the iceberg.
Tap Root Cafe: This is a great first round team, bringing excellent breakfast and lunch options to the table, plus an aweome selection of beer. It's a sneaky delicious combination, sort of like UDub's squad this year - you don't know it's great until they beat you by 18 like they did New Mexico. I've discovered recently that they have some of the best biscuits and gravy in the city, which to me is the equivalent of UDub's coach realizing they had a 6'10" point forward who had great handle with both hands and had automatic range out to 23 feet. That's a pretty big deal.

Yet, their negatives are big enough to make dispatching them fairly easy if a very talented faces them in the tournament. You know, like next round when West Virginia is going to murder them or this round when Bear Tooth salivates as they look at Tap Root's slow service, luke warm water, and oddly cold set up.

The Showdown: This is a blow out, as Bear Tooth is just a mega powerful contender at this point. As much as I love Tap Root, Bear Tooth brings its A game in almost every facet of the equation. Which, you know, is very unfortunate for Tap Root. Bear Tooth is movin' on!

Matchup #2
Middle Way Cafe: This joint is bringing it like the Baylor squad of this year's tourney. They everything well, but they throw in one thing that they do excellently and that acts as the tipping point. Middle Way Cafe's tipping point is my go to breakfast order for the entirety of the city - breakfast burrito with avocado. That thing should be illegal for how delicious it is. I crave it in nearly every situation, breakfast...lunch...dinner...3 am, randomly at my desk during the day. You name it. It's the great x-factor of this bracket.

Besides that, they have incredible baked goods, a varied lineup of tasty sandwiches, good service (although occasionally horrific times in terms of receiving your food), and a full array of coffee for those that like their breakfast or lunch to be super charged.

Snow City Cafe: In many ways, Snow City is a sister shop to Middle Way. They do a lot of the same things. Focus on breakfast and lunch, trendy and friendly waitstaff, primo location, art friendly...you name it. Their menu may be even more balanced, as their lunch isn't just sandwiches but a variety of tasty treats (like the pesto chicken).

However, here's one thing that they're missing out on that is necessary to move out of this round - a go-to meal. You need something to rely on and something to always bring you back. Snow City doesn't have that for me, which is no good indeed.

The Showdown: In an epic matchup and one of the closest ones so far, Middle Way wins simply because it has two go to meals (the aforementioned breakfast burrito and the delectable avocado melt) while Snow City has none. To use a little of Bill Simmons NBA Trade Value column logic, when I took the two head to head, who would I take? Middle Way every time.

Prepare for an epic showdown next round...Bear Tooth vs. Middle Way for a spot in the Final Four! It's going to be a barn burner baby!

Hippie Bracket: (2) Middle Way Cafe vs. (7) Organic Oasis

Today in the Hippie Bracket we have a match up between one of the most popular breakfast/lunch spots in all of Anchorage versus one of the best kept secrets as Middle Way Cafe and Organic Oasis square off. Seperated by just a short distance and fighting for the same niche (vegetarian/vegan eaters or those who just like delicious food), MWC has long outdistanced Organic Oasis in terms of popularity. But is it deserved?

Middle Way Cafe: This restaurant is arguably my go-to weekend breakfast spot and my go-to lunch spot. Their almost comically delectable avocado breakfast burrito hits me in a way that almost no other meal in the city does, kicking my weekend off in grand fashion each and every time and setting me up for a great couple days (I clearly like this burrito). Then, if I'm headed their for lunch it's hard not to go for the Avocado Melt, a sandwich that is every bit as good as the best sandwiches in town and synonymous with the restaurant as a whole. It's ingrained into the discerning Anchorage diner's repetoire as much as possibly even Moose's Tooth pizza is.

They have a wide variety of breakfast and lunch options, all of which are quite tasty. Their soups and baked goods are also exceptional, almost always sucking me in to make a bad decision (aka eating too much).

I only have a couple beefs with this joint: on numerous occasions they've lost my order and had to remake it, or after waiting for a lengthy stretch they come out to inform me that they are out of avocados. To a person eager to eat, that is devestating news. I'm also not a fan of their coffee, as I find it difficult to reason to myself that I should drink their brew while I could walk three doors down and pick up some Kaladi coffee for less.

Organic Oasis: This place is sneaky good, in that you don't think it would be good until you eat it...and then it is. On numerous occasions I've been blown away by my meals, finding their chicken stuffed with portobello mushrooms and their vegan high protein wrap to be particularly good. As perhaps the single most green restaurant in town, I was a bit skeptical of what their dessert experience could be, but I'm not going to lie - their brownie ala mode (vegan) is near the peak of my dessert experiences in town. To throw in another major positive, they even have a nice beer selection.

On occasion, they have solid concert experiences. That in itself is a major positive and something that really adds to the overall quality of the spot.

However, there are a number of big negatives. A lot of their meals have been described by friends and yours truly as "bland" or even "completely lacking flavor." Never a good thing. On top of that, their service and atmosphere is odd and their hawking of random vitamin packs and strange alternative medicines is a bit off putting. While a lot of their meals are good and their juices are great, they are all massively overpriced.

The Showdown: Anyone who knows me knows that this isn't a competition at all. Middle Way is a VERY strong two seed (like Duke will be this year) and Organic Oasis is a low seed with a lot of holes (like...every low seed really). If the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, Middle Way has very much captured my love. My biggest problem is stopping myself from eating their daily.