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.

Hippie Bracket: (3) Snow City Cafe vs. (6) Spenard Roadhouse

This is another Moose's Tooth and Bear Tooth like matchup, as both of these restaurants are owned by the same crews and both find fans coming out of the woodwork. Snow City Cafe has been a landmark of Anchorage dining for a long time, while Spenard Roadhouse is a recently launched (just hit it's year birthday!) eatery that worked through its early faults to come out pristine. But who is the winner here?

Snow City Cafe: I've eaten breakfast at this place more times than I count. I love the food to an almost unhealthy degree, and it is one of the few restaurants I've ever been to that I'm so confounded by what to order that I order two entrees.

Yeah, that's right.

Snow City is the 2009 Oklahoma Sooners of the tournament, giving us some serious firepower like their Club Scramble or their awesome Benedicts (ala Blake Griffin), plus a ton of supplementary parts like mimosas, great coffee, hip and friendly servers, great atmosphere, and iconic location (the Willie Warren, Austin Johnson, and Taylor Griffin of the team). It is an exceptional place to eat at, but its big detriments are rather major: epic wait times and a strangely mediocre lunch menu bring down the experience from being a transcendant one.

Spenard Roadhouse: This restaurant started out to deafening acclaim (a coworker of mine went there every day, twice a day, for the first three weeks of opening) and lots of confusion from your's truly. My first experiences (along with my friends) were really mediocre, even bad. My first experience involved baby back ribs with my parents that tasted quite similar to marinara sauce. Unless I misunderstand the food, that is not what they should taste like.

Recently they've made a late run to relevance in my mind, as I've found a niche of foods that I enjoy. Their bacon of the month is fantastic, because really you can't beat bacon. The pièce de résistance however is their Autumn Risotto, a carefully crafted dish that is not only visually pleasing but something that must be eaten with the voracious intent of a pig. Or maybe that is just how I eat it. It's ridiculously tasty, and rivals the risotto I've tried in my forays into the food in Italy and in my kitchen.

In a lot of ways, their start and turnaround is a lot like the 2002-2003 Syracuse Orangemen squad - start out with drama and mediocre results, but in the end they turned it around and found their identity. And it's a damn tasty identity.

The food...not the Orangemen. That would be weird. Sorry Carmelo Anthony.

The Showdown: So who wins in this matchup, the late breaking contender Spenard Roadhouse or the long time favorite with major flaws Snow City Cafe? Well, when you get down to matchup of this sort you have to go with the place that has the most longevity and experience in these situations. The Roadhouse is new-ish, while Snow City has years of experience pleasing my palette. With that in mind it's Snow City Cafe in a barn burner.

Hippie Bracket: (4) Tap Root Cafe vs. (5) Fire Tap

The battle of the Tap related restaurants! Both Tap Root and Fire Tap are south Anchorage favorites, with one being a long underrated stop for the more discerning restaraunt fan and the other being a recent launch that saw long waits upon its open respectively. But there can only be one eatery with Tap in their name past this round...who could it be?

Tap Root Cafe: Tap Root is the Davidson Wildcats of the past two years in the tournament. At first you think "who the heck are these guys?" and then you get an experience with them and all of a sudden you're cheering as Stephen Curry makes it rain. Or in Tap Root's case, as the server delivers a delectable Shooby Dooby (a sandwich made of two chicken breasts encased in mozzarella and wrapped in bacon - seriously) and some remarkably good beer from parts unknown. They have a number of very impressive factors in their equation: tasty food, surprisingly good prices, great beer, friendly service, cool atmosphere, and steady musical performances of quality.

Yet with any surprising low seed, they bring negatives to the table. Tap Root's big negatives are very evident on the first experience and on the fifth. Luke warm and oddly bad water, service that disappears for 20 minutes at a time even when it's slow, strangely cold (in temperature), and sometimes it is too loud and crowded to exist as a person. Do the positives outweigh the negatives? Definitely. But the negatives, however small, can take a good team down at any time.

Fire Tap: This restaurant is very similar to your prototypical major conference squad who gets a nice seed and then gets spanked by a lower seed, ala Illinois falling to Western Kentucky in the first round last year. They look like they should be good. They smell like they should be good. You hear they could be good. But when you get to actual application you wait forever for food, the food is mediocre and overpriced, and ultimately they are getting by on being a poor impersonation of a once good program. They're essentially the homeless man's version of Moose's Tooth, except they do nothing well at all. Really, they made it into this tournament just so they could get a smack down, which sometimes I think is the reasoning behind all of those major conference teams getting a five seed when they shouldn't be in the tournament.

The Showdown: What showdown? Just like what would have happened in the matchup between those two aforementioned squads, Tap Root brings down the rain with fantastic beer, delicious and varied foods like the Shooby Dooby or their awesome breakfast burritos, and tops it off with a slam dunk of unique atmosphere and quality music to enjoy. Meanwhile, Fire Tap folds under the pressure as your server snaps at you and it takes you forty five minutes to get a luke warm sandwich that is bad and costs you $13.95. This is a debacle for the confidence of Fire Tap, and if I were them I'd go back to formula.

Hippie Bracket: (1) Moose's Tooth vs. (8) Bear Tooth

What did we do to deserve this my fair readers? This is a showdown for the ages, and in the first round even! You have the number one seed of the entire tournament, the universally beloved Moose's Tooth, versus it's upstart little brother Bear Tooth. The only guarantee about these two places besides fantastic food and quality service is that you'll likely have to wait to eat at either place. But which is more worth the wait?

Moose's Tooth: This is perhaps the crown jewel of Alaskan dining experiences from the point-of-view of most Anchorage denizens, and with good reason. I've been to Chicago for their deep dish pizza, I've been to New York City and tried their slices...hell, I've been to Italy and tried what they had to offer, and I find them all lacking in comparison to a fat slice of Chicken Ranch or Greek Gyro from the Tooth. These guys are like the Fab Five from Michigan in 1991: immensely likeable, supremely talented, and they capture the imagination of anyone who experiences them.

You have even have the specific analogues for each player: Chris Webber was the de facto Alpha Dog (like the Chicken Ranch is the go-to pizza for many); Juwan Howard as the guy who was out-shadowed by Webber but in many ways was as good (the White Pizza for its sneaky awesomeness, and let's face it, Howard played like a white power forward from the 80's); Jalen Rose as the versatile point forward (the Avalanche because that brings a little bit of everything); Jimmy King as the guy who could kill you without you paying attention to him (the mozzarella sticks and their ability to destroy your appetite before your meal got there); and Ray Jackson as the guy who never reached the same heights as everyone else but was part of the team (the beer because if you drink too much of it you may not reach your dreams either).

I feel bad for anyone who faces up against Moose's Tooth because they are ridiculously delicious and a towering favorite.

Bear Tooth: We're going old school on this analogy, but Bear Tooth is like Oscar Robertson's Cincinnati Bearcats squads. In reality, they're just like Oscar Robertson. Every night could be a triple double experience at BT: go there for a dinner at the Grill and have some remarkably tasty halibut tacos; realize you feel like getting a bit of a drink on so you stay for their awesome beer (same as Moose's Tooth's beer) or perhaps a tequila flight; then not wanting to leave yet so you go check out an awesome arthouse movie at the theater. Ten out of ten experiences across the board in all three experiences.

Throw in the fact that youcan get the same pizza at this Tooth as you can at the other, plus all of their other advantages, and you have perhaps the perfect competitor to face off against Moose's Tooth.

The Showdown: While it's hard to argue that the Michigan Wolverines from 1991 were not one of the most talented squads of all time, the ultimate point of their story is that even with all of that talent, they ended up losing. Moose's Tooth is a remarkably exceptional restaurant, but the equivalent of Chris Webber's timeout in the championship game is the fact that they serve the same pizza at Bear Tooth. When you add a ton of other food and drink that you can't get if you dine at MT, it unbalances this showdown. Bear Tooth's versatility is unparalleled in the tournament, and with that in mind, I say sayanora to Moose's Tooth. You have been dethroned by your little brother.

I also want to note that this is one of the fiercest debates between my friends and I: which of the Tooth's is better? I'm the only one that sides with BT.

Hippie Bracket Breakdown

I once theorized that there is no better guarantee in Anchorage food than the one a staff of hippies and pseudo-hippies provides you. Odds are if you walk into a restaurant and you see a gaggle of tie-die shirt wearing beard men or girls wearing retro chic dresses and headbands, you're going to have a good eating experience.

The good news about this category is due to the burgeoning arts scene and the love of the outdoors inherent to the state, we get a bunch of high quality contenders. They range from the crown jewels of the hipster eating scene like Moose's Tooth or Middle Way Cafe to the more unheralded sleeper types like Organic Oasis or Tap Root Cafe, but they are unrelenting in their quality.

Note: Talkeetna Roadhouse would fit into this category if it weren't for it's extreme lack of being from Anchorage. Powered by it's biscuits and gravy only, it may have had enough to go all the way even