One thing that I should probably do more of is craft beer AND food reviews. In an attempt to ameliorate that shortcoming. A quick review of a recent dinner at Maximiliano in Highland Park. (Without food OR beer photos)
My wife and I split a soup, pizza and dessert during our visit while I had two Craftsman beers (since Maximiliano is the de facto tasting room for Craftsman).
We started with fresh Minestrone soup minus noodles which was really good. I had to pick around what appeared to be cauliflower but I could have easily polished off a second bowl. And I liked the addition of squash chunks to it.
I paired it and the following pepperoni pizza with the rarely seen Cabernale. The crazy and crazy good hybrid of red wine and beer. It was delicious (as always) with big grape notes and a strong undercurrent of oak barrel.
As my wife described it, pizza is made or broken by the crust. Good ingredients on top are all well and good but the crust ties it all together. The crust on this pizza is a cross between crackery and bready. Right in the zone for me and the pepperoni was the real deal. Spicy but not rip roaring so. Again, I could have had more but I wanted to save room for dessert and a second beer.
Beer wise, I went with the sour blonde by the name of Cirrus. I have only had a few of this style. Most notably Eagle Rock’s Equinox. And while the “cloud” was good, it needed a little more tartness or liveliness to it. Again it had some really nice subtle barrel notes to it.
The dessert was a bit of a letdown. We had not much experience with cannoli’s but this was too rich for our blood with hazelnut and chocolate chip. It was like a creamy version of cookie dough stuffed into dough. You could tell the quality, it just wasn’t what we were hankering for at the end of the night.
If I did rating with stars or forks Maximiliano would get many, for the beer and pizza alone.