Well, not too beery, but nonetheless, beerful at least.

The most recent trend in craft beer and beer marketing circles seems to be beer and food pairing. I couldn’t be happier for it. Not only does it help to highlight that beer has immense range and flexibility when it comes to flavors, but I like to think it will also help accord more respect to beer as a beverage. It’s not that I don’t like wine, but I do feel beer has mainly been out-marketed by the wine industry, when it comes to “cuisine,” if you will. My life will become immeasurably more pleasant when I can walk into any bar and choose a local craft brew, but also when I can go into the kind of restaurant that has a separate wine list and find a beer list as well. In fact, creating that sort of demand among patrons is precisely what motivates me to do my bimonthly beer & food pairing down at Delish! on Elmwood.

So, I digress a bit, but all of this is to say that when I find that special restaurant that has a fine fine beer list and as well, knows how to match beer up (or better still incorporate it,) with their chow, I’m a happy camper indeed. While Buffalo doesn’t actually have any specifically cuisine à la bière restaurants, we do have Shango. It was there I found myself with family on a Friday night and was treated to an extraordinary dish. Behold:

Ok, I’m no expert food photographer, I know, but I hope you get the gist of it, anyway. It was a very special pork chop, grilled to perfection and served with a glaze that incorporated Abita beer. I could have done the obvious and enjoyed it with a bottle of the same, but upon some consideration, I went instead for Unibroue’s excellent Trois Pistoles, a dark belgian ale with just the right sort of malt complexity, I thought, to go along with this dish- and boy was I right on that. The smokey notes in the pork went very well with the flavors of malt in the beer, and the mild carbonation did a great job of collecting flavor on the way down, leaving my palate clean and ready for the next bite. Suburb!

So, a tip of the hat to Jim Guarino at Shango for coming up with this extraordinary special dish.