St. Paddy's Day IPA Roundup: Bell's Hopslam, Brooklyn Blast!, Smuttynose Noonan Black IPA, and Victory DirtWolf

None of these beers are green.  Some of them have some green on the labels.  Is that enough to make this post acceptable for St. Patrick's Day?

It's not like I've ever really subscribed to the notion that one should drink green beer on St. Patrick's Day--I can't recall ever having a green beer, though that might speak more to my social life than anything else.

So for anyone not doing the bar scene today, but still looking to enjoy a nice beer at home, here are a few options, all types of IPAs, all at least good and worthy of trying.

Offensively Bad "New Orleans" Cuisine at Nanola Restaurant in Malta

A few weeks ago I thought I had a brilliant idea for an Eat This article: feature a classic New Orleans dish from the new Nanola restaurant and bar in Malta on Fat Tuesday.  My upcoming piece was to be posted on March 4, the start of Mardi Gras, the perfect day to publish such an article.  I'd been wanting to get out to try out Nanola and figured this was as good an excuse as any.

There were several options that appealed to us, any of which would have been fine to focus on for an Eat This piece.  We ordered the alligator bites as an appetizer, I had the jambalaya for my entree, while K got an oyster po' boy.  And there was the promise of beignets for dessert.

But just as I wrote about a couple weeks ago with my visit to The Capital, my hopes of eating something worth writing about were dashed.  While the failure at The Capital was rooted in brutally bad execution, the issues at Nanola run even deeper.  Not only were the dishes we ordered at Nanola executed poorly, but they were also failures conceptually.  Just wait until you see the picture of my "jambalaya" for proof.

It was so bad, I have to say, that when it came time to think about dessert, we passed on those beignets.  Here--with another first-hand report from K--are the reasons why we came to that decision.