In addition to The Works in downtown Loveland, we are also frequent visitors of Paxton’s Grill. As mentioned in my review of The Works, my parents visit both of these restaurants close to weekly, and we have joined them on a number of occasions. This past Friday happened to be one of those occasions, and we were joined by another couple who are longtime family friends.

Despite the very small dining space, the wait for a table for six wasn’t more than half a beer. I think that’s how I should start measuring my wait times, by how many drinks I enjoyed while waiting. Speaking of drinks, Paxton’s has a really good craft beer selection. That was my one complaint about The Works, but I’m happy to say that I am much more satisfied with drinks at Paxton’s.

It is hard not to compare these two restaurants. They basically share the same parking lot. Also they are the only affordable/casual dining restaurants in downtown Loveland. I would love to combine the food from The Works with the drinks from Paxton’s into one perfect restaurant, but they are both worthy of their own visits as is. Continue reading for my full review of our latest meal from Paxton’s.

Chicken Philly Panini

On our most recent visit, my wife and I decided to share meals. I ordered the chicken Philly Panini with onion rings and she ordered the goetta sandwich with waffle fries. For those of you not from Cincinnati, goetta is another regional specialty of German origin. It is primarily a breakfast sausage but has seen wider uses for other meals throughout the day. It is primarily composed of ground pork shoulder and steel-cut or chopped oats.

The chicken Philly Panini was filled with grilled chicken, onions, peppers, mushrooms, teriyaki sauce and loads of provolone cheese. I was very happy with this choice, as was my wife. The onion rings are also thick cut and quite delicious. The goetta sandwich was served with grilled onions and melted swiss and toasted rye bread. We often aren’t the most adventurous meat eaters, but we decided to give this one a try. Overall it was good, though perhaps a little out of comfort zone. We resulted to adding some ketchup to it to make it more pleasing for our tastes.

Goetta Sandwich

As mentioned earlier, Paxton’s is definitely worthy of a visit. The beer selection alone is a great reason to stop in for a seat at the bar. And though I prefer the pizza from a nearby restaurant, the food from Paxton’s is good and varied enough for repeat visits. I’m sure we will be back soon.

O.A.R. has a new album coming out August 2nd titled King. The have also revamped their website completely, including a page dedicated to the upcoming release. And while that is all great, my favorite part of the website has to be the Past Shows area under the On Tour section of the site. Why is that? Well because I am powering that entire section of the site through a XML feed of data on oarsa.org. Each show has a “More Info” button that you can click to magically be taken to that show’s page on oarsa. I love it and I hope it really drives even more traffic to the site. In addition there is a nice write-up about the site (and a link to it) on the Community page. Once again these guys have proved to be the most thoughtful and down to earth musicians around.

I’ve been slowly adding Cincinnati related blogs to my blogroll and have built up a pretty good collection. First are a handful of blogs dedicated to urban living in Cincinnati.  UrbanCincy is a wonderful resource for happenings and events around downtown and the nearby neighborhoods. Somewhere Over the Rhine focuses more on the Over the Rhine neighborhood that is going through much revitalization, but it also has other downtown related news.

As far as personal blogs go, it seems that 5chw4r7z is the most popular around. And for good reason, as his blog entries are full of great photography and tales of so many events from around town. Wine Me, Dine Me is a great resource for local restaurants and Hoperatives is my go to source for craft beer in the area.

A blog that I just found yesterday, Ault Park Sunrise, is nearing completion of the author’s attempt to document 40 sunrises in Eastern Cincinnati. He travels by bicycle to Ault Park, or other surrounding areas of town, to document the sunrises, as well as area history and nature. I found the photos to be great and the historical information to be very interesting. Eventually we will be living in this part of town, so I look forward to making similar adventures soon.

I really miss my lunch time runs I had while working in the office in Denver. I wish I could still head out for a nice jog around our business park, but unfortunately my office is no longer in such a location. Plus we do not have any showers in our Mason office. They have talked about adding some showers to the building, which would be great. The Little Miami Trail is less than a mile and a half from the office. Though I couldn’t actually run to the trail without severely risking my life, it would be nice to drive down there for a quick jog while in the office. But I do need a place to shower off after a humidity filled run.

Speaking of the Little Miami Scenic Trail, Kim and I headed down there on Sunday for a bike ride. We plan to compete in the Morgan’s Triathlon in a couple of weekends and badly need to put some miles in on a bike. I managed to get sixteen miles in on my mountain bike. The shade from the trees really helped to make the ride very nice, even though the temperature was approaching ninety degrees! If there is one saving grace from the humid summer heat in Cincinnati it has to be the shade from the trees.

After a couple of tiring fundraiser walks on Saturday afternoon, I found myself driving from Coney Island back to my parents house in Loveland. My wife, mother, and infant son were along for the ride. We were all hungry after a morning filled with walking, so I suggested we stop for lunch at Quaker Steak & Lube in Milford. I never got around to trying this restaurant known for its wings even after they opened a location in a Denver suburb while we were living there. So it was on my list of places to try and our drive happened to take us right past it.

Outside Quaker Steak & Lube Milford

Upon our entry into the restaurant we were promptly seated at a table near the bar. This was the first thing that was surprising for me, as I always assumed it to be more of a counter order restaurant, similar to the way Buffalo Wild Wings is (or was). For starters I tried the house beer, even though I could find very little information about it. It appeared to be a light amber ale, but its lack of much taste was a little disappointing.

I then decided that I wanted to try the breaded boneless wings, and found a combination plate that was served with magna fries that was right up my alley. Magna fries are thick-cut fries smothered with cheddar-jack cheese and chunks of smoky bacon. I ordered my wings with the hot sauce, while my mom went with the tequila lime BBQ on her similar order. My wife ordered the breaded and grilled boneless wing platter, which was served with toasted pita and fresh steamed broccoli. She opted for the Thai ‘R’ Cracker and Louisiana Lickers sauces.

Boneless Hot Wings and Magna Fries

My initial impression of the boneless wings was that they weren’t as saucy as I was used to them being. Buffalo Wild Wings is known for drenching their wings in sauce, which I like.  However, these boneless wings appeared to be meatier than others I have had in the past. Without them being bathed in sauce, I don’t feel like the heat from the sauce really shined through like I wanted it to. If I were to dine in again I would definitely ask for some additional sauce.

As mentioned I didn’t think the hot was all that hot, though my mother and wife found it to be much spicier than their sauces.  I tried each of the others and really enjoyed the Thai ‘R’ Cracker and Louisiana Lickers.  Perhaps the Buckeye BBQ would have been a better choice for myself, which is described as a smooth, fiery, sweet BBQ.

The magna fries were good, but nothing out of the ordinary for loaded fries. One thing that was really cool were the toasted pita wedges that my wife was served with her plate. At first it seemed kind of strange, but then she realized that you can simply pick up the pita that is conveniently underneath one of the grilled boneless wings and eat it with your fingers without getting sauce all over them. Genius!

I don’t know that I will go out of my way to eat here again, especially since it seemed a little expensive to me, but overall the food was pretty good.

I hope you enjoy the video above that my dad, brother, and I put together yesterday. Don’t miss Pig-Fest XVIII: Return of the Pig on August 20th, 2011. We announced the date over a month ago, but we finally put together the invitations and sent them out via facebook last night. Our good friend MER has agreed to come back and I’m sure the quest for the Pig Cup will be back as well. It is sure to be another great time!

One of my biggest fears about the move back to Cincinnati was the lack of accessibility to beers that I like to drink. So far that fear hasn’t really been an issue at all. There are a growing abundance of craft beers from the area and neighboring states that are easily available. Plus there are superstores like Party Source and Jungle Jim’s that carry harder to find items.

I’ve had no problem finding Great Divide, Avery, and others from the Rocky Mountain area. I even had Avery IPA on tap at a bar last weekend! I wish I could get Odell beers out this way, but there are some new favorites that should help to replace them such as Great Lakes and Bell’s. I’ve also grown pretty fond of the beers from Founders Brewing Company.

There were actually a number of local events for American Craft Beer Week, which was a little surprising to me. I never got the change to attend any of the events, but you can be sure that I’ll have a couple of toasts of my own over the weekend to this great week of celebrations.

It didn’t take long for my new favorite radio station in Cincinnati to go off of the air. Frequency 94.1 (WNNF) was playing a pretty good mix of adult album alternative up until noon yesterday, when it was interrupted by Willie Nelson and then a hodgepodge mix of song clips from other genres and even bits from WKRP in Cincinnati.

Though the mix of music on Frequency 94.1 wasn’t perfect, it was as close to a decent radio station that this city had going. I’m reading that adult album alternative (AAA) formats always seem to fail here and for the life of me I cannot figure out why. KBCO in Boulder, Colorado is a great example of a really popular and successful station in this format. If it can work in Cleveland, why not here? I guess some things never change.

One thing our move has affected that I didn’t even think about is my TV watching. I haven’t really kept up with any of the old shows that I used to watch besides The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother. I did catch the last episode of this season of Survivor, but I missed two or three episodes leading up to it. One thing that has increased is my viewership of Cincinnati Reds baseball and the NHL playoffs.

Some may view my decreased time spent watching TV as a negative, but I actually think positively of it. Currently most of the extra time is spent on my commute to and from work, but I’m hoping that I gain more free time to spend with my family once we move into our new house. It will certainly be nice to spend time with Trey as he becomes more and more mobile, rather than spending that time stuck glued to a television set.

Wow, two zoo entries in the last two months. We took Trey out to the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden this past Saturday. My mom, brother, and his girlfriend all came along for the fun. The month of May is the 25th annual Zoo Babies celebration at the zoo, which highlights all the latest babies in the zoo’s collection of animals.

Giraffes with new baby.

The biggest draw at the zoo right now is a baby Maasai Giraffe, Zuri, that was just born April 2, 2011. We headed directly to the giraffe ridge upon entry so we could catch the scheduled feeding. Though they did not feed the baby, I’m assuming it is still nursing, zoo visitors were able to feed both parents a cracker for $1 each.

Trey loves the zoo.

From there we spent the next four to five hours exploring all the different areas of the zoo. Though it did take some time, the zoo actually seemed much smaller than I remembered it to be growing up. Even so, my legs really felt it at the end of the day. Besides all the animals on display, some of which were more active than I have ever seen (gibbons and colobus monkeys especially), my favorite part of the zoo has to be the beer that is available for purchase. Not only beer, but craft beer! And to top it all off you can take the beer with you on your walk through the zoo.

Enjoying a beer.

What a great idea! Check out the rest of my mom’s pictures.