project: patio meet-up no. 1

Thursday night was the inaugural Project: Patio Meet-Up at Raffe's Beer Garden, and the gods of beer and outdoor-drinking were truly shining on us since the daily deluge we'd been getting every afternoon and evening for the past week held off for one night only, not unlike a concert of Motown divas.





Raffe's Beer Garden
What I Loved: The beer selection at Raffe's is absolutely off the charts. Sure, it's 99 percent bottled, but when I saw they had Samuel Smith's on the menu, I would've been happy for them to serve it to me from a milk jug because it has been way too long since I enjoyed a Sam Smith's brew. I wasn't exactly at a Sam Smith's pub, being at Raffe's on Poplar Avenue here in Memphis, Tennessee, but I was reminded of the time that the AEB and I got so drunk at a Sam Smith's pub in Swiss Cottage that we apparently took dozens of pictures of ourselves on the tube on the way back to my place in Kingsbury and had ZERO memory of the little photo session until some time the next afternoon when I found the pictures on the camera. And even those didn't really jog anything, at least not for me. I lost about a half an hour of my life completely to Sam Smith's wheat, but there is photographic evidence and by God, the beer was worth it.

Why You Should Get Drunk There: The patio is great, small and intimate and tucked back off of busy Poplar Ave., and the interior ain't bad, either. The lighting is nice and dim, such that the person across from you ALREADY looks more attractive even before you've had a sip of anything, and though I did not sample them that night, I hear the gyros are out of this world.


cheers,
elizabeth