Apart from being a wine store, beer pourer, and restaurant, Brü Grill & Market is also one of the few establishments on Lake Forest's El Toro Rd. not ruled by some distant corporate overlord. As such, it's the only place I know of in this bedroom town that has the cojones to do beer can chicken the right way and alcohol-lace just about everything on the menu. If gulping down one of their raw oysters burns like you're also taking a shot of hooch, it's because the bivalves are actually splashed with vodka.
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As expected, the mixed drinks are potent creatures. What just about
everyone gravitates to, if they're not already sipping a local beer
sampler, is a drink called the Orange County Sour. I did because
like everyone else, I'm also a sucker for dishes and drinks named in honor of something local.
Never mind that the only citrus fruits involved are grapefruit and lime.
It employs an orange slice simply as garnish. But with a few drops of
bitters and thanks to that grapefruit, the drink is one of those
palate-cleansers, biting enough to cut through all the rich food. The
liquor that powers the acerbity is blanco tequila and the froth that
floats above the liquid like some bizarre cloud is actually meringue
built from foamed egg whites. It won't remind you of OC as much as it will
recall memories of Orange Julius before they stopped using raw eggs.
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.