The Real Stuff

I love mac and cheese, but I must confess that it's rare I find a version with real cheese that bests the boxed variety. On a particularly gloomy Friday night, my roommates and I decided it was time to expand our dining horizons, and so we headed to the Rock Bottom Brewery. My brewery food expectations were not high, but I was famished and it was clearly a hopping place. So hopping, in fact, that we waited 45 minutes for a table, which gave us ample time to study the menu. I was pretty grumpy by the time we were seated, but being a great believer in comfort food, or perhaps just feeling like it was winter and I wanted winter food, I ordered the Classic Mac n' Chicken. My mood lifted a bit when my Caesar salad appeared with beautifully shaved Parmesan floating atop crisp leaves. When an equally pretty ramekin of pasta topped with breadcrumbs arrived, I was further nudged out of my grumpiness. But it was my first bite of that pasta, a mix of chewy pasta elbows, buttery, well-toasted breadcrumbs, tender chicken, and just a sliver of still melting Parmesan, that put me squarely back into the land of happy.