Dragon*Con.
It's the dork Mecca of the east coast. Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, comic fans, vampires of all sorts, gamers, goths, BDSM'ers, and everyone and everything else under the sun is represented. Put 60,000 of them into a blender, add copious amounts of booze and drugs, remove all morality and dignity and set them upon downtown Atlanta. That's the best description of Dcon I can give.

It's Sodom and Gamorrah with lightsabers.

The stories I could tell here would make a sailor repent, but we're here to talk about food. Right? Right? Who's with me? Well.. I'm going to talk food anyway.

There's something that I learned a long time ago about convention survival. Hot dogs are $6, sodas are $5. If you want to pay to eat, you're going to pay a lot. I treat going to a con much like camping. I pack in breakfasts, lunches, snacks, and drinks. I usually do eat my dinners in a nice sit down restaurant. So we took with us poptarts, cold cereal, oatmeal for the coffee maker, and plenty of sandwich fixin's. We took very little soda and tons of bottled water. And booze. We took more booze than anything else. Nothing exciting there at all. But Max Lager's was exciting indeed.

Max Lager's is a wood fired grill and brewpub at the corner of Peachtree St and West Peachtree. I shit you not. We decided on Max's because we were standing on the street corner across from it arguing on where to dine. We noticed it and gave it a go. The first night, I ate grilled trout topped with roasted pecans. It was served with black truffle grits and wild mushrooms with spinach. Fucking phenomenal! It was the best food I had eaten in a restaurant in YEARS! Everything was fresh and prepared to absolute perfection. My wife's bacon bison cheeseburger was also a work of art, but it didn't hold a candle to the trout. The in-house brew I had to accompany my fish was an american brown ale. Perfect bitterness, plenty of body. More flavor than any American dark beer I'd tasted in some time. Spectacular meal. So we went back the next night!