Trendy? Me?

**Author's note.  My apologies, this was originally scheduled for 8:00 this morning, but it never published. 

So I've never been a trendsetter, nor have I ever been a follower.  I've kind of made my own way, and nobody seems to care what that is one way or the other.

But if putting fried eggs on bacon cheeseburgers is a trend, haul me up onto that bandwagon, baby! 

I'm up in the greater Cleveland area again this week, and eating restaurant food far more often than I should.  By chance last evening, I found the B Spot.  Beer, brats, burgers, bologna (fried), it's quite the place.  How often do you go someplace that has a pickle bar?  Not often enough, in my opinion.  Pickled onions, green tomatoes, spicy pepper relish, hot sweet pickle chunks, garlic dills and house-recipe ketchup.  Fresh rosemary on the crispy sliver-cut fries.  Yolk running down my fingers and commingling with juices from a truly rare burger. 

(Really, dark pink, soft and beefy, just the way a burger was meant to be.) 

I was surprised, during my meal, to look down at the paper holding my fries to see Chef Michael Symon's name on the logo.  I knew he opened a few more restaurants since my last major visit to the city.  But this was a sight to behold.  An entire page of beers, many of them on draft?  Pulled pork and pickled jalepenos on fries, the midwestern answer to the nacho?  A vanilla bean apple pie BACON milkshake?

I'm not a fan of 'celebrity', of style over substance, but I have to say, I like what I'm seeing and I want more.  I'm ready to take back most of the less-than-kind words I may have had for Chef Symon in the past.  Only time will tell.

Oh, and an amusing rental car anecdote, for those of you who can't get enough of it.  Monday night at the restaurant, I caught sight of a car behind me, out of the corner of my eye, as I was pulling gracelessly into a parking space.  When I turned my head, it was gone.  But, convinced I must have missed it, and concerned that I might back up to straighten my park job and strike someone's beloved automobile, I looked again.

The Grand Marquis is so sporking big, so...damn...huge, that I mistook my own rental car in my peripheral vision for AN ENTIRELY SEPARATE VEHICLE. 

Gee. Thanks, Enterprise.  Way to make me look forward to Friday.