About a month ago, a good friend of mine and I made the arduous 7-hour drive to Kansas City for our annual Fantasy Football draft.  I know a lot of the guys affiliated with this league actually read my blog posts (apparently they aren’t horrible friends), but I have to make the narrative such that each reader has never met these people, and God have mercy on your soul if you ever do.  I honestly think if you split the entire group of us up and talk to each member individually, you would leave the conversation thinking that you just talked to an intelligent and moderately successful engineer.  But if you analyze the way the entire group talks and acts over the course of the weekend, you may find yourself in need of a full-blown lobotomy – think Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character, Douglas Quaid, in Total Recall.  (Get your ass to Mars!)  For God’s sake, we make the loser of last year’s league wear a dress during the next year’s draft.  Do you have any idea how hideous a grown man with a shaved head looks in a dress?  If you have Alzheimer’s, it would be the last image you would forget.

Now that I set the table for this long-awaited post, one of the league members is a partial owner of The Local Pig, which has locations in Westport, MO, and in an industrial area in Kansas City.  The Local Pig KC location is your typical butcher shop, where you can select locally raised and butchered fine cuts of pork, beef, chicken, lamb, and duck.  We had our Friday night dinner gathering at the KC location, and had some excellent pulled pork sandwiches, beans and beer.  The Friday night dinner offered the dozen-and-a-half or so of us to hang out in an intimate setting while we berated each other’s previous fantasy football seasons, reminisced about our time at SDSM&T, and in general caught up with everyone’s lives.  A lot can happen in one year…

Later that night, we made our way back to Westport, and since The Local Pig Westport location was conveniently two blocks away from our hotel, of course we had to make a stop there for the start of our bar hopping adventures.  The LP/W location is quite the opposite of its KC location.  Westport has a specialty food menu, and its meat and cheese charcuterie plate is the establishment’s staple menu item, and it’s absolutely fantastic.  Surrounding the main dining area next to the bar is an L-shaped refrigerator stocked completely with bottled craft beers, and they also had about a dozen (probably more; I wasn’t even remotely sober) craft beers on tap.  The tap beers offered a great variety, including a seasonal pumpkin beer that had just been released.  It was a craft beer snob’s dream.

Our friend did claim that his bartender would make me the best Old Fashioned that I’ve ever had.  Of course, I was skeptical – not because I’m a bad friend – but because I’ve found out the hard way over the last several months that it’s much more difficult to make a great Old Fashioned than it is to simply say “great Old Fashioneds are our signature cocktail because it’s printed on our menu”.  But he is the host with the most, so I was not going to deny him the opportunity to prove me wrong.

I watched somewhat intently on how the bartender made his version of my favorite drink.  I don’t remember the name of the whiskey, but he immediately caught my half-drunk attention when he started his concoction with rye whiskey, which up until that moment, I had assumed was only reserved for Manhattans.  The rest of the bartender’s delivery was about as expected for a decent Old Fashioned:  the simple syrup and the Angostura bitters.  But it wasn’t until the last second when I noticed the bartender had put all of the ingredients, along with a little ice, into a bartender shaker and shook the mixture before pouring the contents into the typical whiskey glass, topping it off with a generous slice of orange peel (which he made sure to squeeze any remaining juice out of the peel onto the rim of the glass).

The result was a damn tasty drink!  If you’ve had rye whiskey before, then it tasted about what you’re thinking:  dry, grainy, with a hint of black pepper…. and bitters.  From my brief experiences with Old Fashioneds, this was quite an unorthodox version of the drink from A-Z.  Rye whiskey is definitely not my favorite (otherwise, I’d be having more Manhattans in my diet, duh!), and the taste of rye can turn a lot of bourbon fans off in general.  So it’s fair to say that using rye as their base for the Old Fashioned can be risky, but that’s a minute critique of the overall quality of their drink.  I’m not willing to say it was the best all-time Old Fashioned that I’ve had, but I will say it was thisclose.

If you are ever in Kansas City, head out to Westport – it’s only about 15 minutes away from downtown – and stop at the Local Pig.  A couple of Old Fashioneds paired with their meat and cheese charcuterie plate (which also comes with some sliced pieces of baguette bread, orange marmalade jam and a spicy mustard) will sure to get your weekend started right before a home Chiefs game on Sunday.