Thursday, June 12, 2014

FOOD BLOTTER: Ephata Cafe and Crafted Tap House open, goodbye SpoCOOL

Posted By on Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 5:40 PM

Ephata Cafe, located at 1908 W. Northwest Blvd, is now open and serving up a variety of juices, smoothies, sandwiches and other snacks. Opening Week specials continue through Saturday, when there’s a cake and ice cream celebration at 3 pm.

Crafted Tap House + Kitchen in Coeur d’Alene is opening this Sunday.

Also in Coeur d’Alene, a new taproom is opening soon — but for kombucha, not beer. Read more about Bare Culture Kombucha in this week’s Entree newsletter.

This weekend — Father’s Day, hint hint — is Swirl Washington, a new evening wine event at the Davenport with winemakers and chefs from around the region. It’s meant to be similar to Taste Washington Spokane, an annual event that ended in 2010.

The Fainting Goat, a wine bar and restaurant in Wallace, is celebrating one year today with champagne and cake.

Hopped Up Brewing is celebrating its first anniversary on Saturday with live music and beer floats.

The Washington Brewers Festival is this weekend, but unfortunately held on the other side of the state. But a few of Washington beer guru Kendall Jones’ festival picks are available in our area: Iron Goat’s Dry Fly barrel-aged creations, Orlison’s IPL and Rye IPL, Ramblin Road’s Belgian-style beers, and Twelve String’s tequila barrel-aged beers — “Who ages beer in tequila barrels? Gotta try it.”

A handful of local breweries took home honors from last weekend’s Mountain Brewers Beer Fest: Laughing Dog got gold for its Anubis Imperial Coffee Porter and bronze for its De Aschste Hond (a wild ale in the fruit category); Paradise Creek Brewery took home gold for its Hoe’s Daddy Dunkelweizen; and Selkirk Abbey earned gold for its Saint Joseph. See the full results here.

This week’s Inlander is the biggest of the year, primarily because of the 84 pages of Summer Guide. We did Summer Guide categories for both food and drinks this year. We mentioned cold brew in the food section — Roast House is offering free classes on how to do it properly.

Remi Olsen is moving away from Spokane, the Spokesman reports, bringing an end of sorts to the reviews and updates of SpoCOOL. The site lives on in a new form, and the blog portion is still available here.)

Ha Ha’s Teriyaki Grill was hit with some vandalism and racist graffiti.

If you’ve never been to the Saturday farmers market in Moscow, it’s serious business. Vendor spots are juried and coveted, and the city is hosting tryouts for new food and craft vendors next Friday. Applications are here.

A little advance notice — next week’s Thursday Market on Perry also includes a food truck rally.

A New York chef spends plenty of pages of his new book praising WSU researcher Stephen Jones, a leading wheat breeder whose work involves small farms in creating diverse wheat varieties.

This has been around a while but I'd missed it until now, so maybe you did, too: A guy in Brooklyn sends grilled cheese sandwiches with little parachutes down to people on the sidewalk from his upper-story window. Here, described as only TV news can describe it.

Read previous food news here.

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Wheatland Bank Free Horse & Carriage Rides @ Riverfront Park

Fridays, 4-8 p.m. Continues through June 21
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Lisa Waananen

Lisa Waananen is the web editor and a staff writer at the Inlander. She specializes in data and graphics, and her recent cover stories have been about family history, the legacy of Spokane photographer Charles A. Libby and genetically modified food...