Doing the introduction thing

It’s not that you can’t get a great meal in this town. You just have to kill it yourself.

There’s no place on Earth I’d rather live than Juneau, a town of about 30,000 in Alaska’s southeast Panhandle, but the dining scene has long ranged between middling and awful. Considering we get a million tourists a year - most of them affluent cruise ship types - plus an influx of politicians and wealthy lobbyists because we’re the state capital, there’s plenty of incentive for a few good chefs.

But the best meal here remains king crabs bought live from fishermen at the dock. You take the crabs home, step on them, rip off all the legs at once, then boil them in a very large pot. In second place is a whole king salmon wrapped in foil and thrown on the backyard pit grill.

These occasions of Last Frontier spirit are rare, however, since like the rest of the modern world life tends to revolve around too many hours in office cubicles. So at the end of long day, when someone says “I could really go for a good steak right now,” it’d be nice having a reliable place to go for one.

The good news is the scene is slowly improving. The bad news is there’s a long way to go.

This mediocrity is seldom reflected in tourist guides, where recommendations are often questionable and out-of-date, and in local newspapers. In fact, the title of this blog, Consuming Juneau, is taken from a long-ago column in the local daily that tried offering no-holds-barred reviews of stuff, only to get killed when businesses complained in droves. A restaurant review blog at the paper’s Web site died last year for similar reasons.

This blog is reviving and continuing those posts in an attempt to offer, to my knowledge, the only place offering objective restaurant reviews of Juneau and other places in Southeast Alaska.

I’d like to think these are something more than the ramblings of the uninformed or someone with an agenda, since they’re based on the opinions of a group who meets weekly to shoot-the-spit at whatever place suits the mood that day. It’s a pretty diverse group. We work everything from executive to blue-collar jobs, live in everything from million-dollar homes to trailers. Our hobbies range from death-defying mountaineering to "Deadliest Catch." Our group, among others, includes a gourmet-caliber cook, a frequent wedding reception worker, a vegetarian, a one-time rancher, a comfort food junkie and a person whose first priority is ordering the most unusual dish possible. We've collectively eaten good and bad meals throughout Alaska, the U.S. and dozens of countries around the world. We know the merits of fresh-caught whale in Barrow, prime dry-aged Midwest steak and how certain cooks can do wonders with lentils cooked in a stone tea hut at 15,000 feet in Nepal.

The point is to give serious diners an apples-to-apples comparison of how Juneau’s establishments rate against those in the big city.

We’re not snobs whose expectations of fine dining is $50 mac-n-cheese with shaved truffles. A hole-in-the wall place that does nothing but make dumplings is among our favorites. The bottom line is how well a place does whatever it’s aiming for and if it’s a fun place to be. Ratings on based on a four-star system, with no curve just because we’re a small town with some limits on our access to first-rate supplies. In general, the guidelines for food are as follows:

Four stars: A transcendent experience featuring top-quality food and service, unique in character, and in general surpassing expectations even for what might normally be considered a quality meal.

Three stars: A very good establishment that meets high-quality expectations for food and service. There may be a few pleasant surprises or letdowns, but none so remarkable as to detract from a consistency that makes it worth recommending.

Two stars: A good experience that will usually satisfy, if not thrill. A notable flaw in food or service will drop an otherwise excellent eatery to this level, as will a more regular occurrence of minor problems. Will usually be recommended, but with suggestions of where to exercise caution.

One star: Not recommended. There may be a reason or two to visit such as a particular dish or great view, but overall flaws in food and service are almost certain to result in a disappointing meal.

Technically a rating of zero stars is possible, but this would involve a level of negligence so bad it's unlikely to be met, such as the group getting food poisoning from a variety of dishes - or robbed by the dishwasher at gunpoint.

Finally, we’re doing our best to write these according to the standards of real reviewers, meaning multiple anonymous visits and not accepting any freebies. We’re also not letting past experiences prejudice current ratings. Feedback from anyone who visits these places is welcome and we’ll try to post some that doesn’t appear to be from publicity trolls or people with unreasonable axes to grind. They will, of course, not affect our grades. For anyone who disagrees with those, just remember you can always question the taste of people who like living in a town with three times the annual rainfall of Seattle.