Phil’s Birthday
My best friend Phil, his birthday is in the first week of February, moved to Huntsville to open a physical therapy clinic and left me behind in Chattanooga to suffer with our beautiful mountains and the best riverboat cruises in the US! Well, he cam back to see me and man had a lot of things changed since the last time he was here.
There have always been a ton of things to do in Chattanooga, but Chattanooga has continually grown over the last 2 decades and now we are getting cool weird stuff! Keep Chattanooga Weird! The city has 10 breweries now and they are actually thinking about doing a local beer festival on the Southern Belle Riverboat and having a 4 hour cruise! There a bunch of new things to do in Chattanooga. You’ve always had the big dogs like the Southern Belle Riverboat, Ruby Falls, Rock City and the TN Aquarium, but now you have a huge craft beer, craft cocktails and a big foodie scene in Chattanooga.
We started the evening at one of the best restaurants in town, Alleia. They have my favorite app in town, their honey bruschetta is quite simply phenomenal! We had a couple cold beers, I had the usual, my favorite, cold Coors Light, and Phil had a local Chattanooga Brewing Co. beer. I had the margherita pizza and Phil had the Red Fish. Great food, great atmosphere. We left there and drove about a quarter mile to Oddstory, which is a new brewery in town on MLK and had a flight of their beers, which Phil said were great, he’s the expert. Really cool place, one big room, tons of seating and fresh new vibe that you are seeing alot of with the exposed brick, rafters, and drify wood walls. Waltzed over to Hutton and Smith, another local brew and Phil didn’t enjoy their beer as much as Oddstory, but still said it was very good, small place great bartender!
From their we went to Coin Op, which is locally owned by one of my buddies Brian Hennen, awesome place to get a cold beer and play old school video and arcade games! We chose to play Mario Kart up on the projector screen for like 2 hours! Alot of fun remembering what it used to be like when you were a kid!
At that point we called it quits and got an UBER to the house! Phil and I stayed within a quarter mile of where we were the entire night and did a ton of stuff and visited alot of ppl and saw a bunch of cool bars. We probably passed another 5 or 6 that we didn’t go into, there are like 6 other areas of downtown Chattanooga just like this! And thats just downtown, Chattanooga is increasingly giving it’s locals and visitors alike tons of things to do in the city and it is becoming more and more known and less of a local gem. I hope we can find a beautiful medium between the 2 without destroying what Chattanooga is at it’s core, The Coolest Place on Earth!