top of the food chain

Feast with the Beasts is one of my favorite annual events. Attendees sampled food from some of the area's best restaurants while strolling through the Knoxville Zoo this past Saturday night. The weather was warm but not unbearably hot like two years ago. And it didn't rain like last year.

I especially liked the shrimp grits from the Green Hills Grille. I can't remember which restaurant served fried alligator meat. I felt a little guilty about tasting it mere minutes after viewing the living rare white alligator in his tank. I didn't try everything but almost everything I did try was really good. The only food I should have skipped was something they called a "boneless hot wing" from Applebee's. It was just a chicken nugget.

The darker it got, the easier it was to forget you're at a zoo. I could barely see the silhouette of an African elephant by the time we got to that end of the zoo. I wondered if the elephant was bothered by the noise and the all the cigarette smoke. I wish smoking was prohibited at the zoo. Heck, I wish smoking was prohibited in all public places. My wife and I knew it was time to leave at the point in the evening when it seemed to change from an eating event to a drinking event. The food booths had started to run out of samples. I heard one guy tell his buddy that he hadn't gotten his $60 worth yet. The friend advised him to "keep drinking."