RESTAURANT OF THE WEEK
A PERSONAL REVIEW OF RESTAURANTS AROUND THE WORLD

GLACIER BREWHOUSE
ANCHORAGE, ALASKA

Call me crazy but I took my wife up to Anchorage for a long Valentine's Day weekend once upon a time.  Yup -- Alaska in the winter time and it was great!

One of our favorite dining experiences in the city came at the Glacier Brewhouse.  This is a huge restaurant with a lodge type feeling.  There's nearly always a wait to get into the place, especially on weekends.  The windows are all steamed up on the outside during the winter and it feels great once you get in out of the cold.

While the Glacier Brewhouse is listed in most publications as a an Italian place, I found it to be more of a steak and seafood house.

My meal started out, as it always does when they're on the menu, with steamed Manila clams.  Tender, succulent and wonderful dabbed in drawn butter (never mind the occasional speck of sand!).

I had rockfish for my main selection and my wife enjoyed a nice New York strip steak.  Both were great. King crab legs were on the menu but they were very expensive and earlier during this visit, I tried them at another restaurant and they were no better in Alaska then they were back in the lower 48.  So why pay more for the same thing you can get at home for the same price?  And there's no "extra freshness" angle, either.  It still comes frozen to most restaurants and markets in Anchorage even though the crab is actually caught in Alaska.

If you're into beer--and this is a brew house with its own micro-brewery--you'll love sampling the various beers.  They offer some year round and others are seasonal.

We're not into desserts all that much but my wife had to cave in and try the turtle cheesecake and she talked about it for weeks.

This is a big place with a lot of happy diners that does a booming amount of business.  It's a fun and rewarding dining experience.

Check 'em out on the world wide web here.

Additional Alaska Restaurant Reviews

Annabell's - Ketchikan
Sea Galley Restaurant - Anchorage