When I was in Atlanta for the fantastic Culinary Curiosity Dinner we held at Southern Belle, I used a few hours of my downtime to visit the World of Coca-Cola. It’s essentially a huge and pretty fancy museum all about Coke. The most interesting part, to me, was “Taste It!”, a big room with dozens of soda fountain dispensers allowing you to taste cups of different Coca-Cola Corp. drinks from around the world.

Fanta Apple Kiwi from Thailand was my favorite. But the worst soda — and this was pretty much unanimous among the many people I saw try it — was Beverly from Italy. I’d been hearing about this drink for years, on Reddit and on the Steamed Hams Society Discord; it’s famously bad tasting and it’s also available at the Coca-Cola exhibit at Epcot Center, where they have a similar but apparently smaller soda sampling place. Beverly is one of those thing like the Altoona-Style Pizza which gets a ton of Internet (anti-)hype, but few people have actually tried. I am now one of the “lucky” few…

Honestly, to me, it tasted like tonic water that had something wrong with it. It’s truly the Malort of sodas. (It has an “intensely bitter grapefruit-like flavor [hence Malort] designed to stimulate the appetite before a meal” according to Google.)

Beverly is not intentionally bad! In fact, many people consider it good! As you read above, it’s an apertif — a category of beverage I know absolutely nothing about. It seems Coca-Cola Corp. discontinued the drink in 2009 but obviously they’re still making enough of it to repulse hordes of museum visitors each day.

Because I am perversely attracted to this sort of thing (which is why we have served the Altoona-style pizza at three of my Culinary Curiosity Dinners this summer) I simply had to memorialize my Beverly experience by ordering a bootleg t-shirt online…

The SUMMER CURIOSITY DINNERS have concluded!

Fourteen dinners between Memorial Day and Labor Day, with countless American regional culinary oddities served! I’m taking September off, then the Fall Tour begins Oct. 11 in Wilmington, NC. I’m still setting up the other cities but stay tuned here or at BillOakley.com for info and tickets.

And there will be a SPECIAL HOLIDAY EDITION of the Culinary Curiosity Dinner! In Portland and possibly one or two other cities in the first week of December!

This Week’s All-Timer

This is a recurring feature of this newsletter in which I highlight one of my all-time favorite foods or food products which I haven’t talked or posted about in a while.

This week it’s Beecher’s “Worlds’s Best” Mac & Cheese. You may have seen this in your grocer’s freezer. It has a luscious flavor that is richer than most pre-made mac & cheese and, with the penne, the texture can’t be beat.

The box say it “Serves 2-4”. Uh, yeah. No WAY one guy such as myself could eat all that ALONE. Right….?

This stuff is expensive as hell but it’s worth it. You can find it much cheaper and in larger containers at Costco, though!

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