Sip and stay awhile

It's an easy game, this reviewing of restaurants and bars.

In most cases, the fish really do just lie there in the barrel for the critic to shoot. One mocks the scene, questions the authenticity of the menu, harrumphs into one’s make-believe ascot and gives the almighty thumb's-up or thumb’s-down. And everyone can play along on Yelp!

If you're really good, you even get to score it all on a clever rating scale. Since stars are passe and bells are taken, my editor and I discussed pictograms like unicorns or powdered wigs or maybe even Ben Franklin or Kyle Kendrick heads as our scale. We imagined restaurateurs agonizing over whether they received two or three Kyle Kendricks, the difference between success or failure. But then we dropped the idea. Because if we're totally honest, being that kind of restaurant critic is a pretty empty thing.

My outings over the past couple of weeks to the city's beer gardens - in particular, Stephen Starr's new Frankford Hall in Fishtown - clearly drove home this point.

For instance, I could tell you that the jagerschnitzel at Frankford Hall was a little dry and overcooked, or that the traditional spaetzle, cheese and onion was a wet mess, or that the weisswurst should have just been boiled rather than grilled. I could sneeringly point out, as several blogs have, the incongruity of glitzy Starr opening his theme-park beer garden smack in the middle of Fishtown hipsterdom.

But then how would I square the fact that I'd spent just about the most pleasant Saturday of the summer, day-drinking with my friends Chris and Jane, both of whom happened to live in Munich and could have nitpicked Frankford Hall all day long?

Chris, who lived more than dozen years in Germany, gave Frankford Hall high marks for authenticity - in particular the German potato salad and the bratwurst and red cabbage - though he had a few gripes, beginning with the beer list. "Pils has no place in a beer garden. Kolsch has no place in a beer garden," he said, noting that both styles are popular in northern Germany, not Bavaria, spiritual home of the beer garden.

We sat at long, wooden tables in the cozy gravel courtyard and drank liters of Spaten Oktoberfest and Paulaner Munich Lager and Köstritzer Schwarzbier, and ate gigantic pretzels with spicy mustard that might just be the best (and at $8, the most expensive) in the city. Over the several hours we spent drinking, a sort of nitpicking became the running joke.