Sushi At The Uaf Wood Center

No smoking. Cheap pitchers. Great nachos. Looks a bit like a board room, but great for a few beers with friends to start the night.

Hail to thee, dear old Wood Center Pub!!! Without your cheap wood paneling, cheesy nachos and wonderful selection of pitchers and reasonable prices, I never would've survived five years of a quality university education. Many a night I have spent at your tables working furiously on a paper or battling pub trivia. Your beautiful bartenders... your whacky comedy skits... your infamous Halloween parties... your epic battles of wit and wisdom during election season... where else in the world could a rocket scientist, dumpster diver, SWAT team officer, army vet, sorority sister, transgendered researcher and a local journalist all sit down together for a pint and get along in happy harmony? Go there, you must. Drink there, you will. Yoda deems it so.

The Pub is one of the cheapest places in town to get a pitcher. My standard go-to for Monday Night Football when it's that season, free nachos, raffles and the game projected on a screen make the experience. The Halloween party is insane, and live music on a regular basis gives it a great atmosphere. Unfortunately it isn't really a place you go with a dancing mindset, but occasionally if you hit it on a good night, the dancer in you won't be disappointed. I love this establishment and will continue to frequent until the day I leave Fairbanks.

The pub is one of my favourite bars in Fairbanks and the best place to get a pitcher and a chilli dog. I tend to go almost every Wednesday night as I have class to 9 and a pitcher of beer and a couple of games of pool is the best way to spend an otherwise boring night of the week. The last experience I had was humorously unfortunate but it was the exception to the rule. We had found the pub's website online to see if there was a good movie plying. The week before was Hobo With A Shotgun, which is quite possibly one of the best-underrated movies ever. We weren't able to find a schedule that extended past October but we did find a list of beers. Because we were in class we didn't read the entire website well enough because we weren't aware that they had rotating taps. We saw Killian's on the list and were excited as we were in the middle of a lecture on Irish culture in anthropology. When we got there we immediately asked if we could get a pitcher to Killian's and were slightly disappointed when we were informed about the rotating taps. Oh well, it was our fault for not reading the website and we were still in a great mood. We ordered a pitcher of Guinness and four chilli cheese dogs and proceeded to our usual table and started a game of pool. The Guinness tasted off. The fist clue was that there was almost no head when poured into the pitcher, (the bartender could have been that amazing) but there was also no head when I poured two tall glasses, (and I am definitely not that amazing). The taste wasn't quite right. It wasn't bad. We ended up finishing the pitcher with no problem; it just didn't taste like Guinness. Halfway through the first game when my colleague was about to sink a very easy shot, the bartended came over to apologize profusely and inform us that they were out of hot dogs. She offered either our money back or nachos. As we were still very hungry we opted for nachos with extra chilli on top. My colleague then promptly missed his shot. Halfway though our second game the bartender returned. Again my colleague was about to make an important shot when she came over to inform us that they were out of chilli. Again she offered our money back or nachos with extra cheese and jalapeños. We were quite hungry at this point so we still took the nachos. We got a second pitcher of something called Moose Drool or something. It was better than the faux Guinness but still wasn't quite what we were looking for. Neither of us are usually beer drinkers preferring to stay to rum or gin, (he drinks capn n coke and I gin and tonic) but the pub only has beer. Eventually we got our nachos and they tasted like the best nachos in the world. We were starving at this point and had downed a pitcher and a half of beer so far so we might have been bias, but they were good nachos. We will head back next Wednesday and the week after as well. Its still our favourite place to go, we just had really bad luck once.