What has been a meme in FUN for years now comes to fruition! Introducing FUN Food Reviews where Tyler and maybe other FUN hosts provide food reviews from competition venues. This week featuring sub-par Pizza Villa from the Week 0 Event in Bedford, NH https://youtu.be/X5Y7hHG9eR8
What are your favorite competition venue food offerings? We may look at doing some off-venue as well.
Will you be reviewing the Volunteer Food as well, or just the food available for the masses? (Some places it’s probably the same, but some places have really nice volunteer food.) Any news on the planned schedule of events that future episodes will cover? Or is the idea to “secret shopper” it so that events won’t know to expect you and try to inflate their rating? 
I probably won’t rate volunteer food because it’s being provided for free and I don’t like biting the hand that literally feeds me. All reviews will be of something that I paid for.
I’ve posted my travel schedule a couple places but here it is. Other hosts have asked about doing reviews too so there may be more places:
Week -2: FACC Event Grand Rapids
Week -1: Week 0 event Manchester
Week 0: Not traveling but Premiere night and 1690 Israel stream
Week 1: FiM Kettering 1 Friday / FiM Calvin University Sat
Week 2: Finger Lakes Regional
Week 3: Central Illinois Regional
Week 4: Iowa Regional Fri / Wisconsin Regional Sat
Week 5: Las Vegas Regional
Week 6: FiT Championship
Week 7: MSC
Week 8: Champs
I wish I had the mental bandwidth / budget / ability to care this much about the quality of volunteer food. Alas, almost always dictated by the venue and cost, and (almost?) never dictated by trying to sway our FUN Food Review score.
The topic of brisket tacos came up in a thread a few months ago. There is a place, Tacos A Go Go that sells some pretty good ones and they have a location about a mile from GRB so you will have two chances to try them out. Please note they are only open for breakfast and lunch.
The homemade Mac & Cheese at Greater Kansas City was the best.
Inside the Venue: Beats me.
Outside the Venue:
I find this list heavily bias. But if you go to Carl’s Bakery’s make sure you order ahead if you want more than a dozen or to pick your assortment of donuts. (This is not a joke) 
I concur. It is biased toward things I like to eat, and have already eaten
Is this your ranked order? Or in no particular order? I would assume the former given there are numbers.
But this is good info as this will be my first time personally attending CIR.
Jack, what do you think is incorrect?
Nothing bad at all. These are great places for teams. They’re use to handling Cat, Bradley,and Hospitals. Will say alot of pizza places not being Chicago ,and missing the best one Agatucci’s.
No there are a bunch of great places to eat at. Blue Duck is very good. And the Donut Nazi (siendfield reference) and they’re donuts are great.
Great question!
Not really, numbers are sorta arbitrary. Honesty just depends on what you’re in the mood for.
Blue Duck and Oliver’s North are the two places my wife and I are on a first-name basis with the wait staff locally. Everything else is tier-2 if you ask me, but all would be on my recommendation list.
Jack isn’t kidding about Carl’s though: Excellent donuts, but they have the strange business model of becoming disgruntled when you try to purchase lots of things from them. Trefzger’s, on the other hand, is on a first-name basis with our lead mentor.
Agatucci’s is also excellent, a notable omission. “Tiger sauce” is their signature addition to some great thin-crust pizza.
Other omissions, re-reading said list:
Avanti’s or La Gondola are the other local sandwich and Italian places. Food is solid (I’m a big fan of Avanti’s lasagna) and the prices are as rock-bottom as you can get.
Schooner’s Bar and Grill also is my favorite spot for the signature Central Illinois Fried Pork Tenderloin. They’ll ask you how many buns you want for it. The answer should be between 3 and 5, depending on how much you like bread.
Kelleher’s Irish Pub downtown is also great across the board!
And while I don’t generally hand out recommendations for purveyors of craft “mentor cookies” on this website, PM if needed, there’s a number of good ones of those too!
@Tyler_Olds this was a great idea. Now all these local teams at events will definitely bring you their favorite food to review. Dont worry @Nick_Coussens , @gerthworm, I will help ya taste test at CIR.
One bite everyone know the rules.
I remember the year FLR made a faux version of the famous Rochester, NY staple, the Garbage Plate for lunch. It was a nice try.
I also remember while working the Las Vegas regional all the field reset kids ate all the food before the key volunteers got anything and sent them scrambling for their lunch. One of the refs went out and came back with In & Out which was on the UNLV campus. I was very excited for the opportunity and got a Double for dinner that night. Beside the really crunchy onions in the burger what stood out was the sign that stated you had 20 minutes to eat your food and then you had to go. I guess that’s why they’re called In & Out.
In all of my travels the best I ever ate was in Chicago. The is amazing there.
My favourite when we go to MSC is Tony’s I75 Restaurant. It’s not actually in Saginaw but my team always stays in Birch Run/Frankenmuth so we can go there. My favourite is the BLT which has 1 pound of bacon.
its the 2nd reply to this thread
Sounds reasonable, if not actually necessary. There could be medical risks.
Interesting that their menu shows this as a “lighter side” item:
