This month, we sat down with Keith Allard, proprietor of Wikiwiki Poke Shop, Grand Rapids’ first of the kind. At the risk of rambling, I will briefly say that Wikiwiki is as singular a dining experience as I’ve ever seen in this town. Playfully serious, the atmosphere Allard’s crew has curated feels like a meme Instagram page opened a restaurant. And it’s good. I shamelessly heaped the contents of my “La The Darkbowl” onto Migos’ Sour Cream and Ranch flavored Rap Snacks and just could not believe how well the two paired. Before Wikiwiki, that sentence would have been grammatically correct, but semantically useless. With Wikiwiki, it could just be lunch.

Forty Acres Soul Kitchen, a modern adaptation of traditional Southern-style food opening this month, will be Grand Rapids’ only African American-owned full-service restaurant — that means a host, waitstaff, full bar and food menu. Let that sink in for minute. In the state’s second-largest city of 200,000 people. In 2018.

When suckling the last globs of sauce from a rib, gnawing at the thing for remaining bits of meat, circling a good clean bone, it becomes hard to imagine any cuisine quite as savage as barbecue. It wears no disguise. Order up a joint’s three-meat platter and look at your dish. What you’ll find is a plate of animal parts torn asunder, plus a square of cornbread as distraction. Meat. It’s so obviously central to barbecue that you’re not wrong to wonder why anyone bothers with baked beans at all.

Tucked away in a nondescript strip mall in Holland’s Beechwood neighborhood, Brewery 4 Two 4 takes experimentation to the max. That’s somewhat out of necessity, since the brewery produces its beer on a tiny half-barrel system at its 321 Douglas Ave. taproom.