I hadn’t yet taken a bar stool at Doe’s Eat Place when a hulking man with a ginger goatee asked me what I wanted to drink. Since the taps were out of sight, I asked for a list, which pulled a guffaw from the guy sitting next to me, who was sipping a bottle of Miller Light and pulling at the fried biscuits that are a Doe’s trademark. Turns out, the list—or more probably The List—is more than 100 bottles strong, including some that aren’t popular among even the city’s most devoted drinkers. “If you can finish a bottle of this, all credit due ya,” he tells me, pointing at an obscure microbrew on my list. There’s some incentive to suffer the pain, though. “If you finish The Beer Tour, you get a free steak dinner,” he says with suddenly wide eyes. Content to pay for my meal, I get a menu from Mandy, the curly blonde bartender, as Matt, the goateed owner wearing a salmon-striped Polo button up, sets me up with a Diamond Bear IPA. “Pretty good for an Arkansas beer,” he backhandedly assures me. I attempt to settle in with the menu, but my fellow pine-riders insist on sharing their input. By the time the raves for the biscuits, the shrimp and the steak die down, I’ve been told that every item on the dangerously short menu is worth ordering. I settle on a ribeye that comes with new potatoes, a simple salad and those fried “drop biscuits.” Down at the end of the bar, a woman and her husband are getting drunk, loudly, on whiskey. To their left sits a man who may or may not be sleeping with the woman to his left; she seems more interested in the couple between us. They have a three year old, “about to be four,” and he works at a tire shop. She’s wearing a dark grey University of Arkansas sweatshirt and has her hair impossibly styled, with sweeping bangs and half a dozen different highlights. He’s wearing a black zip-up hoodie and a backward black baseball cap, with an inscrutable logo embroidered on the band, and glasses with thick lenses. He hasn’t shaved his gaunt cheeks in a few days. She’s outpacing her boyfriend’s drinking and soon switches to whatever Mandy’s able to concoct. She doesn’t seem too picky, as long as there’s vodka in it. My salad, drenched in vinegar dressing, arrives. Black Hat calls over one of the bussers, whose nickname is Turtle. Vaguely, he starts to describe seeing an old friend around town. I turn to the New Orleans-Dallas game on the TV to offer a little faux privacy but I can still hear their conversation. When Turtle didn’t quite get Black Hat’s meaning, the latter says, now that I appear distracted, that he bumped into the guy at an NA meeting. He quickly adds, almost apologizing, that he’s only going to help “keep my head straight, you know?” Turtle, I assume while wondering when Jason Kidd was traded to Dallas, nods sagely at this point, as the conversation dies. He’s called back to the kitchen and Black Hat goes outside to smoke a cigarette. The ribeye has arrived by the time he’s back, and conversation at the bar gets more and more lively as Mandy keeps pouring. The subject of snake handlers comes up. Matt says the proper pronunciation of Philippians, the book of the bible that inspired the faith, is “Fill-IP-pi-ans.” There’s some debate, so cell phones come out, the mobile web is consulted, Wikipedia is loaded. One guy calls his mom. The consensus is that Matt is right. Soon, we’re talking about visitors from far away and how they all seem to think that Northwest Arkansas is the backwoods of the backwoods. “We’ve got indoor plumbin’ and everything!” the whiskey drunk man at the end of the bar asserts. (He didn’t slap the bar for emphasis, but he should have.) There’s a little bit of ribbing coming my way, but the tide of anti-Yankee sentiment is held back when I mention that I actually grew up in Missouri. Later, Matt says in passing that he might go home after his shift and relax in the hot tub. One of his coworkers jerks his head in my direction, pointing at the New York City kid wearing a blazer, and says, “Careful, he might take you up on it.”

I hadn’t yet taken a bar stool at Doe’s Eat Place when a hulking man with a ginger goatee asked me what I wanted to drink. Since the taps were out of sight, I asked for a list, which pulled a guffaw from the guy sitting next to me, who was sipping a bottle of Miller Light and pulling at the fried biscuits that are a Doe’s trademark. Turns out, the list—or more probably The List—is more than 100 bottles strong, including some that aren’t popular among even the city’s most devoted drinkers. “If you can finish a bottle of this, all credit due ya,” he tells me, pointing at an obscure microbrew on my list. There’s some incentive to suffer the pain, though. “If you finish The Beer Tour, you get a free steak dinner,” he says with suddenly wide eyes.

Content to pay for my meal, I get a menu from Mandy, the curly blonde bartender, as Matt, the goateed owner wearing a salmon-striped Polo button up, sets me up with a Diamond Bear IPA. “Pretty good for an Arkansas beer,” he backhandedly assures me. I attempt to settle in with the menu, but my fellow pine-riders insist on sharing their input. By the time the raves for the biscuits, the shrimp and the steak die down, I’ve been told that every item on the dangerously short menu is worth ordering. I settle on a ribeye that comes with new potatoes, a simple salad and those fried “drop biscuits.”

Down at the end of the bar, a woman and her husband are getting drunk, loudly, on whiskey. To their left sits a man who may or may not be sleeping with the woman to his left; she seems more interested in the couple between us. They have a three year old, “about to be four,” and he works at a tire shop. She’s wearing a dark grey University of Arkansas sweatshirt and has her hair impossibly styled, with sweeping bangs and half a dozen different highlights. He’s wearing a black zip-up hoodie and a backward black baseball cap, with an inscrutable logo embroidered on the band, and glasses with thick lenses. He hasn’t shaved his gaunt cheeks in a few days. She’s outpacing her boyfriend’s drinking and soon switches to whatever Mandy’s able to concoct. She doesn’t seem too picky, as long as there’s vodka in it.

My salad, drenched in vinegar dressing, arrives. Black Hat calls over one of the bussers, whose nickname is Turtle. Vaguely, he starts to describe seeing an old friend around town. I turn to the New Orleans-Dallas game on the TV to offer a little faux privacy but I can still hear their conversation. When Turtle didn’t quite get Black Hat’s meaning, the latter says, now that I appear distracted, that he bumped into the guy at an NA meeting. He quickly adds, almost apologizing, that he’s only going to help “keep my head straight, you know?” Turtle, I assume while wondering when Jason Kidd was traded to Dallas, nods sagely at this point, as the conversation dies. He’s called back to the kitchen and Black Hat goes outside to smoke a cigarette.

The ribeye has arrived by the time he’s back, and conversation at the bar gets more and more lively as Mandy keeps pouring. The subject of snake handlers comes up. Matt says the proper pronunciation of Philippians, the book of the bible that inspired the faith, is “Fill-IP-pi-ans.” There’s some debate, so cell phones come out, the mobile web is consulted, Wikipedia is loaded. One guy calls his mom. The consensus is that Matt is right.

Soon, we’re talking about visitors from far away and how they all seem to think that Northwest Arkansas is the backwoods of the backwoods. “We’ve got indoor plumbin’ and everything!” the whiskey drunk man at the end of the bar asserts. (He didn’t slap the bar for emphasis, but he should have.) There’s a little bit of ribbing coming my way, but the tide of anti-Yankee sentiment is held back when I mention that I actually grew up in Missouri.

Later, Matt says in passing that he might go home after his shift and relax in the hot tub. One of his coworkers jerks his head in my direction, pointing at the New York City kid wearing a blazer, and says, “Careful, he might take you up on it.”