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Triumph Brewing Company

Channeling the spirits of my pub-dwelling predecessors, I strolled down Triumph Brewing Company’s long entryway with a sense of womb-like familiarity. I picked up the menu for a cursory glance, already knowing I was going to order my favorite item, the Epic Burger. Shock, numbness, ice-cold fear: It was gone.

I reeled like a Weeble about to fall down. To calm my nerves I ordered an Imperial Stout, a dark, rich beer with a velvety consistency brewed in the tradition of Russia's imperial court. Soothed by my taste of royalty, I screwed my courage to the sticking point, no longer afraid of the menu makeover but thrilled by the possibilities it presented.

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I ordered the braised flank steak sandwich, a zesty combination of succulent flank steak, avocado, onion and cilantro relish, radish and chili arbol aioli. The sandwich turned out to be a delight, as the radish, relish and aioli combined to give the sandwich an unexpectedly spicy pop. This flavor blast was balanced by the avocado, which mellowed the spices enough to keep them from overwhelming the steak.

The pairing with the stout was a little strange, but when I switched to the Zythos IPA, a lighter beer typified by a honeyed bitterness, the flavors settled into a more complimentary exchange. Triumph’s quasi-hipster atmosphere enhanced the thrill of the combination, as I blissfully imagined my delightfully scruffy fellow patrons raising a collective glass to my entirely accidental feat of beer connoisseurship.

The real draw of Triumph is the beer. After all, food is available at many places on Nassau Street, but you can only get draught craft beer at one: Triumph Brewing Company. The fact that Triumph’s interpretation of pub food is delicious is almost window-dressing once you’ve put down its beer sampler, a seven-salvo salute to high quality beer that every Princetonian should indulge in at least once.

5 out of 5 paws

Pros: Great beer, great atmosphere and aioli so good it’s worth figuring out what the hell aioli is.

Cons: It gets pretty packed on weekends.

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