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If you’re going to be attending any of the Barnes Foundation’s opening festivities (or just popping in for a look in the next say, five years), be sure to stop into the Garden Restaurant for a cocktail. Senior executive chef Andrew Perekupka (of 1^st & Fresh Catering, a division of ARAMARK), has concocted a drink list to rival the top cocktail bars in the city.

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Taking its cues from city spots like Positano Coast and Fare, Conshohocken’s Isabella is going green in its glasses. Mixologists are introducing a menu of seasonal organic cocktails designed to “bring the same respect for seasonal and organic fruits and vegetables to the bar as chef Michael Cappon brings to his menu.”

For $13 or less, you can quaff a Rhubarb Mojito, a Cucumber-Lime gin refresher, a Smoked Cherry Cosmo with house-smoked organic cherries, or a Peach Margarita. Each of these drinks features organic alcohol and some (but not all) organic ingredients.

Isabella [Official website]

John Mariani wears a tie and jacket when he goes to dinner. Every dinner. The restaurant columnist for Esquire is a one-man barricade against the onslaught of informality in 21^st century dining.

Case in point: When I met him at a media conference in Pittsburgh in 2009, he told me he was planning a trip to Philly to review several restaurants for his annual 20 Best New Restaurants feature. He invited me, then an aspiring food writer, to meet him not by way of the usual “Do you want to join me?” but instead, “Would you care to dine with me?” It’s perhaps the most regal question I’ve ever answered yes to.

We had dinner at the defunct Maia in Villanova (thumbs down) then lunched the following day at Table 31, where Georges hugged him warmly and gave us a tour through the kitchen. It’s a good thing Georges left before our waiter carelessly poured red wine into a glass that was already 1/3 full of white, or Philadelphia might have witnessed its first public execution in modern history. Neither Maia nor Table 31 made the list that year but Zahav and Distrito, where he “dined” after we bid adieu, did.

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There’s a new beachfront restaurant and bar coming to sleepy Avalon this summer. To celebrate its 45^th anniversary, Windrift Resort Hotel is opening Level 2, a multi-purpose dining room and music venue. Press materials describe the indoor/outdoor design as “west coast meets east coast contemporary” and promise upscale American cuisine overseen by exec chef James Kurtz (ex of Duffy’s on the Lake in Wildwood Crest).

Serving three meals a day, the menu ranges from pancakes and traditional hotel breakfast staples to grilled sandwiches at lunch, fresh clams for happy hour, and oysters, sushi and brick-oven pizza at dinnertime. Not only that, but starting June 18, happy hour brings discounted cocktails and apps, and beginning May 26, nightfall means live bands seven nights a week.

So, should you find yourself in Avalon looking for omelets, sushi, pizza and a Jimmy Buffett cover band, now you know where to go.

Windrift Hotel [Official website]

The Maya exhibition at the Penn Museum is a big bummer. C’mon, we don’t want to be told with scholarly guarantee that the whole end-of-the-Maya-calendar-end-of-the-world thing is an American fabrication most likely perpetuated by holy rollers who believe that kind of crap anyway.  If the world’s not ending, what’s our excuse for spending the rest of this year in unabashed and debauched gluttony?

So, being a good foodie, you should skip the exhibition and just go there for lunch. As part of the exhibition, which opens Saturday and runs through Jan. 13, 2013 (there they go spoiling the surprise again), a robust offering of traditional and modern Maya food will be showcased in the Pepper Mill Café.

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When Snockey’s Oyster and Crab House first opened, a crisp one-dollar bill would fetch you a large oyster stew, half a dozen raw oysters, a dozen fried clams, a steak platter and, if you were taking out, a handful of crackers and a pickle. Such was the world in 1912, when a young Frank and Rose Snock established their seafood eatery at 142 South Street. A hundred years and three moves later, Snockey’s is celebrating a century of continuous family ownership this week.

Now run by grandsons Ken and Skip, who’ve left the recipe for Mrs. Snockey’s  Original Oyster Stew unchanged but added and modified other menu items, Snockey’s will offer special discounts and entertainment through May 6. Thursday (the actual anniversary) is the biggest day for discounts, when dinner platters go on sale for $19.12. Saturday brings a beer garden and roots/rock band Jim Fogarty and the ToneBenders, and Sunday is the day to hear singer/songwriter Mia Johnson and meet WPRB-FM’s Professor Couch and the Rockabilly Roadhouse Radio deejays as they host a classic car show that demonstrates the past century through vehicular evolution.

Snockey’s [Official website]

It can be so hard to be a beer nerd. You can stand on line all morning for a sip of Kentucky Breakfast Stout, sound intelligent when talking to the latest brewing celeb to roll through town and win 1^st place in your homebrew club’s cereal-as-grain competition. But let’s face it, with the surging popularity of craft, there’s always a horde of newbies threatening to overtake you in the quest for beer geek bragging rights.

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As far as we’re concerned, there  are two kinds of people in this world. Those who can stomach expired and distasteful foods and those who cannot.  We are proud to report that we fall into the former category.

Eating eggs three months past their due date? No problem. Picking up a piece of cheese that’s just fallen onto the floor of an ancient stone monument in Rome and popping it into our mouths? Sure thing. Believing that the freezer is a machine that’s capable of preserving seafood and meats until long after the Apocalypse? Absolutely.

So it’s with a great deal of eagerness and bemusement that we anticipate a Philadelphia Science Festival event tonight called “From Farm to Fork: Dangerous Food Facts, Fears and Foibles,” being held at Rembrandt’s. Starting at 6:30, a Monell scientist who specializes in gastronomic preferences and the CEO of a company that manufactures devices to detect foodborne pathogens will explore the facts and fictions behind such notions as the five-second rule, the hard-and-fastness of expiration dates and how our cultures perceive edible vs. inedible creatures.

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Do you ever get that nagging feeling that you haven’t made much impact on the world? If you didn’t win senior class president and your submission to the local poetry writing contest was resoundingly rejected, here’s your chance to be part of something bigger–something, well, record-breaking.

On Sunday, The Nature Conservancy is celebrating Earth Day by hosting picnics around the globe in an attempt to set the world record for the largest outside picnic held across multiple venues. All you have to do to be part of this homage to outdoor eating is show up at Clark Park between noon and 4 pm and BYOP–or be one of the first 100 eager record seekers to arrive in order to get fed by Elevation Burger.

Clark Park, 43rd and Chester Avenue, Sunday at noon. Got it? Have a happy Earth Day.

Picnic For The Planet 2012 [Official website]

All the coolest things happen in New Orleans. There’s Jazz Fest, voodoo sacrifice and the Museum of the American Cocktail. You’re surely versed in the first two, but perhaps not the third.

No joke, the museum is a serious institution that explores the history of the cocktail and endeavors to advance its practice through research, seminars, multi-media presentations, and (according to the website), a “mind-boggling collection of rare spirits, books, Prohibition-era literature and music, vintage cocktail shakers, glassware, tools, gadgets and all manner of cocktail memorabilia and photographs.”

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