Good beer can do that.

Chef Joe Krywucki had sent out a short-rib enchilada with mole sauce. And this time, the beer accompaniment was not one pour, but two: chipotle ale and chocolate stout, mixed together to mimic a Black and Tan.

The chef at Columbia’s Victoria Gastro Pub, it seems, takes the notion of matching food with beer quite literally, preparing traditional Mexican mole sauce—which combines chilies with bitter chocolate—to highlight two of Rogue brewery’s most distinctive craft brews.

The beer-tasting dinners at Victoria, says general manager (and the restaurant’s namesake) Tori Marriner, have been wildly popular. Tonight, we’re in the Seven Sisters room, named, like the 6,500-square-foot restaurant’s other dining areas, for a stop on the London Underground.

The place is packed and noisy, befitting the featured Oregon-based brewery’s exuberant style. Guests have paid $75 each for a five-course dinner (plus appetizers) that includes six beer samples (seven, if you include the aforementioned double-dip) and a Q&A with the distributor.

“Before we started these, I’d been to a hundred wine dinners, but I’d never been to a beer dinner,” says Randy Marriner, who, with his family, opened Victoria Gastro Pub in a former Bennigan’s on Snowden River Parkway in December 2007.

The events are a perfect way to highlight the restaurant’s emphasis on beer—Victoria has 24 on draught and 200 in bottles—as well as its commitment to creative cuisine. Since its first such dinner in 2008, the place has hosted about 15, these days roughly one per month.

When Victoria Gastro Pub first opened, a well-known restaurant reviewer called to rail on Randy.

The critic “took great exception to our location in a Columbia strip mall,” Randy recalls, and, furthermore, “said our name sounded like throw-up.”

Randy didn’t bat an eye. He and his daughter Tori, along with his wife, Mary, and Krywucki, had recently traveled to New York City, where a highlight of their weekend restaurant crawl was the Spotted Pig, a West Village eatery credited with launching the “gastro pub” phenomenon in the U.S.

And since Victoria’s opening a scant three years ago, the notion of a pub that happens to serve excellent food—generally created by a trained chef—has become more common. Moreover, most restaurant habitués understand that the “gastro” moniker doesn’t mean you have to follow your meal with Rolaids.

Krywucki had studied at Le Cordon Bleu London, where trendy public houses with gastronomical aspirations had coined the term “gastro pub.” So when the Marriners found themselves in possession of the site (which was supposed to become a Ruth’s Chris Steak House before the original plan fell through) and asked the chef for some ideas, Krywucki immediately sat down and wrote up a business plan.

Randy, who describes himself as “an old ad guy”—his background includes marketing, real-estate development, and involvement in the start-up of the Iron Bridge Wine Company—says he loved Krywucki’s idea. Soon after, the whole family got involved in making the vision a reality.

Tori, who had studied at Baltimore International College and worked as a manager at Iron Bridge, threw herself into developing a menu and establishing a strong “front of the house,” while mother Mary took over the design of the place. Daughter Rachael Mull, a CPA, is the restaurant’s chief operating officer.

Once they’d settled on the gastro-pub concept, says Randy, everything fell into place.

The name Victoria refers not only to the youngest Marriner, but also to the London railway terminal. Keeping with the British theme, Mary scoured antiques and salvage stores for vintage décor, such as the sliding carriage-house doors that divide the Seven Sisters and Oxford Circus rooms, and the four original panels by Theophilus Van Kannel, inventor of the revolving door, in the entryway. Behind the main bar is a replica of Victoria Station carved in Peruvian walnut.