Wordy Birds Eat

If you're going to create a new event and catch my attention, here's what needs to be included: music (duh), a nerdy element (lecture, reading), art and alcohol (nibbles are a bonus). So it was that last night's first Gallery 5 After 5 sucked me in, delivered the goods and spit me out in time to meet a friend for dinner afterwards.

G5 After 5 had a $5 admission, but since that entitled you to your first drink free, essentially there was no admission. They had a nice selection of beer and wine choices and whiskey for sampling. When I arrived, the Dvorak American String Quartet was playing and people were milling about, looking at the photographic exhibit and chatting. I saw familiar faces and a lot of newbies, undoubtedly on their first visit to G5. There were a lot of cute summer dresses in attendance.

After a while, David Olli of the Science Museum gave a short informative but fun talk about the cosmos and everyone seemed to be into it (who doesn't like star talk?). The Scott Burton Trio was scheduled to play afterwards, supplying a jazz element to the evening. I met some new people and ran into some I already knew while mingling and everyone agreed that this would make a great series. There's already talk of making it one, so I'd highly recommend checking out the next one just for something completely different.

Then it was on to Avalon to meet a friend for a glass of wine (Fantail Pinotage, should you care). He was running late because his weekly Friday massage ran over; I know, tough life, right? Meanwhile, I ran into another former RTD employee who'd been laid off two weeks before me, so it was great to compare notes about life post-layoff. We both agreed that it beats life at the RTD hands down in just about every way. He and my friend were comparing travel notes since they both have trips coming up in the near future and volcanic ash is suddenly an issue for travelers.

By then, dinner was starting to sound like a lovely idea, so we ambled over to Acacia, which was mobbed, with would-be diners spilling out on to Cary Street for a 45-minute wait. Eschewing that, we instead drove to Lemaire, which was nearly full, but they found us a table in the conservatory overlooking Franklin Street, which was perfect, tucked away but with a view of Friday night revelers tripping down the street.

The meal was a lovely thing, consisting of a bottle of Cava, the fresh Gulf shrimp cocktail (actually, two of those), Rappahannock River oysters on the half shell (with Meyer lemon sorbet and shaved radish), cornmeal-crusted Chesapeake bay oysters with jicama slaw, and the jumbo lump crab cakes with grits, baby spinach and caramelized onions. Bubbles and seafood, truly the perfect meal on a balmy spring night; even more so when followed by the perfect dessert, in this case, the hazelnut caramel layer torte. At that point, it was nearing midnight and you could have stuck a fork in us, because we were done.

As good as the meal had been, the conversation was even better, highlighted by my friend referencing a screed, a word I'd used just hours before and, honestly, not a word you hear out of just anyone's mouth. Such are the little pleasures of language geeks.

Let me qualify that: language geeks who love to eat. Because, as we discussed throughout the meal, as fanatical as we are about words, at our most basic, what we love best is food.

Just call us enthusiastic eaters; we like the alliteration and it really is as basic as that.