Recycling West Virginia

Earth Day is all in how you look at it.

Pie was celebrating today as a recycling day by offering $1 PBRs, meaning lots to recycle by the end of the night.

At least I'm guessing that was the point.

My fellow celebrant and I are not PBR drinkers, so we inquired about a bottle of wine.

The bartender looked confused and said that he thought the owner might keep some of his bottles around and that whatever it was, "he drinks it all the time."

With a ringing endorsement like that, how could we not want him to find a bottle of whatever the boss keeps around?

It was a perfectly fine Cotes du Rhone, even if we weren't contributing much to the recycling effort.

We vacillated between the Greek and basil salad, eventually choosing a large basil because I wasn't in the mood for feta.

When the salad arrived, the kitchen had considerately split the salad onto two plates.

What had been split, however, was a Greek salad, not a basil.

We didn't say a word.

Pie is a place with a screen always on, but once we came in, the bartender had at least cranked up the music, perhaps sensing my dislike of screens in restaurants.

I'd have to say the high (or was it low?) point musically was Pretty Lights' remix of John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads," which every time we were sure was about to end, cranked back up leaving us laughing at a seemingly endless take on West Virginia.

I had to admit, it was recycling, albeit of a song.

When we got around to ordering pie, it was the Pamparius with pepperoni, red stag onions, ricotta and mozzarella, chosen mainly for the pig and onions, not that the red stag part meant anything to us.

Meanwhile, the crowd around us seemed less interested in pizza and more concerned about creating recycling with which to celebrate Earth Day.

Somebody had to do it and we sure weren't being much help.

Conversation revolved around celebrity chefs both of the pop-up variety and of course of the Bourdain variety, what with his impending visit tomorrow night.

I saw Bourdain speak back in 2007 in D.C. and I was convinced then that I was the sole person in the room who hadn't ever seen his TV show.

And although he'd been an excellent storyteller, once was enough, so I'd turned down not one, but two, invitations to go tomorrow while my fellow pie-eater had every intention of being there.

Pizza long gone, we left the PBR drinkers to their noble cause and went to Ipanema for dessert.

There I found a friend patiently biding her time waiting for draft night to start and I teased her because Monday nights tends to be a sausage-fest of guys and here she was waiting out the minutes till it began.

I told her she was a credit to our fair sex.

It wasn't long before the guys started straggling in, so we took a bar table and ordered Franco Serra 10 Dolcetto d'Alba and a slice of chocolate coconut cake, one of my very favorite WPA cakes.

Since there were no screens, the music was far more to my taste, and everyone was drinking out of taps not cans, it ended up being the antithesis of our last stop.

The conversation centered on travel, his trip to Prague and mine to Italy, not the sites explored or the art seen, but various meals enjoyed in both places.

Because honestly, doesn't it always come down to food in the end?

And, for the record, by the end of the night we had managed to contribute a couple of bottles to the recycling effort.

Two people can only do so much, even on Earth Day.