Eat your way through VA

During our time in Virginia recently, we noticed that many restaurants in the area advertised "Virginia-style" cuisine. As near as we could determine from dining at several of these establishments, "Virginia-style" refers to "perfectly good burgers or chicken or even fish buried under layers of other stuff loosely referred to as glop." 

If you are not dripping with grease and sauce and goo by the end of your meal, you have not had Virginia-style food. 

The problem with this is that these restaurants give you exactly the same number of provisions for cleaning off as when consuming non-Virginia-style food: a lone napkin. Clearly this is not adequate and should be brought to the attention of the health department. These establishments should provide, at a minimum, full shower facilities to help customers completely remove the vestiges of their meal from their person.

While I am making suggestions, I have one for the outdoor shopping mall that we visited while we were in Virgina. The mall is actually several city blocks of shops and restaurants that have been closed off to traffic, allowing visitors to enjoy, without the inconvenience of passing cars, the parting of their money to various store merchants.

There are a great many restaurants on this mall, all of which offer outdoor seating. Herein lies the problem. This is pretty much the ONLY outdoor seating available on the mall. Should you need a short break from walking around, or should your shopping companion decide that it is absolutely necessary to spend several hours sampling and comparing various types of exotic olive oils at a kitchen store, you have few options. 

Such an exotic olive oil section of a store really does exist. We visited it, and tried out many of the approximately 895 kinds olive oil displayed. To aid in our tasting there were little bread cubes from Panera to dip into the olive oils. (Strictly speaking, it is not absolutely necessary to dip the little bread cubes from Panera into any of the olive oils; the bread is quite yummy on its own, as I discovered in the process of consuming several pounds of it.)

There is no telling how much we might have consumed had we actually been hungry upon entering the store, but we were not, having previously partaken of a Virginia-style lunch.

As we tasted various olive oils, we felt that we should render an opinion on them, though we did so quietly. With our keen tasting sense sharply honed on Virginia-style food, we found that our verdicts tended to fall into one of two camps:

"I like this one." or

"I don't like this one."

The next customers felt no compunction to keep their opinions private. Further, their taste buds and vocabulary were clearly more advanced than ours. They did not talk about "liking" oils or "not liking" them. They very confidently used terms like full-bodied, hefty, blond. I thought at first they were describing some Olympic male gymnast. Not that I would go around describing some Olympic male gymnast in this manner, but you see the similarities.

With its many wineries, cideries -- which, for the uninitiated, produce hard ciders -- Virginia-style restaurants, and yes, stores of exotic olive oils, Virginia is clearly a state of which it can be said, "No food or beverage left untasted." *

*Although we do not recommend a certain Greek olive oil we tried. At first we did not fully understand why we did not care for it, but upon further reflection, it perhaps was a little too "full-muscled."