But I think I know something about Pizza

Sorry for the lack of posts for the past few weeks, but life has been a wild ride since Rudy died. We sold our house, packed our house, and moved into a small one-bedroom apartment 30 miles away. Meanwhile, the semester was coming to an end (this is finals week). In any case, we're settled into the 703 square-feet upstairs unit that we'll call home for the next six months or so.

Part of moving to a new area is discovering its culinary offerings. It turns out that Woodbridge has just about every restaurant you can imagine--as long as your imagination is constrained by chain restaurants. Seriously, it's an urbanite's nightmare. One of the small handful of mom-and-pop type pizza places is a take-n-bake that was written up favorably in the Washington Post. It's located just down the street from us so I swung by to pick up a pie to cook in our new place (in a brand-new oven, I might add).

I was greeted nicely enough at Papa Petrone's Take 'N Bake by a thin, gray-haired, nimble man who quickly approached the counter from the back of the store. When I asked if they had salami as a topping (which at that point I could see was not on their menu) he quickly replied "no." He asked me in a cocky tone, "Where you from?" I looked up from the menu flier and said, "California originally." He squinted and looked at me like he was Philip Baker Hall and fired, "Californians don't know shit about pizza." Stunned, I chuckled and said, "Well I don't know about that, but no one seems to have salami any more." I proceeded to place my order (pepperoni, mushroom, and black olives for the curious) without incident.

I kept replaying the conversation in my head the entire way home, laughing harder with each time. Cynthia laughed hard for a while, too. Evidently salami is a taboo topping at Papa Petrone's.