Vegan Drinks, restaurant-fail edition.

Apologies for my absence of late, beloveds. I don’t have a good excuse. I’ve just been mindlessly interwebbing elsewhere, and I’ve missed you!

After work on Friday, Red and I got dolled up and went out to the Baltimore Vegan Drinks happy hour. We’ve been to two or three before, and they’ve been fun. I was especially excited for this one, as it was held at Pizzazz, a brand-new Italian restaurant with a menu boasting plenty of vegan food. Plus, it was a joint event benefiting Compassion Over Killing. What could be better?

Oh my God, let’s see…a place to sit, menus, a restaurant staff that wasn’t totally cuckoo, a band that didn’t have the amps turned up to 11, clearly delineated food and drink specials? Shall I go on?

It started with the traffic. Obviously we can’t blame the traffic on either the event organizers (Paul, you rock) or the restaurant, but I can—and will, with extreme prejudice—blame it on the thousands of drunk Orioles fans and hopeless out-of-town drivers who conspired to snarl us in a vehicular web of SUCK. Opening Day, I hate you.

So, it took us a little longer than we anticipated to make it to Pizzazz. No worries there. The worry set in when we barely cleared the threshold before running smack into a wall of bodies more suited to a mosh pit. We saw people we knew, but couldn’t get to them. Half the tables in the nearest section were reserved. The band was setting up in a space entirely too small for live music, and the outdoor patio was closed. (To be fair, it was in the 50s, but we had been expecting outdoor seating, and most restaurants have patio heaters to warm things up al fresco.) No one really seemed to have a handle on what was going on.

An official-looking woman hustled us to a table with a few people we’d met at the last Vegan Drinks. This was okay with us, because we would have eaten dinner with Jabba the Hutt at that point. A harried waitress gave us our special event menus, just before a guy appeared and asked us if we’d been seated there or, I suppose, just sort of plopped ourselves down next to the bank of reserved tables. Once he was reassured that we weren’t trying to steal anyone’s seat, I stared down the drink list with a fervor that could only be slaked by numbing quantities of alcohol. I ordered something that was basically lemonade with açaí berry vodka. Red ordered Johnny Walker. His drink had alcohol. Mine, as best I could tell, did not.

“Look, Jabba, next time you wanna talk to me, I’m gonna need two tables. And plenty of vegan food.”

Food! Blessed, blessed food. I had never had Daiya, that mythical, melty vegan cheese that was rumored to change my life, so I went for a four-cheese pizza. It was decent. The cheese had melted, but in my hyperbole-soaked brain (what’s that? Daiya cures cancer?) I had been expecting gooey strands of faux-mozzarella stretching from the pizza to my mouth. It didn’t happen. That was okay. Red’s penne Bolognese was good, but we agreed that as a whole, Pizzazz really needs to up their garlic game. More is better, people.

And then the birthday party arrived to claim their reserved tables. Oh, sweet fancy Moses, that party. They were, for the most part, lovely people. I realize that it is irrational to be annoyed that people are cooing and squealing and hauling balloons and presents into a public space that happens to be right next to my head, but the dancing. As soon as the band started (too loud, decent rock covers, not a good fit for the space or atmosphere, better luck next time), two ladies decided to jitterbug in between our tables. Please envision two people trying to dance in an airplane aisle, and you have this scene. They thoughtfully moved their routine over to the bar, right in front of the entrance, but not before I pondered throwing an ice cube at them. I begged our waitress for a Yuengling.

Suddenly, our table was abuzz. What’s that? An honored guest! Whoever could it be? President Obama? John Waters? Holy shit, it was Bruce Friedrich, and if that means something to you, you’re way ahead of where I was on Friday night. Bruce Friedrich, our dining companions excitedly informed us, is one of PETA’s VPs. If you’ve spent any time on this here blog, you know that I bit my tongue and prayed to taste blood before I said something I would regret.

John Waters and Harris Glenn Milstead (aka Divine) ca. 1970s or ’80s. Ripped from Dreamland, which you should absolutely visit.

After that? Our sweet waitress understood that we really, really wanted to get out of there and regain our hearing as well as our sanity, so she figured out our bill separately and collected a decent tip for her trouble. (Note: I’m not bragging on our super-generous tipping habits, just pointing out that even in a shitty situation, treating your waitstaff with kindness and rewarding them with more than that meager 15% is the least you can do, especially when they do nice things for you like tally up your check instead of forcing you hash it out with the rest of your table of PETA-loving near-strangers.) We grabbed our things, pleaded anniversary plans—totally not a lie: it was our anniversary, just of our engagement, not our wedding—and booked it back to the parking garage.

The leftover Daiya pizza was excellent for breakfast. With a little garlic salt on top, of course.

Manic Monday.

There will be a Thanksgiving with the Turkeys post, I promise. Once Red has the photos uploaded, I’ll give you a snout-by-snout rundown of the animal-loving awesomeness that thrives at Poplar Spring. It’s worth the wait! In the meantime, enjoy this picture of Opal, one of Poplar Spring’s turkey residents:

Photo by Deb Durant of Invisible Voices.

Vegan Drinks was hella fun. To our surprise, it was not as vegan as we thought it would be. We spent the evening chatting with an omni and her vegetarian partner, as well as a vegan whose omni husband had begged off, fearing persecution. The soy White Russians were dangerously tasty—more than one and we would have been cabbing it home (and that’s a $50 ride at least). Good vodka makes all the difference, people! The vegan Bailey’s was also good. I got hints of coconut, so I wonder if they used coconut milk or creamer or something. Either way. Yum. I would have enjoyed meeting more people, but we were in a loungey basement-esque area, which made working the room tough. It was a plus, though, because Paul (the organizer) is looking for a larger space to host the next happy hour. Baltimore vegans, unite!

The New York Times won back a tiny bit of my heart by running an op-ed by Gary Steiner, a philosopher and professor at Bucknell. While he’s already gotten flack for coming off as grouchy and portraying veganism as a huge pain in the ass, I appreciate that he doesn’t try to placate the happy-meat crowd (ahem, Jonathan Safran Foer). “You just haven’t lived until you’ve tried to function as a strict vegan in a meat-crazed society,” he writes, and it’s true. It’s not always true—sometimes I find it very easy, and other times I just want to throw up my hands and say, “Yes! Please! Feed me a salad! Leaves! Twigs! Anything!”—but it’s refreshing to hear it put so bluntly. His approach might not make instant converts of anyone, but I’m glad it’s out there.

Red and I are pleased to report that Go Max Go’s Twilight bar is a worthy successor to the misbegotten Milky Way! We split it, and Red declared that half the bar was all he needed to feel satisfied. His opinion probably means more than mine, as he is a connoisseur of the American candy bar. I didn’t grill him on the full range of his Twilight experience (note: I’m obviously trying to up my Google ranking with Twilight fangirls), but the rice milk chocolate must have done the job or he would have let me know. Carry on, Go Max Go. We’ve got your other three flavors to try, and if you’d like us to test any products you may have in beta, we’re all yours.

Photo ripped from Go Max Go.