Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Big Slice

Sunday afternoon, D. and I had a lovely winter lunch at Roscoe's, a fairly new wood-fired pizza place in Takoma Park that we've been to a couple of times over the last several months. It was Valentine's Day, and D. isn't a vegan (yet, ha ha), so I said sure, why don't we go to Roscoe's, that's fine -- it's nice. My main thing is to be vegan for myself at home, and elsewhere when I can be.

Well, it turns out Roscoe's has not only a vegan panini (as an editor and the son of linguists, I cringe every time I have to say "a" panini, which of course is a plural) but also a vegan pizza, called the Vegani, with rapini, chopped tomatoes, and mixed olives (and presumably no cheese). I was very excited because this was completely unexpected -- though not exactly surprising: If you've ever been to Takoma Park, you know it's a haven for vegans and other oddballs (I used to live there).

When I ordered it, the cute waiter with the neo-barbershop-quartet facial hair and the tattoos on the underside of his forearms (a star on one, the words "tat two" on the other -- we asked him to pull up his sleeves all the way so we could see them) told me that they had a vegan cheese made from arrowroot now -- would I like that on the pizza as well? Why not? Arrowroot wasn't even on my radar before I started eating vegan, and I'd started noticing it in cookbooks, though I hadn't gotten around to Googling it yet.

Well, the pizza -- with a nice yeasty, charred Neapolitan-style crust -- was delicious. And the "cheese" was tasty, creamy, and a little blistered, though not elastic like melted mozzarella. Fine by me.

It was a wonderful meal not only because of the company and the occasion but because I had pretty much accepted that pizza wouldn't be a part of my life anymore (a letting-go but not a sadness or a hardship, as many might think it would be for a pizza lover like me),* and now here I could eat it again. We'll be going back to Roscoe's a lot.

So how hard is it to have some creative and well-made vegan selections on a menu along with everything else?

Not hard at all.

________

* This reminds me of Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, which I blogged about early on. In it, the author -- responding to those who view vegetarians as sentimentalists for avoiding meat -- writes of two friends ordering lunch: “One says, 'I’m in the mood for a burger,' and orders it. The other says, 'I’m in the mood for a burger,' but remembers that there are things more important to him than what he is in the mood for at any given moment, and orders something else. Who is the sentimentalist?"

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