West Virginia Brick Oven Bistro’s pickle pizza is really good. Or so we’ve heard.
Consider, if you will, this completely hypothetical situation.
Let’s say you’re a writer for a statewide lifestyle magazine and your friends are all talking about this Cross Lanes restaurant called WV Brick Oven Bistro and the “pickle pizza” it serves. You are slightly skeptical, but you also know it’s your journalistic duty to try it.
At first you have some trouble finding the place, because it’s actually located inside T&M Meats, a neat little shop where gas grill gourmands pick up fresh-cut meat, deli cheese, and craft beer. You eventually find it, though, walk in the front door, and grab a seat at one of the few empty tables.
A nice waitress takes your drink order and returns with a chilled fruit jar full of ice cold pop. But you’re panicking. The paper menu on your table doesn’t list a pickle pizza. You realize you might have made a terrible mistake. Pickle pizza? Who ever heard of such a thing?
To save yourself embarrassment, you consider ordering one of the delicious-looking hot dogs everyone else seems to be eating. But you have a mission to complete. So, in a hushed voice, you ask the waitress “Is this the place with the pickle pizza?”
She says “yes.” She doesn’t ask if that’s what you want for lunch, though. She just says, “You won’t regret it” and she heads toward the kitchen.
The nice waitress is back in no time. She plops down a metal pizza stand, and on it rests a 12-inch thin crust pizza covered in mozzarella and big slices of pickle, sprinkled with chopped fresh dill.
You stand up from your seat and, acting like a complete weirdo, start snapping photos of the pizza with your big magazine camera. You notice this is making people uncomfortable. “Wow, this guy takes his Instagram really seriously,” they are probably thinking. But you are not worried about this right now.
The first slice leaves behind a stringy trail of melted mozzarella on its way to your paper plate. You lift the slice to your mouth and take a tentative bite. “Pickle pizza?” you think. “Am I really eating pickle pizza?” But the pickle flavor is balanced nicely with the creaminess and saltiness of the cheese and the brightness of the fresh dill. “Hmm,” you think after that first bite. “Mmm,” you think after the second.
Half of the pizza is gone before you know it. You ask for a to-go box, because it would be piggish to eat the whole thing right there.
So here’s the (purely hypothetical) question. If you ate the entire rest of the pizza standing in your kitchen at 1 a.m., would you admit it?
5254 Big Tyler Road, 304.776.4809, tandmmeats.com, @wvbob
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