Barring a miracle in which the Virginia Office of Vital Records gets its spit together and sends me the paperwork I requested a month ago, I’m heading to Richmond tomorrow morning. This is not entirely bad news.

I used to live in Richmond, and while I don’t miss much about it, I do think about the food often. My ideal day would be a pre—type II diabetes festival something like this:

1. Breakfast at Perly’s. I’ve been ordering the same thing here for 20 years: breakfast special no. 1, with eggs any way, sausage or bacon, fried apples, and biscuit. Often, the biscuits taste like light bulbs. But when they’re on, they are freaking on.
2. The most amazing fried chicken I’ve ever had, takeout from Ukrop’s, a grocery store I rarely patronized for anything else when living there and am still somewhat uncomfortable buying from because:
   • It doesn’t sell beer and isn’t open on Sundays, and while I support the right of Baptists to follow their beliefs and prosper, that doesn’t mean I have to actually support them, and anyway it’s way too expensive
   • One of the guys who owns it is behind pretty much every half-baked idea to revitalize Richmond, not one of which has worked and most of which are financed by tax dollars, which is a little rich for one of Eric Cantor‘s best donors.
3. An early dinner at Buz and Ned’s, which I’ve written about before and which offers the best pork barbecue in the commonwealth except for maybe Pierce’s Pitt.
4. A takeout chocolate pie from Bill’s, which has the worst pork barbecue in many states but amazing pies and good limeades.

Also there might be produce—-I hear that this is going to be a big peach crop year, and if I’m lucky, maybe a few Hanover tomatoes will have popped. But vegetables aren’t really a one-day-in-Richmond priority.

Photo by me! Can you ID it?