blue goat

When your friend visits from Washington DC, you never know what time she will get here. People in DC have very important jobs that often require them to work late. If the job isn’t keeping them trapped inside the beltway, the insanity that is Northern VA traffic usually does the trick. I know, because I used to work there and was on call all day, every day and spent an ungodly amount of time in my car.

I blame the District of Columbia for why I was drunk by the time my partner in crime made it to town on Friday night. This girl is more than a friend, she was my wing-women for most of my twenties and even though we are older and settled, we were still planning to throw it down in RVA. I greeted her with a glass of wine, told her to put on her walking shoes and headed to the Blue Goat (5710 Grove Ave).

This was not my original plan, but I felt like my drunken self would fit in better at a place that has a bartender who has made his name synonymous with getting wasted. I wasn’t wasted when we got there, but I sure felt McKenna’d when we left.

The Blue Goat is Richmond’s only nose to tail concept restaurant. It has a funny late night scene of ladies with too much makeup, red wine stained teeth and orders of late night fries. I figured it could be good for the ego to go to a place where we would most likely be on the younger side of the age spectrum.

We planned to just catch up and enjoy a few cocktails, but halfway through my tequila drink, I started to feel chatty. I decided to engage a group of guys by making fun of the smallest one for wearing a cardigan sweater. (This kid was wearing a button down shirt under a cardigan. It was like he was asking for someone to make fun of him.) I came to find out that he had just turned 21 and was out celebrating a friend who was getting married soon.

We jokingly teased them for all wearing plaid shirts and kept up some fun conversation, while drinking our cocktails perfectly named, Dirty Diana. Then our orders of fries and pork rinds arrived and they moved down the bar. In between sips of my drink and shoving fries in my mouth I glanced down to see these young guys talking to another couple of ladies. These ladies must have been in their forties. I thought to myself, those guys were much too young to be in this place. They were out hunting.

That is when it hit me. I walked right in to the trap. We were the ones being hunted and I was the warm up cougar.