lemon ice-cream vodka and pizza

First DC area restaurant review! Okay, this isn't the first restaurant I've been to since I got to DC, but it's the first place where I actually have pictures to share. And this place isn't actually in DC but in Virginia, close to where I live.

After some Metro hopping and shopping at Target, my friend and I ended back at our home station and decided to go look for food. We wanted pizza so I took her to the only pizza place I knew, Piola. I only knew of this place because my new roomie took me here for drinks with her classmates.

Anyway, so Piola is a pretty cool place with pretty decent prices. There's a happy hour with $3 beers, $6 cocktails and apparently free appetizers. We took part in the happy hour drinks but didn't really see the free appetizers being served. We were sitting outside though, and not at the bar, so that might have made a difference.

My friend ordered this DELICIOUS drink, called Sgrappino Al Limone. If you don't know Italian, the menu states it's lemon ice-cream and vodka. OH. MY. GOODNESS. Can you say deliciousness in a cup? You can't taste the vodka at all and we all know I love cocktails that don't taste like alcohol. This is the second best drink I've ever had, and is now second on my list of favorites (my love is still in the So Cal Strawberry Lemonade). The only downside was that this little shot of a drink was $6, which I thought was a little pricey because there wasn't much in the cup. But then it was $6 and not $8 like it would have been in other places.

For starters, we ordered the Lipari (home made bread with tomato sauce, mozzarella and oregano). It was like a fancy version of cheese breadsticks. Probably easier to eat in this version. I would have liked it to be a bit crunchier but it was still pretty good.

For pizza, we ordered the Diavola (spicy salami) plus sausage. We ordered one pizza because we were going to share, and I had asked the waiter if he thought this was enough for two people. He replied that it was enough food for two.

The waiter then brought out two plates, each with half a pizza on it.

I'm not sure why the waiter thought he needed to separate the pizza onto two separate plates. Did he think we couldn't share off the same plate? Did he think we would fight one another and not share the pizza equally? Did he think we didn't know how to control ourselves and end up eating more than our share of the pizza? I have no idea, but we thought it was pretty odd and funny that our pizza was served in this manner.

I liked the thin crust of the pizza, however, due to the salami and sausage, I think the grease caused the pizza to be soggy in the middle. There was not a crunch in every bite. But because the pizza was thin crust, it wasn't too filling and we each easily ate half our share of the pizza. Well, okay, I only ate 3 of my 4 slices and ate the toppings off the last slice.

The spicy salami was not spicy to me, and I added crushed red peppers to the pizza too. Of course, my spice palette is extremely on the high end compared to normal people so it was no big surprise that I thought there was no spice to the spicy salami. My dinner companion, on the other hand, thought there was a real kick to the spicy salami.

Piola is definitely a place I will be frequenting more often in the future. Especially for the lemon ice-cream vodka drinks. YUM!