City Dogs of Richmond

PI work has its' perks...like visiting other places. Which for me means finding interesting places to eat. Okay, I'm sorry, I like to eat. And the City Dogs Tavern in the Bottom section of Richmond, VA gets a thumbs up from me. It's a neighborhood bar kind of place which means they have several large screen TVs all turned in to ESPN channels. The menu has a page full of hot dogs all named after US cities. I had a Philly dog (onions, peppers, provolone, & mayo) and a Sante FE (guacamole, mustard, & jalepinos)....If I get there again I'll try a brat and get another Santa Fe. While all the men in the place watched Notre Dame get beat I enjoyed my lunch and thought about Ollie Ruggaliano, the first client of the Natasha McMorales Detective Agency. Ollie's family owned a chain of hot dog places in the Chicago area. When I visited there to do a background on him I met his menagerie of a family and heard all sorts of theories about why he hired me. You can read more about all that when the "Why Natasha?" novel is published next month.

Mountain beauty

I was on my way to Atlanta on Friday to check on a client's wife. I got as far as Spartanberg,SC when I got a call telling me that the wife was not having an affair. She was having breast enhancement surgery. "Problem" solved. I love it when a plan comes together. So I decided to come back to Bristol the long way, through the Smokies, so I could see how the colors had changed. The mountains weren't the way I had expected but they were still breathtaking. I guess you have to let the beauty in a thing be in that thing and not in your own head.