Pittsburgh to New York: Pickled Chocolate

I was almost inadvertently in New York this past weekend, and though Amy Rosenfield of the local-to-me-now-in-Pittsburgh shop Mon Aimee Chocolat had some good Brooklyn chocolate suggestions (Nunu, Liddabit, Fine and Raw, the Mast Brothers) and I stumbled upon the West Village headquarters of the smoke-and-mirrors operation Pure Dark (with overstuffed chairs, products of unnecessarily mysterious provenance, and meaningless slogans like "Chocolate Harvested from Nature"), I found myself eating many more pickles (pickled peppers at the Spuyten Duyvil, horseradish pickles at the DUMBO farmers market) than chocolate bars, so it seems only fitting to run this leftover interview with Rick Field of New York-based Rick's Picks about pickles and Pittsburgh. (I have little recollection of how or why Rick and I got into this conversation and whether or not any of it is true, but, then, I'm interested in the themes of truth and memory in nonfiction writing.)

Emily: Let’s go, tell me about the pickle hat.

Rick: It’s not covered in chocolate, though.

It’s alright, give it a try.

Alright, so I went to a wedding in Pittsburgh. It was an interesting weekend. There was a convention of muscle, um, body builders there, all covered with cocoa butter.

Mm.

So every time we went down in the elevator, we experienced these enormously overdefined people with gross cappuccino-colored skin, all greasy and basically naked. We needed some relief, and we went to Pittsburgh’s noteworthy vintage and used clothing arena and I was fortunate enough to find a beautiful large green felt hat, which was a good thing for me to find because I am in the pickle business...

A pickle impresario, some might say…

Yes, and I thought that this hat could be something that I could really become known for. So I wore the hat for the balance of the weekend and received many compliments and enjoyed wearing it. Sunday, I returned to the Pittsburgh airport after the wedding was over in a cab, and was somewhere between consciousness and sleep for most of the cab ride, and got out of the cab, paid the guy, went to check in, got to security, and realized I’d left my hat in the cab.

Aaaah!

So, of course, since it wasn’t a business trip, I didn’t have a receipt, so I called the cab company—I believe it was Ace Cab of Pittsburgh—and asked them if they knew where my hat was. They said, “well, did you get a receipt? Do you know what cab it was?” And I said “no, I don’t.” I said, “good god, man, you must put out an APB to all cabs! Find the green hat.” And about two minutes later somebody called back and said that they did have my hat in their cab and they would return it, but the hat had to come back to the airport at human pricing. So I agreed that the driver would turn the meter on and my hat was brought back to the airport for twenty-eight dollars, thirty with tip. And I recovered my hat and it was a very happy ending. And that’s the story of how a thirty-dollar-wedding-weekend-hat became a sixty-dollar-wedding-weekend-hat.