The night before Halloween, it’s 7 pm and pitch black, cold, wet: classic Seattle noir. The reflected melty-candy-red and green of stop lights is dissolving in streaks underfoot. 

I’m hurrying down the puddling sidewalk to meet KIRO Radio personality Rachel Belle at Infinity Nails on Broadway. I’ve only met her once before, briefly. I don’t listen to a lot of radio, but in preparation for this Drinks With I’ve been beefing up on her recent podcasts (endearingly called “Ring My Belle”). Because of my homework, I’m armed with all kinds of random tidbits about Rachel. Like the fact that her favorite Halloween candy is Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, followed by Snickers and Almond Joys.

I also get the sense Rachel is a girl who likes to have fun and would do odd things for the sake of a journalistic hook. I suggested we get a Brazilian together on Halloween night (I’d booked an appointment). Like normal people, she had more glamorous plans for Halloween than a pubic trim. She suggested we get a manicure on Halloween Eve instead.

That wasn’t a bad hook, since I’m 34 and—weirdly—have never had a manicure in my life.

At Infinity Nails, I have my manicure cherry popped to the tune of bright matte blue polish administered by a women who doesn’t open her mouth the entire time. Rachel is relaxing next to me on one of those big pedi-recliners, eyes twinkling, corkscrew curls bouncing as she laughs and chats about everything from her love for Libras to how she achieved perfect diction working as a street reporter for radio years ago. While I get my blue on, she’s going classic red. I tell her I’m going as the devil for Halloween. She warns that mixing it up with blue will make me look patriotic.

In those fifteen minutes at Infinity, I learn the following things about Rachel: Her ethnicity is Romanian, her eyes are green, she has scattershot freckles all over paper-white arms. She also bites the skin around her nails (her manicurist keeps scolding her).

So far so good, and we haven’t even had a drink yet. And this is about fucking drinking!

I have a proposal: I really want to tackle Pettirosso’s gin punch bowl. I’d seen it advertised on the menu. For $55 you get a giant, crystal punchbowl with enough juice to serve a party of six. I have visions of Rachel and myself spooning gin into each other’s mouths—a boozy, proto-Sapphic, Dionysian spree punctuated with bites of cream-filled puff pastries till we eventually collapse under the table, expiring like characters from Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe.

My dreams are dashed. Rachel Belle is a beer drinker and not a gin fiend.

We go to Pettirosso anyway and sit at a cozy table, the room candlelit and hemmed with scintillating floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Rachel orders a bottle of Bear Republic Racer 5. I get something called “Maiden’s Blush,” made with Old Tom Gin, Genepy des Alps, Creme De Mure and lemon. When it arrives, it’s mouth-puckeringly sweet and tastes like candy. Good thing I have a sweet tooth and an endless hole for gin.

“Pairs well with Smarties,” I quip.

Because I’m dead serious about candy, I have a fistful of Smarties in my bag. I retrieve them.

We chase the Smarties with a burrata salad sprinkled with pine nuts on a bed of arugula. Burrata is all the craze and I’m a burrata virgin (always arriving to the party late!). If you haven’t had it, burrata is basically mozzarella that had sex with cream. When the outer mozzarella “rind” is cut open, velvety, buttery, magic mozzarella cream spills out.

Burrata prompts a confession from Rachel.

“I have a sour cream addiction,” she says. She’s laughing, but she’s dead serious. “Like, a really refined, deep sour cream addiction.”

It’s not just any sour cream she eats, but Darigold, the king of sour creams.

“I realized when I was 24 that it was actually an addiction. It happened when a friend of mine was hanging out one day—we were day-drinking—and when she got up and went to the bathroom, I ran to the kitchen and huddled in the light of the refrigerator, shoveling it in. As soon as I heard the door open, I ran out and acted all cool, like nothing happened. I talked about my addiction so much on air, at one point I received a huge package in the mail. It was a pallet of sour cream on dry ice—from Darigold.”

Now she has a sponsorship with them. One of the perks of mastering the on-air overshare.

That’s not the end of her dairy fixations.

“I have this thing I’ve been doing since I was a kid,” she continues. “I fold squares of American cheese and swallow without tasting.”

Her eyes roll back.

“I love how it feels when it slides, all slippery and processed-cheese-like, down your throat!”

Petirosso doesn’t serve squares of American cheese. (Then again: maybe they do; I hate processed cheese and was trying too hard not to vomit to ask.)

Instead, we order some salmon sliders. The tender, melty slabs of salmon arrive topped with a dollop of caraway lemon yogurt sauce and ribbons of pickled red onions. They fly to our mouths on pillows of Macrina brioche.

Because Smarties and a Maiden’s Blush weren’t enough to sate my sugar cravings, pumpkin pie with homemade marshmallows seems like the next logical step.

I’m not a professional food writer, so I can’t really convey the yumminess of this particular item (nor of any of the delightful pastries served at Pettirosso). Imagine everything good about sugar and spice, a bite that’s like a Will Cotton music video in your mouth, where befreckled sugar fiends with alabaster butts and breasts drift upwards amid cumulus clouds of golden-tipped marshmallow puffs, our limbs and hair getting muckily, irresistibly sticky in ambrosial, big-rock-candy-mountain dew, where we frolic on riverbanks awash in cataclysmic amounts of tangy, thick-as-fuck Darigold sour cream. Pure pumpkin sex on the beach. It slides slippery down our throats.

What followed is hazy. A diabetic coma. At one point toward the end of the evening, I realize we never learned the names our nail polish colors while at the salon. I’d meant to write it down. I told her to give them names.

Rachel doesn’t skip a beat:

“Mine is definitely That Time of the Month.”

“That’s disgusting,” I say.

“No, I mean it’s Pretty Princess Red. Yours is Smurf. Together, we are America.”