Cafe Paradiso, Washington, D.C.

After my expedition to the National Zoo this afternoon, I stopped for a late lunch at one of the sidewalk cafes along Connecticut Avenue in the Woodley Park neighborhood. It was hard to decide where to eat, since there were probably a dozen cafes. I ruled out the Lebanese, Asian, and Indian restaurants, and still I had to pick between a New Orleans Cajun place, a French cafe, and three Italian cafes. I read the menus posted outside and narrowed it down to the French cafe and two of the Italian places, and I ended up picking based on who had waiters outside.



The lunch crowd was mostly gone by 2:30 at Cafe Paradiso Ristorante Italiano. There was one businessman sitting at a sidewalk table reading his Wall Street Journal (and a very slow reader was he, since he was still there when I left!), so I picked a table on the side with a view of the street. The cute, young, Italian waiter brought me a glass of water and a basket of slices of a country loaf of white bread. The menu had the usual selections of Italilan-American items, plus a supplemental menu del giorno with half a dozen daily specials. I chose a grilled seafood salad from the supplemental menu (mostly fish and fresh pastas), with a glass of iced tea.

The salad arrived with one great big scallop and three extra large tail-on shrimp, all grilled and warm, resting on a bed of mixed, European-style salad greens and dressed in a lemon-basil-olive oil emulsification. There was quite a nice assortment of lettuces and chichories, obviously not from a stock mix, in a large white rimmed bowl with a fan of ripe tomato wedges on one side, a light scattering of capers, and quite a number of julienned strips of sweet, cold, roasted red and yellow peppers mixed in with the leaves.

The waiter recommend the tiramisu for dessert, but I wasn't in the mood for that, so I chose the tartufo. Tartufo—the Italian word for truffle—is an amaretto-flavored chocolate ice cream ball rolled in dark cocoa. Cafe Paradiso's version had a vanilla ice cream core. The large "truffle" was presented on a big, colorful, Italian country, pottery plate with three star-shaped dollops of sweetened whipped cream and two whole strawberries as garnish.

And after eating all that, the businessman still reading his same newspaper, I wandered home.