Bistro Francais, Georgetown, D.C.

My feet hurt.

Last night, Leo got home late from work after a hard day with office politics and was too tired to go to the gym, so we decided to walk into Georgetown to find something "non-Asian" for dinner. Our explorations got us onto the wrong road, and we ended up walking down a mile-long expressway with no way to exit. As we walked back towards civilization, we began to see some restaurants along M Street. West of Wisconsin, though, the establishments seemed to be mostly Indian, Lebanese, Chinese, or those crowded, noisy, smoky bars with food, none of which were what we had in mind. Finally, we espyed the tried-and-true Bistro Français and headed straight there.

The restaurant was crowded, but I guess the maitre d' recognized me, because we were immediately escorted to a decent table in the back dining room with an antique wood banquette on one side and an interesting view of the service bar through the window partition on the other. A non-Anglophone female brought our bread, butter, and water, then we met our charming waiter, a tall guy from Ivory Coast. His English was perfect, with an ever-so-slight cute French accent.

What to eat? What to eat? While we were trying to make up our minds, we got a bottle of one of their cheaper house bordeaux-superieurs to sip while we perused the menu. I forgot what it was, but I remember it made the claim to be like a Saint-Emilion (but if it was, it was totally unlike any Saint-Emilion I've ever drunk!). Eh. House wine.

When the waiter came back the second time to take our order, we still hadn't made up our minds, so we just plunged in and made a quick guess. I ordered a bistro salad and a minute steak. Leo asked for the seafood soup and the cold poached salmon.

My salad was a big plate of leaf lettuce with a lot of julienned beets on top and a very ripe and flavorful tomato wedge on either side (where do they get ripe tomatoes this time of year?). Their house dressing is a tasty, thin mayonnaise flavored with a bit of dijon mustard. My minute steak maitre d' hôtel was yummy. It was a large, thin, nearly square piece of sirloin cooked medium rare and topped with two little round pats of parsley-herb butter. A big pile of thin pommes frites, accompanied by a small bowl of dipping mayonnaise, overflowed the rest of the dinner plate.

Leo's seafood soup was a bit of a surprise. It was prepared very much like a French onion soup, with a large crouton in the soup and an ample amount of cheese melted on top and down the sides of the soup crock. His cold poached salmon looked nice. It was served atop a sauce of some kind (mousseline??), but I didn't taste it and Leo doesn't know the names of the classic French sauces, so I couldn't ask. He had a vegetable on the plate, but I didn't think to identify it, since another waiter from previous visits (the French one who's the exotic dancer) came to the table to say hi and chat.

Our waiter brought the dessert tray, but I didn't see anything inspirational in the way of napoleans or fruit or nut tarts, so I opted for a little cheese plate. Leo had a crème brulee. The cheese plate was simple, with a wedge of brie, a slice of a goat milk chevre of some type, and a small slice of a not-very-aged blue, with green apple slices filling up the empty spots on the plate. He brought some thick slices of a nice, crusty, country-style bread for the cheese—much better than the hard rolls served with dinner. The brie was brie. I'm not a great fan of brie, and, thankfully, this one wasn't ripe (the French like brie which has aged so much that it turns brown and runny and smells worse than dirty, damp gym shoes left in the locker all summer). The blue was tasty. It was an edge piece, so it had a bit more character than the center would have had, but it certainly wasn't a premium French blue. My favorite was the chevre, which was light and rich and had a very nice, complex flavor to it.

Leo's crème brulee must have been good, since he ate it all and kept trying to scrape the au gratin dish with his spoon to extract every last morsel. I think, though, for expediencies' sake, the restaurant had pre-made the crème brulees, since Leo reported that the hard sugar crust on the top of the cold custard was not warm.

After coffee with cream, we limped back home, walking the whole way.

Starland Cafe, Washington, D.C.

Last Friday, my financial planner picked me up in his Z4 so we could continue our previously truncated business meeting. We went zooming off with the top down, the wind blowing my hair. It was a great chance to enjoy the beautiful sunshine and warm weather. We headed out to the Palisades area of D.C., way, way out in the far western corner of the district, northwest of Georgetown, and stopped at the Starland Cafe. He said the Starland is popular in the neighborhood because they feature a lot of live musical groups during dinner. It was an interesting crowd, though I'm not so sure the luncheon patrons are the live music set—most of the tables seemed filled with local matrons. We sat out on their covered terrace overlooking MacArthur Boulevard, and we had a very friendly, peppy waitress with wild hair.

I had the Cobb salad and he had a fried crabcake sandwich with French fries and mayonnaise. I also had a warm pot-au-chocolat à la mode for dessert. What they served me was not a pot-au-chocolat. A proper pot-au-chocolat is very much like a dense, rich, dark chocolate flan or creme brulee (without the caramel or broiled sugar); what they brought was crusty on the outside and more like a baked chocolate pudding or baked fudge. Now, it was good for what it was, but I don't like misnamed menu items.

Port of Piraeus, Washington, D.C.

A few days ago, I had lunch with a financial planner. He was buying, so I let him pick the place. He picked Port of Piraeus in the "Golden Triangle" area of downtown D.C. I've walked by the place before and knew it was Greek ("Piraeus" is a city in Greece), but I was expecting a fairly fancy restaurant, given the substantial square footage it assumes in a downtown office building; it turns out it's nothing more than a big deli serving mostly Greek themed sandwiches and salads. We both ended up ordering their salad special of the day, which was a Greek salad with tuna on top. Our cell phones kept ringing and due to the press of business, our meeting was somewhat truncated, so we agreed to get together again later in the week.

Yee Hwa, Washington, D.C.

Last week we finally got around to trying Yee Hwa, a place I've often walked by in the west end of downtown Washington. Located in the bottom of an office building, it has a large burgundy canopy going out to the curb and heavy curtains in the windows. The canopy and the windows are marked simply with the words "Yee Hwa" and the two Korean alphabet symbols for the same. Now, way over in Chinatown, there's a Texas-style barbecue joint, but I've always had the feeling that Yee Hwa ain't very Texan.

After going through a small entry hall and a second set of doors, one enters a sleekly contemporary dining room that turns out to be much larger inside than the establishment appears from the street. Along the left hand side of the dining room is a long cocktail bar that looks very much as though it used to be a sushi bar. Contemporary, wood-grained tables are separated by low glass dividers discreetly etched with the Korean "yee hwa" symbols. The menu indicates that Yee Hwa is a "Korean-Japanese" restaurant and that the Washington location is a branch of a restaurant in Seoul. They also have a separate menu with a lengthy list of sake and plum wines (some of which were very expensive!) and a handful of Korean and Japanese beers.

Even though the menu featured ribs and Korean barbecue, we decided to be less cowboy, and started with haemul pa jeon, a traditional Korean seafood and scallion pancake. The pancake started out as a very large oval on the grill, and once it was cooked to a slightly crispy, golden brown, it was fan-folded on to a large round plate and then cut into squares. It came with a dipping sauce with soy sauce, chives, and sesame seeds very similar to the sauce for Chinese dumplings. Since the rice flour used for the pancake has different cooking properties than wheat flour, the interior portions of the thin pancake had an interesting, almost "gooey" (yet cooked) consistency to it. We washed this down with a vase of hot "house" sake (the $8 kind, not the $100 kind).

For our main courses, we both opted for different forms of the popular Korean dish, bi bim bap (pronounced "bee-beem-bahp"). Bi bim bap, which means "mixed meal," is an artfully arranged bowl with a huge quantity of shredded vegetables. My bi bim bap was the plain, "simple," cold version with a large bowl of vegetables that included some unusual roots and fern sprouts all topped with a sunny-side up egg, and hot rice in a separate aluminum container. I had to add the special chile-based bi bim bap sauce to taste from a small bowl on the side, then mix up the vegetables, egg, rice, and sauce with a spoon and chopsticks.

My dinner companion had dolsot bi bim bap, which is the hot version that also includes beef. Its presentation is a little different. The bowl was a dark ceramic or stone dish made very hot on the stove. The rice was put directly into the bottom of dish, where the heat from the stone made the outer portions crunchy. With the addition of cooked beef, the rest of the entree was similar to mine with essentially the same vegetables and fried egg.

We were also given nine little bowls of complementary side dishes of various Korean vegetables. Most of these were in the kim-chee family (fermented cabbage with hot chiles...rotten cabbage is an acquired taste), but there were also some shredded white radishes, some preserved slices of what looked like candied jalapeño peppers, and some glossy red mung beans. The kim-chees included radishes and some pretty little slices of a thin cucumber. My friend tasted most of these things, especially the cabbage kim-chees, and thought they were good, but I'm allergic to something in kim-chee and I steer clear (as it was, I had indigestion and was queasy the whole next day, but this happens to me every time I go to a Korean place—I guess I just can't eat Korean food, which is a shame, since the food at Yee Hwa was tasty and elegantly presented).

At the end of the meal, our waitress brought us complimentary cups of Korean sweet rice punch. It's an interesting drink, which I think was non-alcoholic. It was amber in color with a water-like consistency and had a sweet taste scented with ginger. A few little pieces of what my friend said was chopped lotus root floated in the bottom.

Yee Hwa is a very nice restaurant with good food and a lot of amenities. I was surprised at how inexpensive our meal was (my bi bim bap was only $10), especially given the ambiance, quality of service, and complimentary food items. If you're a kim-chee fan, this is the place to go for Korean cuisine.

New Big Wong Chinese Restaurant, Washington, D.C.

We had a lovely early supper this evening in Chinatown at the New Big Wong Chinese Restaurant, just a few steps from the Gallery Place Metro stop. This is another one of those "hole in the wall" looking places that turns out to be a good place to eat. Big Wong is a Hong Kong-style restaurant, and they take pride in serving extremely fresh seafood. In fact, a kitchen employee was constantly running back and forth up to the front of the restaurant to procure various live lobsters (with a pair of tongs) and fish (in a big bucket) from an aquairium near the entrance.

Leo ordered, as usual, chatting up the waitress in Cantonese, so I have no clue what we had, so I'll attempt to describe it without the formal names. The first dish to come out was similar to a chow fun, wide noodles with roast pork, shrimp, mushrooms, and scallions with a little bit of brown sauce. After a bit of a wait, we got the other two dishes, one a seafood "hot pot" with shrimp, crab legs, scored blanched squid, scallops, white fish chunks, and a bunch of tofu triangles with some reconstituted dried exotic mushrooms, carrot slices, and scallions in a translucent cornstarch sauce, and the other a dish with beef slices and lots of white onion pieces in a brown sauce. Both of these latter dishes came with steamed white rice, and pots of hot tea were complimentary.