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.

Beacon Bar and Grill, Washington, D.C.

After church at St. John's Lafayette Square, Robert and I walked up to the Scott Circle area, where we brunched at the Beacon Bar and Grill for their Sunday brunch buffet. It's certainly not gourmet, but it's a $19 per person all you can eat spread with all you can drink of bloody Marys, mimosas, or champagne, so even if the food is mediocre, we can get our money's worth just from the liquor. We had a cute, chatty, new waitress named Gabriella from Argentina, and she kept bringing the bloodies, one after another, without us even asking—I think we must have drunk half a dozen apiece!