Sin é, Arlington, VA

Never have dinner in an Irish pub when Notre Dame is playing Stanford. We made that mistake last night, and couldn't even hear ourselves chew!

Leo and I were trying to goad Ryan into eating something "ethnic" for dinner last night, and he kept wanting boring, plain, American food from national franchises. He just wouldn't do any of the Thai, Chinese, Lebanese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Italian, or French places in the area around the mall at Pentagon City, or even Wolfgang Puck's California Fusion place, but I had an ace in the hole: Ryan isn't just Indian, he's also Irish and Scot (his family claims to be direct descendants of William Wallace of Braveheart fame), and there's an Irish restaurant and pub on Pentagon Row called Sin é.

Sin é (pronounced "shin-ay") is really more of a cross between a pub and a sports bar, but they do have a full menu with half a dozen Irish dinners, eight American dinners, and a full assortment of appetizers, burgers, sandwiches, and wraps. The host found us a booth with really high walls around it to shelter us a bit from the bar noise and the television-in-every-room-turned-to-the-Notre-Dame-game environment of the evening. Leo had some kind of Samuel Adams on tap and Ryan and I drank iced Earl Grey tea while we pondered the multi-page menu.

We opted to share a couple of appetizers, and chose a basket of spicy fried calamari, small squid rings breaded and deep fried then served with what they called a garlic aioli but which tasted to me more like honey mustard dressing, and a huge plate of Irish Nachos, made with thickly sliced potato chips instead of tortilla chips which I just loved!

For main courses, which arrived just after the appetizers were delivered (so much for "courses"), Ryan had a bacon cheeseburger with a house salad, Leo had fish and chips (the fish pieces were huge and looked excellent), and I had a chopped club salad. My salad was ok, but failed on a couple of fussy technical points for qualifying as a true "chopped salad," and was really more of a normal mixed-lettuces-from-the-bag with diced fried chicken fingers and some avocado cubes tossed in ranch dressing salad.

While we didn't endulge, the dessert menu had some fabulous looking things on it, from a bread pudding with Irish whiskey sauce to a Bailey's Irish Cream cheesecake to a chocolate hazelnut cake and others.

I plan to go back to Sin é. The food was good, the prices were quite reasonable, and the service was adequate. I'll just make a point to avoid Notre Dame football evenings!