Prince Cafe, Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

It was a glorious evening last Friday as Miroslav, Sviatoslav, and I (Markoslav) headed in to Georgetown for an evening at Prince Cafe, a Lebanese restaurant and shisha lounge or hookah bar on lower Wisconsin Avenue. Prince Cafe is a local chain of about a half dozen establishments. It was pretty crowded, but we managed to get a table outside on the sidewalk.

The primary purpose of hookah bars is to sit around smoking on a shisha or Middle Eastern water pipe. It was an unusual experience. The usually health conscious Sviatoslav told me the stuff we were smoking was dried fruit only (peach, in our case), but after looking at the cafe's web site, I'm a bit confused, since they refer to fruit-flavored tobaccos. Judging from the lung congestion and hoarseness I got (I'm allergic to tobacco), I tend to think it was a fruit-flavored light tobacco instead of purely fruit powder. Each smoker gets a little plastic tip to put over the mouthpiece so no one exchanges any cooties. I was surprised at how long the one fill of tobacco lasted, as we were there for at least two hours.

Even though we'd all had dinner previously, we ended up wanting to nosh a bit and ordered some appetizers and stuff. I thought the hommos (chickpea puree) was unusually tasty; it came with a big piece of hot flatbread from the tandoor. We also got an order of dolmas, the grape leaves stuffed with rice, mint, parsley, garlic, and tomato; there were five short, cigar-shaped pieces. Dessert was several orders of baklava, which I thought was good but it had an unusual, odd, buttery flavor to it (I know butter is used in the preparation, but the flavor is usually not so pronounced). Throughout the evening, we all had hot mint tea—hot water with a tea bag in a paper cup, so nothing special—and Miro had some Turkish coffee. I noticed in perusing the dinner menu that there were quite a number of Indian entrees listed, in addition to Lebanese choices.