Circle Bistro, Washington, D.C.

After getting tired of the delivery pizza Leo had been ordering us every night this weekend, last night I decided that we should go out for a proper dinner after The West Wing was over. We walked up to Washington Circle where we went to the Circle Bistro in the One Washington Circle Hotel. It was still busy, even at that hour of the evening.

I was determined to have a proper dinner with four courses (an affectation drilled in to me during my Oxford days), so I opted to stick with multiple appetizers, since non-à la carte restaurants serve too much food with their main courses. Unfortunately, some of the things I wanted to order were no longer available last night, particularly a duck confit. Nonetheless, I started with a starkly green broccoli soup with an intense explosion of broccoli flavor. It was supposed to have been accompanied by a truffled custard, but they were out of that, and I chose to have the soup anyway; I noticed they charged me the full amount for the soup, though. My second course was the pan roasted wild mushroom salad, which was another intense explosion of flavors, this time from the mushrooms tossed with some delicious applewood smoked bacon served on a bed of frisee and topped with a poached egg. With these two courses, I drank a white Spanish Escencia Diviña Pontevedra 2004 albariño.

My third course was the crispy veal sweetbreads "General Tso," three sweetbreads which had been sauteed til crisp on the outside and still tender and moist inside dressed in a sweet Chinese "General Tso" sauce and served on a bed of salty, wilted, baby spinach. The combination of sweet, sour, salt, and bitter was classically Asian. For a fourth course, I selected a three-cheese sampler plate with a soft goat cheese, a rich triple-cream cow milk semi-soft cheese, and a lovely blue sheep milk cheese, served with a basket of thinly sliced French baguette bread. Our waiter selected a German 2003 Lingenfelder riesling for me to drink with these courses.

Meanwhile, Leo started with a braised leek and Vermont goat cheese tartlet accompanied by a mound of vinegared curly endive and a glass of white Touraine sauvignon blanc. His next course was a square piece of grilled rockfish resting on a bed of mashed potatoes and surrounded by a tomato sauce which he praised as tasting just like a dish his mother makes at home; he drank a classic dry Australian 2003 Hope chardonnay with that course. I thought the chardonnay was quite good. For dessert, he had a mediocre dark chocolate and chocolate mousse parfait (I'd encouraged him to do the lemon pound cake with lavender essence and wild honey sorbet, but he didn't listen) with a glass of a very unusual red Spanish Silvano Garcia Dulce Monastrell 2003. The monastrell had a powerful taste of grape skins in a silken eiswine-type viscosity; it had a sweetness to it without being cloying.

And thus was our dinner.