Georgia Brown's, Washington, D.C.

This was an odd week at the office, since all the other full-time staff flew to Detroit for a series of conferences and meetings, none of which were my projects, so I got to stay in D.C. all alone with just our summer intern and me in our great big office yesterday and today. Sometimes it was eerily quiet! Anyway, since this was his first week at work, yesterday I decided to take the North Carolinian out to lunch at Georgia Brown's.

Georgia Brown's, located straight across McPherson Square from our building, specializes in American Southern cuisine, more specifically recipes from South Carolina and Charleston. Georgia Brown's is an interesting contrast to D.C.'s other fine dining Southern restaurant, Vidalia, where the recipes are more broadly Southern and the Vidalia style is more re-engineered, updated, and showy, while Georgia Brown's tries to be more down-home—at least as down-home as one can be with $7 soups and mid-$20 entrees at lunch.

The restaurant, which is only two blocks from the White House, achieved a certain degree of fame in the last presidential administration. It is said that it was one of the Clintons' favorite restaurants, but that's okay; I'll eat there anyway.

The decor is rather unexpected and challenging to describe. It certainly isn't anything "homey" or evoking memories of antebellum plantation homes on slow, steamy, summer days. Instead, the walls are lined with high, comfortable, elegant banquettes and the walls and partitions are distinctly modern, with an unusual, undulating ribbon-like artwork hanging from the ceiling over one of the dining rooms. The only thing that reminded me of South Carolina were the people in the establishment, as most of the staff was black dressed in white jackets, and probably 98% of the patrons were patrician whites, much as one sees in the private clubs of the rather racially divided South.

We started with iced teas, mine unsweetened and garnished with a wedge of lemon and a sprig of mint, and Andrew's the "regular" tea—which in the South means the tea is brewed and lots of sugar is added while the tea is still hot so the sugar dissolves properly. The person who brought the teas got the orders switched, so we got to sample one another's tea, and I have to say that regular tea was really, really good.....if I wasn't trying to maintain my 32" waist line, I definitely would have ordered one.

Now, it's time to get down to business and talk about food. Andrew started with the house salad, which was a very large bowl full of mixed greens with ripe-looking tomatoes, Vidalia onions, sweet corn kernels, spiced peanuts, and blue cheese crumbles and what appeared to be a vinaigrette. His main course was the Carolina gumbo. Again, it was quite a large bowl, and seemed loaded with meats like shrimp, crab, chicken, duck, and Andouille sausage, and, as with all gumbos, okra, green peppers, onion, celery, tomato, and rice. He ate it all, so I gather it was good.

My first course was the Charleston she-crab soup. It was intriguing. Naturally, it was a cream-based crab soup, and it was garnished with crab roe. It had an unusual sourness to it, though, and since the menu indicated that the soup contained sherry, I suspect that the sherry used was old and had turned. While I'd originally come to the restaurant planning to order their big shrimp salad, I succumbed to temptation and ordered the shrimp and grits, partially because I like it, and partially to compare their offering with that I had last month at Vidalia. As it turned out, they were both good in their own way. I definitely liked the grits here much better. They were were creamy and good and there was quite a nice serving of them (unlike Vidalia, where there were very few grits). Over the grits was ladled a stew with a half a dozen jumbo shrimp with the heads and tails still on (I forgot to ask the kitchen to decapitate them for me) and quite a lot of Andouille sausage slices. I didn't eat all the stew, but I scraped up every little bit of the grits.

One thing that surprised me was the basket of cornbread and biscuits. Now, I didn't try a biscuit, so I can't comment on them, but I did eat some of the cornbread. It was made in sticks with yellow cornmeal, and it was sweet! In the South, white cornmeal is probably more common than yellow, but what surprised me most was the fact that it was sweet. That's a Yankee thing!

The dessert tray looked quite tempting with a chocolate walnut pie and a bourbon-spiked pecan pie, and I was intrigued with the idea of a sweet potato cheesecake, but I abstained from dessert. Andrew had the peach cobbler with vanilla bean ice cream and seemed to enjoy it.

Too bad I didn't bring my camera. Some of the food was very photogenic!

Who won the shrimp and grits competition? Well, it's a toss up. They're very different dishes, so it's hard to compare and they are both good in their own way.

After lunch, we actually went back to the office and got work done!