Marshall's Bar and Grill, Washington, D.C.

Last night after he returned from his big weekend in New York City, Leo wanted to go out someplace for dinner, so we walked up to Pennsylvania Avenue and started walking west towards Georgetown, when we decided to try a place in the far West End we'd passed countless times, but at which we'd never before eaten: Marshall's Bar and Grille.

Marshall's is wedged in where L Street splits off from Pennslyvania, right next door to that big Mormon center. It's a two-level building with the bar upstairs and the restaurant on the ground level. It's also an interesting mix of contradictions. The restaurant features a bunch of tall, casual booths and banquettes that look very much like a casual bar, but yet over the speakers they were playing Beethoven and Mozart. Also eclectic is the menu, which starts off with Lebanese appetizers, then moves to Mexican; salads are very California-influenced; burgers and sandwiches are very American; there are lots of Italian-style pasta entrees; and the main entrees include steaks and crabcakes, a lamb shank, a roasted chicken, and international chicken entrees from Lebanon, India, and Italy.

Leo ordered fried clam strips for his appetizer and the linguine al frutti di mare for his entree. The waiter forget to bring the clam strips, so Leo had to do without and opted not to have them with/after his pasta. "Fruitti di mare is the Italian phrase for "fruits of the sea," or, in American, mixed seafood. Now, I'm not positive since we didn't discuss it, but it appeared to me that there was only tail-on scampi in the dish; he reported it was quite good, though, and liked it better than a similar dish at Au Pied Bistro. He also had a glass of their house pinot grigio. I tasted it and it was nicely crisp with a bit of a green apple taste, but highly acid, so Leo wasn't quite so sure he liked it; I had him wait until he got his food to try it again, and one he had the cream sauce and pasta to counterbalance the acid, it turned out to be quite a pleasant wine and an excellent accompaniment for that particular dish. For dessert he selected the amaretto cheesecake, which turned out to be an Italian style cheesecake with a full amaretto flavor; I tasted it and it was nice, but I thought the thin layer of cheesecake had been baked in too hot of an oven, letting it develop a somewhat granular texture.

I had iced tea and the California chopped salad. The salad was huge. There was a large bed of chopped greens, including a lot of leaf and romaine lettuce, but also raddiccio and arugula. Mounded on top of the greens were diced grilled chicken, some still-warm crumbled bacon, bleu cheese crumbles, roasted red bell peppers, chopped tomatoes, half of an avocado, and some very interesting corn relish. For dessert I ordered their apple-berry cobbler à la mode, which turned out to be quite unusual. The cobbler was served in an old-fashioned sundae glass and the apple and unidentified berry filling were very dark colored and highly, almost overpoweringly, spiced with cloves.

We weren't served any dinner rolls, since they ran out of them earlier in the evening.

While they had a few service glitches, we both thought our food was pretty good. We discovered that their kitchen stays open until midnight every night, so we'll probably head back there again soon.