Panevino, Washington, D.C.

Tonight we dined at Panevino in the Embassy Suites Hotel in D.C.'s West End. It wasn't bad for a hotel restaurant. It's actually a very large space in a contemporary, but not starkly modern, setting with white lattice room dividers and big series of 2'x2' frames grouped together covering the walls, each holding a completely different piece of art which looked very much like student work painting a detail section of a famous great artist masterwork. It was all quite colorful.

The menu is quite simple and moderately priced. "Panevino" is Italian for "bread/wine," so as one might imagine, Panevino is an Italian restaurant.

We started with white wines, Leo a chardonnay and me a pinot grigio, then we ordered.

Leo started with the fried crab cake with cabbage slaw, then moved on to an absolutely enormous bowl of rigatoni in a red sauce (I couldn't tell if it had any meat in it or not), and he ate every bit of it.



For dessert, yet again, he had the tiramisu. I sampled the tiramisu, and, while it was tasty, it was very much a "commercial" version far from the authentic recipe.



These are the only pictures....I forgot to photograph the main courses.

I had the chop chop salad, which was chopped romaine with chopped bits of chicken, cashews, ginger, other vegetables, and some fried won-ton strips all in a slightly sweet, soy-tasting dressing. I thought about dessert, but all three of the things I wanted included either ice cream or gelato, and they were out of them both, so I just did without. My salad was big, so I was already full, anyway.

We had a pleasant waitress from Eritrea who offered a number of menu suggestions.

On the way out, we got some of their soft, lemoncello-flavored, Italian candy to suck on—it's quite different.