Restaurant Kolumbia, Washington, D.C.

As many of you have heard, roommate Leo and his date had a fancy, expensive dinner at Restaurant Kolumbia prior to their breakup on the walk home (was it the food's fault?). Fortunately, I was able to get their notes and opinions before the breakup. Here are the details of the meal.

Valentine's Day can be one of the most challenging days of the year for any chef and restaurant, and it was no different for the Middle Eastern-Asian fusion Restaurant Kolumbia in Washington's downtown West End. Unfortunately, the staff wasn't quite up to the challenge of the crowds and the food was disappointing, as well.

For Valentine's Day, Chef Jamie Stachowski created a special five course tasting menu with an optional associated wine flight. The food was $90 per person and the wines were $25 per person; credit card deposits were required to secure the reservations for either the 7 p.m. or 9 p.m. seatings. A live jazz band played during the course of the evening.

As diners were seated, they were offered an angel-deviled quail egg as an amuse-bouche. Quail eggs, as many of you know, are tiny little things, maybe one inch or less long. The deviled eggs used Cajun-style spices and lots of green herbs. Amusingly, the amuse-bouche was only one half of an egg. Along with the amuse-bouche, they served the wine for the first course, a Domaine de Martinolles Cremant 2000, which is one of those non-champagne French sparkling wines.

The Cremant, which had been so nice by itself and with the amuse-bouche did not fare so well with the first courses. One was a salmon Napoleon, layers of crackers and smoked salmon in an "avocado goat cheese embrace," and the other was three warm oysters in an artichoke covered with a sesame-tasting black sauce called "black knight sauce." Leo liked the oysters but thought the overall dish hard to eat (artichokes can be a pain in a formal setting).

The second courses were early salads. The "Breakfast in Bed" was an ordinary spinach salad topped with a soft poached egg, bacon, and grapefruit segments, and the alternative was an endive, fennel, and blood orange salad with beet carpaccio and an hazelnut emulsion. The blood oranges were a bit crunchy, so perhaps they were insufficiently ripe and out of season. Paired with the salads was a Domaine d'Elise Petit Chablis 2004, but instead of serving it, they served a red wine.....perhaps the Domaine Charvet Moulin a Vent Beaujolais 2004 slated for the third course?

The third food courses got mixed reviews. On one hand, the porcini mushroom timbale with crispy sweetbreads and perigord sauce was good, but the fish "pot au feu" made of balls of sole with winter white vegetables was "horrible" and "not fresh." No wines were served with this course.

The highlight of the fourth course was the wine, a 2000 Montenidoli Chianti Colli Sensi. The food, on the other hand, demonstrated the kitchen's stress. When taking the intial orders, wait staff did not inquire as to desired doneness on the beef. Consequently, Leo's date was chagrinned that the filet mignon arrived extremely rare. The internal lobster stuffing in the filet was okay, though. Leo suffered a similar but much scarier fate: rare, greatly undercooked squab. I told him regardless of the slowness of the evening's service, he should have sent that back to the kitchen. The squab was very sweet, having been basted with lavendar honey, and came with a quince and date pate Leo thought reminded him of sweet potato chunks.

They both chose the baba amour for dessert, which they decided was the lesser of the two evils. The vanilla pillow cake was a small, very sweet, marshmallow-tasting cake served with rum syrup and what was supposed to have been tropical fruits with passion fruit foam, but which they described as merely a strawberry-banana sauce. They were glad, though, not to have ordered the chocolate fondue, since what they saw on other tables was just strawberries with chocolate sauce. The wine for the desserts was excellent, though; they poured a 2003 Domaine Larredya Jurancon "Selection" with a sweet, green apple flavor.

The bill for two, including tax and tip? $305.

As an overall impression, the food fell well below expectations, but more annoyingly, the service was dismal and understaffed. They were only poured four of the five wines in the wine flight (something they only realized in retrospect), and the wines weren't served with the food on a timely basis or with the correct courses. In fact, they had a long wait after getting the dessert wine before the dessert ever showed up. Then, most annoyingly, after requesting a check, they had to wait over fifteen minutes for the bill to arrive. They've pledged never to return to Restaurant Kolumbia.

Well, I can't say I didn't warn them before they made their reservations.

Lei Garden, Washington, D.C.

Chinese people eat chicken feet. As a matter of fact, it's a pretty popular snack. There really isn't much to eat on a chicken foot, but they cook it anyway—twice, actually—and then savor the item. One of the more popular ways to prepare them is to boil or bake them in some kind of barbecue sauce, then they fry them. Then when it's time to eat, you sort of nibble the skin off the feet and suck the bones. They're really not that bad.

Where did we have chicken feet? Well, this week we went to Lei Garden in Chinatown for their luncheon dim sum offering. Dim sum is a meal made out of a series of appetizer-like small dishes, coming in quite a variety, and featuring a lot of dumpling and balls, as well as other things. As with many Chinese meals, foods are shared around the table. We've gone to several dim sum places in D.C., and Lei Garden pretty consistently has the best dim sum in the District. Some have told me there are some good places in Virginia, but we've not been yet, so I can't compare.





Here are some of the dim sum dishes we had. A couple of carts circulate around the dining room with fresh food, and diners get to pick which items they want.

You can see in the first picture a dish of chicken feet, some cooked pork chunks, and couple of different types of fried dumplings, and an interesting daikon radish dish in a sort of custard. In the second picture are steamed items, including some spinach dumplings and a fun shrimp dish enrobed in a thin pancake. The third picture shows some taro items, one a sort of croquette filled with bean paste and the other a seafood fritter coated in shredded taro.

Our waiter Min was very helpful and he directed the several waitresses pushing the carts around the dining room to keep our plates full and check for special requests. Service at Lei Garden is always very attentive. Hot tea is complimentary.

Dim sum is offered in the upstairs dining room at Lei Garden every day for lunch. Full menu service is available in the downstairs dining room.

Maté, Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

Last night one of my lonely married friends whose wife is in Europe this Valentine's Day rang me up at the last minute and wanted to go to dinner, so he took me to Maté, a trendy sushi-tapas bar across the street from Washington Harbor. I enjoyed our visit.

Maté is a brand new place on the corner of the building where the Loew's Theater is located, and everything is very vogue and modern. It's a noisy, vibrant place; a live D.J. was actually in a sound booth above the bar to play music for the dining room and bar area, but, interestingly enough, there is no dance floor in the place. The one thing I didn't like was that it was smoky, and I couldn't identify a specific "no smoking" area anywhere; we were seated in the dining room area, but some female at the next table was smoking like a chimney.

There is a small sushi bar in line with the liquor bar, but no one sat there; most people chose to sit in the low, modern tables and chairs in the bar or in the dining room area. They had some striking contemporary light fixtures in the place, notably some shiny spiral metal chandeliers in the dining room and a fascinating large fixture in the lounge area that looked like a lot of multi-colored Easter eggs suspended on individual wires.

We started at the bar. I had a glass of Morandé Casablanca Valley Pinot Noir from Chile, which was a lovely burgundy color and had an unusual sweet taste to it without the wine itself actually being sweet. My friend doesn't drink, so he just had pineapple juice. The restaurant is named after the herbal tissane "maté," a popular drink in South America that's packed with the stimulant xanthine (chemically related to caffeine and theobromine); several of the bar drinks included maté in the blend, such as maté martinis ("matinis") and maté mojitos.

As we moved to the dining area, we got these very original round menus with the pages riveted to the bottom half of the circle. Choices were limited mainly to sushi rolls and ceviche, but they also had a few salads and appetizers. We shared several different kinds of sushi rolls including one very spicy tuna roll and another one recommended by the waitress that was covered with shreds of crab meat the name of which escapes me. While I dared not endulge, my friend had the molten maté-infused chocolate cake.

On the whole, the food was adequate and the prices were consistent with average Georgetown prices. My main complaint with the place was that the service was rather lacking. The waitresses acted much more like cocktail bar waitresses than dining room waitresses, and some basics, like refilling water glasses, were forgotten. As long as one doesn't have any higher expectations, though, I kind of liked the place, and it would be a fun place to go before or after a movie when one is just wanting some drinks and some nibble food.