White Nights and Beehives

Yesterday was St. Patrick's Day. Rather than brave the loud, crowded, smoke-filled Irish pubs, a group of us made plans to go to a concert at the Kennedy Center.

We started the evening at Notti Bianche, where Fr. Steven wanted to meet for a pre-concert cocktail before meeting the rest of the group at the K.C. I'd had a late lunch in anticipation of our dining after the concert, but he hadn't, so he ordered one of their appetizer sampler plates.

What is it about this new trend in D.C. to serve a single, enormous shrimp with the shell, tail, head, legs, and feelers still on? This is the third time I've seen it in the past week outside of Asian restaurants. Fr. Steven's "bruscetta trio" had one of those shrimps on a white bean puree atop the bread. There was also a prosciutto with fig compote on bread; the third "bruscetta" was a little lame, being three breadsticks and a little bowl of hummus-type chickpea puree for dipping. He was drinking a Colosi Bianco 2004 from Sicily, which I sampled, and I drank a flute of Bisol Prosecco Crede.

After the concert, the three of us survivors scooted over to Cafe La Ruche in Georgetown for a late night repast. Svet had a huge piece of a fruit tart with strawberries, bananas, and big blackberries on creme patisserie on puff pastry. He's had a similar dessert before and we have this ongoing argument about what was used to glaze the fruit. I suppose I could just taste it myself, but I prefer to continue to demand he develop his culinary sensibilities and try to describe it to me himself. He's too intelligent for me to be satisfied with his continuing assertions that he doesn't know and doesn't care. His mother drank a glass of white wine. I had the tourte aux courgettes, a wonderfully flavorful deep-dish pie of zuccini in a bechamel sauce accompanied by a green salad in a light vinegar and oil dressing. The main course food here is such a great bargain! My tourte and salad was only $2 more expensive than Svet's dessert.

And thus we celebrated Saint Patrick's Day.

Mark and Orlando's, Washington, D.C.

What started off as a trip for a quick "sustenance" meal that quickly began to spiral downhill as restaurants were too crowded and we passed them by landed us in unexpected places tonight for an unexpectedly interesting and great meal. I went with my friend ####, who specifically demanded that he/she not be mentioned by name in this post, and after walking all over the area, where we landed was Dupont Circle at a fairly new restaurant called Mark and Orlando's.

Mark and Orlando's occupies the main floor of an old row house on P Street just around the corner from where I used to live when I was doing my D.C. internship years ago. The dining room is small, seating only thirty-two at tightly packed tables. Decor is rather eclectic with plain white walls, a few art works that looked as though they might be for sale, and a bunch of copper molds and utensils all the way across the top of one wall. A short service bar is located under the stairwell and the kitchen has a large pass-through opening visible to the whole dining room. Windows were on two walls and in one windowless segment was a small wine rack.

The menu was rather short with only limited appetizers and main courses, including very few vegetarian items (no main courses) and no entree salads, both of which are unusual for D.C. For some reason, I was expecting a salad and sandwich kind of restaurant, but I was totally off base with that perception; main course dishes were in the mid- to upper-$20 range and demonstrated unexpected creativity and quality.

#### started with a glass of Italian pinot grigio from the short list of by-the-glass wines, then he/she had a very interesting appetizer: the goat cheese grits. They made cheese grits with goat cheese and herbs, formed it into a thick hamburger patty shape, and fried it; it was served on a bed of large-cut pickled cabbage slaw with a large leaf of frisée as an edible garnish. #### liked it.

For our main courses, #### selected the diver scallops with risotto and asparagus and I had the grilled caesar salad. The scallops were large and plentiful, and #### quickly ate them all; I noticed he/she ate most of the risotto but not all. My caesar salad was quite a surprise. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting, whether I was thinking the menu had accidentally left the word "chicken" out of the name or if I'd just have yet another traditional caesar salad, but it certainly was not was I anticipated. They grilled and cooked an entire head of romaine lettuce. The cooked lettuce rested on a layer of dry croutons with dollops of caesar dressing on either side and little mounds of grated parmesan cheese. Surprisingly enough, the salad was actually quite good, and the grilling process imparted a completely new and different flavor to the lettuce.




For dessert, #### had the blueberry financier, a warm spice cake filled with fresh blueberries and garnished with a large dollop of freshly made whipped cream, and a glass of Landauer sparking wine to wash it all down. I opted for the artisanal cheese plate, which featured chevre, aged gouda and a Butternut (?) blue served with dried apricots and water crackers.

During the meal, we could see co-owner Mark working the tables and supervising the dining room and co-owner Orlando in the kitchen.

While we obviously couldn't taste everything on the menu, we were struck by the wonderful looking items we saw going to tables near us. Mark and Orlando's definitely is going to warrant a second trip.

Fogo de Chão Churrascaria, Washington, D.C.

It was time to flesh out details of a business project yesterday, so we chose to have those meaty conversations at the new Fogo de Chão Churrascaria just down the street at 11th and Pennsylvania. Fogo de Chão (say, "FO-go day SHOW" with a dipthong and a bit of a French nasal N on the end) is one of a half dozen high-end franchise restaurants all around major U.S. cities (plus another four stores in São Paulo) in the recent national fad for churrascarias, or Brazilean steakhouses. As with all of these expensive and elegant restaurants, the concept is simple: a lavish salad bar starts the meal, then wandering waiters carry barbecued and roasted meats impaled on swords from table to table where they are carved to order.

The Washington Fogo de Chão is suitably luxe. Dark woods dominate the dining room and small bar area. Open storage of rack after rack of wines lines many of the walls. The salad bar is a focal point of the room and is spectacular art in and of itself. Waiters are dressed in long-sleeved, light blue shirts with red neck scarves, black boots, heavy black leather belts over a woven red sash, and black, full cut, multi-pleated, ballooning gaucho trousers.

The massive salad bar was laden with vegetables, meats, and cheeses much more reminscent of a tapas bar than a typical American salad bar; in fact, I don't really recall there being much lettuce on the salad bar at all. There were lovely artichoke hearts and hearts of palm, asparagus spears, mushrooms, roasted peppers, dried tomatoes, pimientos, all kinds of fine cheeses, sliced sausages and meats, smoked salmon, seafood salads, and many, many other things.

As we ate our salads and vegetables, the gaucho waiters began walking up to the table with their impaled, roasted meats, where we would take a pair of tongs to hold on to slices as they cut them, hot, juicy, and dripping from the roast. We had all kinds of beef, tenderloin, sirloin roasts, rib eye steaks, and bacon wrapped filet mignon; both leg of lamb and lamb chops; pork ribs, pork sausages, roasts, and a delicious pork chop encrusted in parmesan cheese; and bacon-wrapped, juicy chicken breasts. While we were eating the meats, a waiter brought us bowls of garlicky, cheesy mashed potatoes, fried slices of polenta, whole fried bananas, and these popover-like cheese rolls.

Needless to say, one has no excuse for leaving Fogo de Chão hungry. As if we needed it, they did offer desserts for those who wanted them, but we were stuffed and our fried bananas had served our dessert purpose.

So, if you haven't been to Fogo de Chão, go. It's a wonderful place, very elegant, and with ample, delicious food. The menu is prix fixe, and, since there's very little difference between the $25 lunch and $45 dinner spreads, you eat for basically half price at lunch, so do consider taking your main meal at noon. And, remember, this is not a place for vegetarians!

Papa Razzi Trattoria, Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

Saturday afternoons on a warm almost-spring day are not the best times to go driving in Georgetown. We made that mistake this past weekend and would have given up trying to find a parking place if we thought we'd have been able to drive through the traffic and get out of Georgetown in less than an hour. At last, though, we found a place in an expensive garage down by the harbor.

All this effort was so that we could eat a late lunch/brunch at the Georgetown edition of Papa Razzi Trattoria, a large Italian restaurant which is a part of a northeast coast chain. It wasn't bad for a franchise place.

As we waited for our food to arrive we were given a basket of warm foccacia bread and a basket of pencil-thin breadsticks. Svet had a Seven-Up and grenadine cocktail and his mother had a glass of pinot grigio. Eugene and I drank water; the staff tried very hard to sell us expensive bottles of mineral water but we said we'd be content with tap water; their tap water has to be some of the worst tasting water I've had in D.C.; I detected plastic—could it have been a ploy to sell acqua minerale?

The food, however, turned out to be much better than the water. Svet's mother had the risotto del giorno, which happened to be a mixed seafood, and a glass of pinot grigio. Svet ordered his traditional standard, the agnolotti al'Arragosta, a lobster and ricotta ravioli in lobster cream sauce. Eugene had smoked salmon with crispy leeks and crostini, plus a big insalata di Charles, a mixed green salad including bitter greens, fennel, and parmesan cheese. I had gnocchi di Sorrento, a bunch of small potato dumplings in a pomodoro sauce and baked with a heavy dose of mozarella cheese. Gnocchi, which sometimes can be heavy or doughy, was actually fairly light and quite nice here.






Svet and his mother both opted for dessert, a tiramisu and a pannacotta. I sampled both. The tiramisu I thought was rather ordinary and lacking in mascarpone cheese flavor, though it was sweet and had plenty of whipped cream as Americans tend to like. The pannacotta was really pretty good and had a very attractive presentation with a tall mold forming the pannacotta and an artistic drizzle of caramel sauce decorating it and the plate.




It was an okay lunch, I thought, and we had a nice table by the front windows. Service was adequate, though Svet hated our waitress for some reason.

Prince Cafe, Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

It was a glorious evening last Friday as Miroslav, Sviatoslav, and I (Markoslav) headed in to Georgetown for an evening at Prince Cafe, a Lebanese restaurant and shisha lounge or hookah bar on lower Wisconsin Avenue. Prince Cafe is a local chain of about a half dozen establishments. It was pretty crowded, but we managed to get a table outside on the sidewalk.

The primary purpose of hookah bars is to sit around smoking on a shisha or Middle Eastern water pipe. It was an unusual experience. The usually health conscious Sviatoslav told me the stuff we were smoking was dried fruit only (peach, in our case), but after looking at the cafe's web site, I'm a bit confused, since they refer to fruit-flavored tobaccos. Judging from the lung congestion and hoarseness I got (I'm allergic to tobacco), I tend to think it was a fruit-flavored light tobacco instead of purely fruit powder. Each smoker gets a little plastic tip to put over the mouthpiece so no one exchanges any cooties. I was surprised at how long the one fill of tobacco lasted, as we were there for at least two hours.

Even though we'd all had dinner previously, we ended up wanting to nosh a bit and ordered some appetizers and stuff. I thought the hommos (chickpea puree) was unusually tasty; it came with a big piece of hot flatbread from the tandoor. We also got an order of dolmas, the grape leaves stuffed with rice, mint, parsley, garlic, and tomato; there were five short, cigar-shaped pieces. Dessert was several orders of baklava, which I thought was good but it had an unusual, odd, buttery flavor to it (I know butter is used in the preparation, but the flavor is usually not so pronounced). Throughout the evening, we all had hot mint tea—hot water with a tea bag in a paper cup, so nothing special—and Miro had some Turkish coffee. I noticed in perusing the dinner menu that there were quite a number of Indian entrees listed, in addition to Lebanese choices.

Meiwah Restaurant, Washington, D.C.

For about a year, I've been wanting to go to Meiwah Restaurant on the busy corner of New Hampshire and M by 21st Street, but my friend Leo, a Hong Kong native, has always deferred, thinking we should go someplace else. I could never figure out why he didn't want to go there, since it always seemed to be a thriving hot spot every time we walked past it. Recently, though, he has responded to my questioning a little more and I determined that his reservations were two-fold: he suspected that it was yet another "touristy" Chinese place designed for the American palate and, more importantly, he was bothered by the restaurant's names.

Names? Well, actually, it's a little more complicated and esoteric than that. Apparently, there is a discrepancy between the English and Chinese names the restaurant displays in neon in its windows. The English version says "mei-wah," whilst the Chinese characters say "wahl-kurn." Not knowing any Chinese, I asked if that was Mandarin or Cantonese, and he said it didn't matter, since the characters were the same. Okay, fine, I'll leave it to the Chinese to read and understand their 3,000-plus character alphabet. I also asked about whether the two names meant different things, and apparently both words are proper names, with mei-wah being more typically feminine and wahl-kurn being stronger and more masculine.

Well, masculine or feminine, I'm glad we finally ate there last night, since I enjoyed the food and restaurant, and will likely return another day.

Meiweh is situated right on the corner of the street level of an office building at a busy six-way intersection. The two street sides of the establishment are fully revealed to the public with floor to ceiling window walls that display the dining room and bar. Inside, the space is comfortable and contemporary with several dividers helping to create the illusion of greater privacy. Some of the decor includes nicer looking Chinese art, plus there are several swaths of potentially appetite-ruining photographs of politicians—the owner seems to like to have his picture taken with every senator or representative who comes to eat there.

The menu is interesting and varied and accommodates a number of common special diets, including an all-tofu supplement page for vegetarians and an Atkins-friendly section. They also offer brown rice as an option and the menu indicates the kitchen is willing to put sauces on the side.

For some unknown reason, Leo started with a glass of red Rosemount Shiraz from Australia (he doesn't adhere to the traditions of white wines with seafood); I chose the iced jasmine tea, which was quite strong and bitter from a long steep. The food began to arrive in traditional Chinese style, as it was prepared and finished in the kitchen, not in formal courses as Americans typically do. First to arrive was my seaweed salad. With a $3.95 price, I was expecting a tiny bowl, but the serving was easily twice the size of what I'm usually served in D.C. for nearly twice the price. The seaweed was fresh, crisp, and good, too, and also included a few julienned strips of cucumber. Next, Leo got his squid with spiced salt. The squid was in small pieces, lightly battered, and deep fried, with a little bit of garlic and chopped scallion stir-tossed in with the squid for flavor and color. I sampled a tiny bit of the scallion mix and got the surprise of the evening: I caught a piece of hot pepper that rendered me momentarily speechless!

For main courses, Leo got the Singapore noodles, a curried vermicelli with vegetables and lots of shrimp, scallops, and seafood pieces. He actually liked it! That's always a surprise, so since he liked their Singapore noodles, that gives the entire restaurant his official imprimateur. Still struggling with my Lenten vegetarianism, I had the General Tso's tofu, an enormous serving of fried tofu chunks with large scallion pieces and lots of szechuan peppers in a thick, sweet sauce; a mound of shredded iceberg lettuce garnished with a maraschino cherry decorated the side of the plate.

So, the long-avoided Meiwah was a success.

On the way home, we stopped at CVS, where Leo picked up a couple of pints of Haagen-Daz ice cream for dessert. It's so hard to diet around him!

The Dubliner, Washington, D.C.

As you might well imagine, those of us with law school backgrounds and litigation experience are good at exploiting loopholes in rules. I've been worried about how I was going to get my traditional corned beef and cabbage in celebration of Saint Patrick's Day on Friday this year, given that Friday is a Friday in Lent, hence a "meatless" day (not to mention my Lenten vegetarianism); then I remembered that Sundays in Lent are feast days, not fast days. That means that if someone has "given up" a food item for Lent, he or she may eat that food on Sundays—in fact, some people insist that you must eat the food so that one is not fasting on a Sunday. Well, that solved one problem. But, was it too early to be celebrating that great American celebration of the Irish? Of course not! To bolster my case, I note the fact that the annual D.C. St. Patrick's Day parade was at noon Sunday, marching about a mile down Constitution Avenue. Therefore, your Honors, I submit to you that not only can I eat corned beef on a Sunday in Lent from the Church's perspective, it would be unconscionable for me to fail to celebrate the saint on a day when thousands of people marched in a parade in his honor!

Thus, Eugene and I went to dinner last night at The Dubliner.

The Dubliner is an Irish pub and restaurant in the Phoenix Park Hotel right by Union Station here in D.C. The noisy bar was packed with post-parade revelers listening to Irish folk singers and drinking Irish beers, but we were able to get a table on the patio of the restaurant after only a short wait.



As one might imagine, they have a beer list with quite a few Irish beers both in bottles and on tap. Eugene, being the beer expert among us (he went to college at Seton Hall, a Catholic school), chose a couple of pints of Smithwick's, a dark, smooth beer, for us during our meal. I thought it tasted like beer (can you tell I'm not a beer person?). Eugene liked it, but said he prefers the stronger flavor of a Guinness (which is a beer I don't like).

We wanted to sample a number of different dishes, so we opted to split things rather than order individually. This turned out to be a good decision, since The Dubliner has large serving sizes.



We started with the Irish oak smoked salmon. This was a large serving of actual Irish salmon smoked with Irish oak wood, then cut in very large, thin slices, which I found to be very pleasant and to have an excellent texture, flavor, and freshness. It was served with big pieces of Irish brown bread and traditional accompaniments such as capers, minced red onion, cream cheese, and then slight departures from tradition with slices of tomato and hard boiled egg instead of the chopped varieties of those.



Our main course was—what else?—Irish corned beef and cabbage. This large entree included boiled potatoes and carrots and sauteed cabbage, all cooked so they were just barely past the al dente stage rather than having been stewed soggy from hours of boiling, and quite a healthy serving of thin slices of corned beef. Now, usually when I prepare corned beef, I find it difficult to cut it into thin slices and I end up with larger, very tender chunks and pieces. Here, though, the beef is not boiled to the point of falling apart; they get very distinct slices that were still a bit chewy and required a knife to cut instead of being fork-tender. This drier version was good though unexpected. The corned beef was served with a parsley cream sauce and a little cup of grated horseradish.



While The Dubliner has a menu full of Irish entrees, dessert selections are much more Americanized: New York style cheesecake and Key Lime pie were the headliners. We asked our waiter for more Irish options, and he suggested the Bailey's Irish Cream cheesecake or the bread pudding with Irish whiskey sauce; we went with the bread pudding. And, it was a good choice. The pudding was dense and flavorful and there was a good quantity of creme anglaise over the top. I didn't really taste any Irish whiskey in the sauce, but that was okay. Bushmill's was running a big Irish whiskey promotion at The Dubliner, so we almost got Irish coffees after dinner, but we decided not to since the rain had considerably cooled off the outdoor temperatures and we were getting a bit chilly.

This is a picture of our waiter Michael, who says he's a second generation American Irishman. All of the wait staff was attired in black trousers, white shirts, and green and yellow striped ties.

I liked The Dubliner a lot, especially being outside on the patio. Our table was right along the building under the awning, so we just moved both chairs up against the building and the two little brief rainshowers didn't bother us a bit. I don't know, however, if I would like it as much inside, since, in Irish tradition, it was rather dark and crowded inside, and the amplification system for the folk singers inside was turned up pretty loud.

If you're looking for Irish food for St. Patrick's Day, I'd encourage you to go to The Dubliner before or after Friday, since this place will be so crowded Friday night patrons will be packed in tighter than sardines in a can.