Zed's Ethiopean Cuisine, Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

After struggling with old office and cell numbers from another state and then an old cell number from my "early D.C. phase," my friend Isha finally tracked me down this evening to announce that she was in town and wanted to go to dinner "someplace different," courtesy of her office expense account. That can be a difficult assignment when dealing with an international businesswoman who has lived all over the place, but I know her tastes when she lived in Tulsa were not particularly adventurous, and I figured her London experiences were not much different, so, I picked an Ethiopean place. I was right; the Ethiopean cuisine was a new experience for her and she actually liked it.

Now, Washington has a plethora of good—and even excellent—Ethiopean restaurants, some of which have big followings. I wanted things to be "just so" for Isha, though, which meant we had to go to Georgetown to Zed's Ethiopean Cuisine. Zed's is one of the better known Ethiopean places in D.C., largely because of their fine food and excellent service, but also because they are alleged to be the only place the Ethiopean Embassy will use to cater their formal embassy events. What I particularly like about Zed's is their elegance; they seem to be the only "white tablecloth" Ethiopean restaurant in town.

We started with two appetizers we shared, kaisa and shrimp tibbs. The kaisa is a soft, traditional, cottage-type cheese enriched with butter and herbs; the shrimp tibbs are pieces of shrimp with sauteed onions, red pepper, and garlic in a tomatoey sauce; both of these appetizers are eaten with the fingers with pieces of Ethiopean injera bread.

Since this was Isha's first visit to an Ethiopean establishment, I thought the best thing to do would be to order sampler plates, giving her a broad variety of tastes and flavors. We ordered one beef and chicken sampler and one vegetarian sampler. They all came on one big injera-lined platter for the whole table to share. I'm not sure what everything was on the platter, but it appeared that we had a chicken and hard boiled egg doro watt, several beef stews including kaey watt, alicha, and segana gomen; chopped collard greens with garlic, a delicious cabbage and carrot tikile gomen, a stew of green beans, cauliflower, and carrots, a chickpea puree, and a few other things I can't recall. They also brought us a basket of rolled up pieces of injera which we could use to pick up and eat our food.

We washed down our food with big cans of Tusker Beer from Kenya, which was a pleasant lager.

Unusually for an Ethiopean restaurant, Zed's offers Italian style desserts. While Ethiopia was one of the few African countries that was not colonized by European powers in the 18th and 19th centuries, there was a brief period in the very late 19th centiry when Italy had a presence in Ethiopia in the area known as Eritrea. Isha had a cappuccino tartufo (ice cream ball) and I had a piece of grandmother cake, which was a lemon tart-like cake; they also had profiteroles and gelatos on the menu.

As expected, we had a very pleasant evening at Zed's. The food was excellent and the service was gracious, efficient, and professional. Zed's is a great place for Ethiopean "first-timers" as well as for those seeking a more elegant Ethiopean experience. Yes, it's a little more expensive than the places in Adams-Morgan or on U Street, but this is Georgetown and I think Zed's continues to be worth the money.

Potbelly Sandwich Works, Washington, D.C.

There's something uneasy about eating at a restaurant called Potbelly Sandwich Works when a person is a little overweight wearing some clothes that are just a little bit too tight, especially when lunching with colleagues who are young and svelte. Nevertheless, there are limited options in the downtown area near the White House for people not on expense accounts, and we've done Cosí and Breadline far too often, so this afforded us a welcome change.

Our first problem, though, was going to luncheon at 12:45; that's still in the midst of the lunch rush. We found ourselves standing in line out on the sidewalk just to get in to order. The staff at Potbelly, though, was unexpectedly organized and efficient, and they were taking orders quickly and preparing toasted sandwiches in amazingly short time.

Potbelly is a national franchise sandwich shop with stores concentrated primarily in the Great Lakes area, with others in Texas and the VA-DC-MD area. They serve mostly toasted sandwiches and hot soups in small, comfortable stores with folksy decor.

I had a toasted tuna salad and Swiss cheese sandwich on a little whole wheat sub roll with a big, crunchy, dill pickle and a bottle of Orangina. It was a decent lunch for the type and price point of this kind of restaurant. My colleagues had a roast beef and provolone sandwich and a meatball marinara sandwich, plus chocolate and strawberry milk shakes.

Now, it's back to work. It's warmish out with a touch of wind, but the skies are a bit grey and overcast. Perhaps spring will come soon.

La Creperie, Arlington VA

Had another lovely dinner tonight with Oklahoma friend Kody, who met me at the train station this evening when I got back in to D.C. from Baltimore. We metroed down to Pentagon City to do some wine shopping at World Market and then grab some dinner. We wandered and wandered around Pentagon Row looking for that little Vietnamese restaurant and couldn't find it, so we decided to pop in to La Creperie. La Creperie is, of course, French!

We started with glasses of Merlot Michel Picard while we purused the menu. Dinner began with us splitting an order of pâté et cornichons, which was a pleasant country-style pate spiked with pistachios and accompanied by several cornichon pickles and little cocktail onions with a basket of a sliced baguette.

For our plats, Kody had a crêpe Parisienne, which was a great big crepe filled with spinach and brie cheese with a basil sauce drizzled across the crepe, which he said he liked. I had the crêpe au Merguez, a crepe stuffed with bits of spicy French sausage. onions, and green peppers with a bit of cheese and a tomato sauce. I liked the sausage, but I would have liked it to be a little hotter and spicier; the French in France, however, do not.

For dessert we split a crêpe Suzette, the classic Grand Marnier-flavored dessert, this time served with a little scoop of vanilla ice cream. Kody drank a Siema Pinot Grigio and I had an Henri Marchant champagne. The picture below is of Kody with his pinot grigio and what's left of the devastated crêpe Suzette.

Belga Cafe, Washington, D.C.

Tuesday night, I metroed over to Eastern Market to meet my friend Kody for dinner. Kody is an Oklahoma boy I used to know before I moved to D.C. and he's here this semester at Georgetown University to take a couple of classes while he does an internship at an unspeakably unfortunate placement (but he volunteered for it and likes it). We'd originally planned to go to Montmartre (Kody loves all things French), but on the Metro ride over, I ran in to a friend who suggested Kody and I go instead to Belga Cafe. That was a wonderful idea!

So, once Kody arrived, he thought Belgian food would be fun, so off we went down Barracks Row to Belga Cafe.

Belga Cafe has been open a year now, so they were having a special four course prix fixe menu for $49, including some unusual Belgian beers and free souvenir beer glasses as an "anniversary special." It's this week only, though, so you Belgian beer fans should race right over. The special menu looked good, but we decided instead to order à la carte from the menu.

Kody opted for the le vrai steak Belge, a Belgian-style steak served with Belgian fries (the original pommes frites, for you French fries lovers) and mayonnaise for dipping, plus a green salad with a simple vinaigrette. On the waiter's strong recommendation, I had the waterzooi van vis, a waterzooi of fish. For those unfamiliar with Belgian cooking terms, a waterzooi is a stew with seasoned stock enriched with egg yolks and cream. In this case, the fish was accompanied by some mussels and julienned threads of winter vegetables; I also detected an anise flavor, so they probably used some celery root or fennel in the mix.




For dessert, I had wanted to try the asparagus ice cream with asparagus beignets, but, alas, they were out, and nothing else on the dessert list struck my fancy, so I abstained. Kody tried the three-way crème brulée with one chocolate pot de crème and two vanilla brulées differently scented.



Kody hadn't had Belgian beers before, so he decided to sample several.





He also decided to sample a poire William eau de vie....



......and an Osborne port.



I had a "Delirium Tremens" beer. It tasted like beer. I also had a port after dinner, and it was good; my only complaint was that the bartender served the ports in grappa glasses.

Anyway, it was a great evening and I'm looking forward to dining out with Kody again soon.

Ruby Tuesday's, Silver Spring MD

Monday night, Miroslav, Svet, and I wandered up to Silver Spring to a Ruby Tuesday's for a late snack. All I got was iced tea, since I was still full from dinner, but Miro ordered one of those enormous dessert thingies with a brownie, ice cream, whipped cream, and a cherry that was served in an oversized beer schooner and certainly would have been enough to serve two to four people; he's lucky he's 6'6" and big enough to eat all of that!

Darling Svet seemed to have confused Ruby Tuesday's with one of the gourmet restaurants he usually frequents, and kept complaining about his chips and cheese dip, somehow thinking that they would actually use real cheese instead of "cheese food" in the dip. Finally after him whining enough about the cheese and him thinking that it was too spicy (did they actually put spice in that??), the waitress offered to replace the queso with the spinach dip, which he accepted. I guess it was okay, since he ate it all. Some day I'm going to have to fix him a nice, properly spicy meal.

Salmon and strings

Last Monday evening we went to the Grand Master's homecoming at East Gate Lodge up in Takoma Park. A huge contingent of Grand Lodge officers showed up to join the members and guests. They started with dinner for everyone, featuring tasty slabs of baked salmon, wild and brown rice, roasted new potatoes, grilled asparagus, and a melange of sauteed squashes and onions, plus big tossed salads with diced marinated chicken breast and shredded parmesan cheese with a balsamic vinaigrette. Some kind of nice looking chicken dish was an alternative to the salmon, but Miroslav and I both had salmon, so I wasn't sure what the chicken was. They had cheese and water crackers before the meal. I'm not sure if the meal was provided by a caterer or by in-house cooks, since they were actually using the kitchen there.

The Casablanca String Quartet from "The President's Own" Marine Chamber Orchestra (the people who play for state dinners and such) provided classical background music during the meal, and played as the featured entertainers later in the evening during the formal program. These four Marine sergeants all have interesting training and experience, including degrees from places like the Juilliard School and the New England Conservatory. I've often wondered if military band and orchestra members get any kind of perks or salary supplements, since they all seem to have college degrees and would presumably be eligible for commissions as officers. Does anybody know?

During the formal program, the string quartet played all four movements of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusick, which was kind of fun. Svet was about to go crazy because his boss was sitting a couple of chairs to our right and was singing along with the music, and Svet wanted to shush him but didn't dare say that to the boss!

We escaped at the end of the public portion of the program before the lodge had their formal business meeting, so we missed whatever dessert they were having after the session.