Bistrot du Coin, Washington, D.C.

Who speaks French around here? My French is awful—I only speak enough French that with my Okie accent I can convince the waiters in Paris that they really do know how to speak English. My question is, what is the difference between "bistro" and "bistrot"? I know that they both mean bar/café, or something of that sort, but when is something a "bistro" and when is it a "bistrot"? Is it a gender question? Socioeconomic question? Preference of the owner question?

Well, the source of this burning question was last night's late night supper with my friend Steven, who had me meet him at Dupont Circle at 11 p.m. and then graciously took me to Bistrot du Coin. The crowds had thinned out by that point and we were able to be led straight to a table.

Bistrot du Coin is a wild place. Part bar, part restaurant, it's always lively and noisy—very noisy. It attracts a very young, hip crowd and it's often full of young couples, especially drunk young women who paw all over their men in a way best reserved for the hotel room. The high ceilinged space rocks not only with loud, happy crowd noise, but with popular music played at a loud, deafening level. One can never say the place isn't festive!

As we perused the menu, staff brought us a basket of thick slices of French bread and water in a wine bottle. Where some restaurants have daily specials up on a chalkboard, the chalkboard specials at Bistrot du Coin were for various wines of the day, both by the glass and by the bottle. We ended up ordering a carafe of one of the house wines, a Lyonnais red Cotes du Rhone 2002, which was light and versatile.

Steven started with the tartiflette savoyarde, a tasty and hearty gratin made of potatoes, roblochon cheese, onions, and intensely flavorful bacon.



For his main course, he had the casserole de lapin aux spätzle a creamy rabbit, mushroom, and vegetable stew with Alsacian spätzle. He let me have a sample of his stew, and it was absolutely divine! In fact, it was so good that when one of Steven's friends called (this is what he gets for talking on a cell phone in the middle of a restaurant!), I sneaked my bread over to his casserole dish to sop up a bit more of that delicious cream sauce!



I finally got to try the salade de magret de canard fumé et seché, a salad with smoked duck and grilled scallions, which I've always wanted to try on previous visits, but thought it was too big to do along with a full meal. It was worth the wait. There was a perhaps too small amount of French-style bitter salad greens covered with slices of duck "proscuitto" and the grilled scallions. Then, around the edges of the plate was a dice of smoked duck meat with diced bits of roasted onions and carrot that offered an explosion of flavor. I found myself using my fork to track down every last morsel of the duck.



For dessert, we split a pyramide d'abricot de chocolat, an exquisite creation with chocolate mousse around an apricot jelly enrobed in chocolate ganache and garnished with chocolate shavings, dried apricots, and an apricot sauce. Along with the pyramid, Steven ordered us a couple of glasses of Clairette de Die et Muscat sparkling wine, a perfect choice since the wine was light, slightly sweet, and had essences of apricot, exactly matching the pyramid.



While the proprietors and regulars of Bistrot du Coin are not so happy about it, I rejoice at the newly-in-force smoking ban in restaurants here in D.C. Smoking is a huge, nasty tradition in France! Now that I don't have to worry about coughing from the smoke and leaving the place with my clothes smelling like an ashtray, though, I'm looking forward to a lot more visits to endulge in the delicious foods at Bistrot du Coin.

Bistro Français, Georgetown, D.C.

Why does everyone always call at midnight and want to go out to eat? I have always been a night owl and love late night dining, but D.C. just is not the city for this sort of thing. We end up going to the same handful of places over and over and over again, since no one else is open, public transportation has shut down, and we've no car for driving around all over the place. So, tonight when Kody called me tonight at midnight and wanted to go be social and have a little French food, what else could we do but walk in to downtown Georgetown and land at the old standby, Bistro Français?

Mind you, I like Bistro Francais, but I just wish we had more options for late night variety.




Anyway, I had a tasty Tropiques salad with avocado, hearts of palm, and artichoke hearts with a remoulade type dressing. Kody had an omelette with fine herbs, Swiss cheese, and smoked salmon accompanied by French fries, and a glass of the house sauvignon blanc. Lovely, crusty, French rolls and butter were served alongside.

And, what would dinner out with be without his traditional liquor glass picture?



I suppose I should go to bed. I hate going to bed when the sun is coming up.

Zorba's Cafe, Washington, D.C.

Happy Passover!

Today is the first day of Passover (seasonal felicitations to any of you Jewish readers!), which means the observance started last night at sundown. My friend Eugene has some Russian Jewish ancestors, so we decided it would be fun to have a meal with traditional Passover foods, but we didn't want to do a formal religious Seder meal (the original "Lord's Supper," for you Christian readers). Several of the nicer restaurants in town have special Passover menus this year, including Felix in Adams-Morgan, Gallileo in the West End, and Rosa Mexicana in Penn Quarter, but they were booked up with reservations (not to mention pretty expensive!). Nonplussed, we looked for a place with roast lamb on the menu.

And, we happened upon Zorba's Cafe, just across from the Q Street exit of the Dupont Circle Metro station. Zorba's is always a fun place for a quick and inexpensive meal. They are a rather casual place where diners go to a counter on the lower level to order, pay, and pick up their own food, then they can select their own table on the main level, upstairs, or out on the patio where we chose to eat. The best thing about Zorba's, though, is the "home cooked" food from old Greek family recipes.

This place has some of the best kotósoupa avgolémono I've tasted. This is a simple chicken, vegetable, and rice soup enriched with eggs and lemon juice—a very classic Greek dish—and theirs is always well balanced, hearty, and delicious. They didn't have any matzo ball soup (matzo is not a traditional Greek food!), but we brought our own box of matzo crackers to eat in lieu of the leavened rolls Zorba's serves.

For our main course we had a sort of "blue plate special," their arnáki sto foúrno. They roast a leg of lamb and pull the tender meat from the bone and allow it to mingle with its own natural juices. They serve it on top of a mound of lightly tomato-sauced Greek pasta called manéstra, which looks like large, oversized grains of rice. Along with the lamb and pasta is a large serving of Greek salad with crumbled feta cheese and black Greek olives. Along with our meal, we split a carafe of Greek red wine, since the Passover tradition is to drink four glasses of wine with dinner!

Oh, I'm really curious about the "Mexican Passover" food at Rosa Mexicana, so if anybody is feeling bold and adventuresome and wants to try it out, let me know.

Double dinners

Ended up going to Annie's Paramount Steak House with Kevin after lodge last night for a martini and fried mushrooms.

No sooner did I get home and online to check mail did I find Ian, who was in a social mood and after we IMmed for an hour, we decided to meet at Au Pied Bistro in Georgetown for an early early morning breakfast. Well, I walked all the way to Au Pied, whose web site says they are open til 3 a.m. on Monday nights, only to find them closed. So, we wandered over to the nearly-always-open Bistro Français, where I had a deliciously fluffy and tender omelette aux fines herbs with an order of thin, crispy pommes frites and some handmade mayonnaise for dipping. Ian was going to do a salade du marché avec chevre chaud but changed his mind at the last minute to order glacée de chocolat. After leaving the bistro, we loitered a bit on the streets of Georgetown watching the local constabulary turning doughnuts in the streets and racing off to their various coffee breaks with their lights flashing, before finally deciding to head our separate ways and go home to bed.

Little Viet Garden Crabhouse, Arlington, VA

Leo has been working a lot of late hours and weekends at the office lately, so when he was still at the office at 8 p.m. one night this past week, I made him take a dinner break and meet me in the Clarendon neighborhood of Arlington. He wanted something other than Chinese or Thai food for a change, so I was thinking the international variety in Clarendon, not to mention a Hard Times Cafe with great American chili, would give him some variety. He selected Little Viet Garden Crabhouse, a Vietnamese place. Well, at least it wasn't Chinese or Thai. LOL

Little Viet Garden is a fun cafe with both indoor seating and a very large outdoor covered patio. It was just a little too chilly that night for al fresco dining, so we stayed indoors. Leo started with an order of fried spring rolls. Then he had the seafood special, a double kebab of shrimp, salmon, and a single scallop which ended up on the floor. I had the bun cha gio, the traditional Vietnamese salad with vermicelli noodles and a chopped pork eggroll.




I want to go back to Little Viet Garden soon for their all-you-can-eat crab feast, featuring she-crabs for $25 and he-crabs for $30. Sounds delicious.

Circle Bistro, Washington, D.C.

After getting tired of the delivery pizza Leo had been ordering us every night this weekend, last night I decided that we should go out for a proper dinner after The West Wing was over. We walked up to Washington Circle where we went to the Circle Bistro in the One Washington Circle Hotel. It was still busy, even at that hour of the evening.

I was determined to have a proper dinner with four courses (an affectation drilled in to me during my Oxford days), so I opted to stick with multiple appetizers, since non-à la carte restaurants serve too much food with their main courses. Unfortunately, some of the things I wanted to order were no longer available last night, particularly a duck confit. Nonetheless, I started with a starkly green broccoli soup with an intense explosion of broccoli flavor. It was supposed to have been accompanied by a truffled custard, but they were out of that, and I chose to have the soup anyway; I noticed they charged me the full amount for the soup, though. My second course was the pan roasted wild mushroom salad, which was another intense explosion of flavors, this time from the mushrooms tossed with some delicious applewood smoked bacon served on a bed of frisee and topped with a poached egg. With these two courses, I drank a white Spanish Escencia Diviña Pontevedra 2004 albariño.

My third course was the crispy veal sweetbreads "General Tso," three sweetbreads which had been sauteed til crisp on the outside and still tender and moist inside dressed in a sweet Chinese "General Tso" sauce and served on a bed of salty, wilted, baby spinach. The combination of sweet, sour, salt, and bitter was classically Asian. For a fourth course, I selected a three-cheese sampler plate with a soft goat cheese, a rich triple-cream cow milk semi-soft cheese, and a lovely blue sheep milk cheese, served with a basket of thinly sliced French baguette bread. Our waiter selected a German 2003 Lingenfelder riesling for me to drink with these courses.

Meanwhile, Leo started with a braised leek and Vermont goat cheese tartlet accompanied by a mound of vinegared curly endive and a glass of white Touraine sauvignon blanc. His next course was a square piece of grilled rockfish resting on a bed of mashed potatoes and surrounded by a tomato sauce which he praised as tasting just like a dish his mother makes at home; he drank a classic dry Australian 2003 Hope chardonnay with that course. I thought the chardonnay was quite good. For dessert, he had a mediocre dark chocolate and chocolate mousse parfait (I'd encouraged him to do the lemon pound cake with lavender essence and wild honey sorbet, but he didn't listen) with a glass of a very unusual red Spanish Silvano Garcia Dulce Monastrell 2003. The monastrell had a powerful taste of grape skins in a silken eiswine-type viscosity; it had a sweetness to it without being cloying.

And thus was our dinner.