Chinatown Express, Washington, D.C.

Had a great dinner and stimulating conversation tonight with my friend John, who's been in town this week from southern California while he attends a convention for the National Association of Elder Law Attorneys. We dined at Chinatown Express in Chinatown. John walked all the way over there from his hotel in the rain, but he said he wanted the exercise. We picked Chinatown Express because he wanted noodles, and they have fabulous freshly made noodles there (this is the place with the noodle chef in the front window where passers-by can watch him work).

We started off with a plate of hand-made pork-stuffed dumplings. They always do a good job with their steamed dumplings and manage to make them in a way that doesn't make the wrappers gummy or sticky.

John ordered a little bowl of seafood and noodle soup. You can see what he got! There was a big selection of octopus, squid, shrimp, scallops, and fish balls along with Chinese vegetables and a large quantity of the handmade, fresh noodles.

I had the pan-fried noodles with similar seafood items (except no fish balls). It was as expected and arrived billowing steam from having been just dished up out of the wok. Their fried noodles have a bit of brown sauce, so the dish always reminds me a little of lo mein.

It was great to have the chance to meet John on this trip and I'll be looking forward to future dinners when he's back in D.C.

Tandoori Nights, Arlington, VA

The Market Common at Clarendon is the beneficiary of an exciting new restaurant that opened just a little over a week ago. Tandoori Nights is the second location for the Migliani family, which already established a successful Tandoori Nights in Gaithersburg, Maryland. If our experience this week is any indication, the Arlington location as well should prove to be highly successful.

Svet and I went to Tandoori Nights for lunch Thursday. It was a beautiful day and we took advantage of their large, second floor patio overlooking the Market. Inside, though, the decor is bright and exciting. Fabulous murals decorate the space, including some vibrant Indian-themed paintings on the ceiling. Bar furnished are streamlined and contemporary, and several tables in the dining room feature stylized canopies recalling Indian tradition.

The menu features items which I can best describe as popular and modern, designed for the young Washington urban professionals. Perhaps this is due to the popularization of Indian foods in American culture, but the kitchen does not forget its Indian roots. I'm not sure if they have separate lunch and dinner menus, since the menu we received featured a lot of dinner type items priced in the mid- to upper-teens. A table tent, though, listed a number of lunch meal specials priced at $7.95.

While Svet started with a fruit smoothie, we both ended up ordering the lamb kebob lunch special. The first course was an apple and shredded carrot salad dressed in a light and slightly sweet vinaigrette served in a white, boat-shaped bowl.



For the main course, they brought us clover-shaped plates with two sausage-shaped rolls of lamb barbecued in the tandoor, a bowl of thin yellow dal (lentil) soup, basmati rice studded with bits of saffron rice, and a delicious spinach dish I thought at first was going to be saag paneer, but which turned out to be pieces of miniature corn on the cob in the spinach mixture. Along with the meal came some nice naan bread from the tandoor; Svet wanted more bread, so we ordered an onion naan as well.



Service was excellent and attentive throughout the meal. We also had a visit from the restaurant manager to make sure everything was alright.

Next time you're on a shopping expedition to the Market Common (Apple, Williams-Sonoma, Crate and Barrel, etc.), stop in at Tandoori Nights for lunch or dinner. And, judging from the looks and size of the bar, it will, no doubt, soon be a popular happy hour destination for the young professionals crowd.

Georgetown Cafe, Georgetown, D.C.

There's something comforting about a diner. The food is always simple, plentiful, and cheap, and one can always count on getting full without emptying one's wallet. Diners are surprisingly hard to find in D.C., probably because their low prices don't generate the cash flow needed to support the high rents in most parts of town, which makes it all the more surprising that we would find a diner not only in Georgetown but on the tony Wisconsin Avenue.

Ian has been trying for weeks to get me to try one of his favorite diners, the Georgetown Cafe, so off there we went last night. It was an interesting irony since this is one of the few times we've been out before midnight when lots of restaurants are still open, yet the Georgetown Cafe is open twenty-four hours a day.

Georgetown Cafe isn't your stereotypical diner. In addition to burgers and breakfast items, they have a large selection of Middle Eastern foods. Located on the upper floor of a narrow, old building, decor is sparse around the cheap, utilitarian tables and chairs. A long bar in the back suggests that at one time the space may have been a restaurant with a liquor license, but it's now used as a service station for the wait staff.

Diners always make me crave chicken-fried steaks and gravy; alas, there were no such treats on the menu. Then I looked at the burgers, but Ian wanted breakfast—omelettes, specifically—and he's not much of a carnivore, so I acquiesced to breakfast as well, ordering a ham and cheddar cheese omelette. Ian chose a Swiss cheese omelette with home fries, potato slices lightly pan fried until soft. Both omelettes came with buttered white bread toast which was rather lighter than I would have preferred for "toast," and little pre-packaged servings of grape jelly. We also ordered a basket of French fries; the fries had been lightly battered and expertly deep-fried; they were just great, being the highlight of the meal.




For beverages, I had an iced tea, which was fine, and Ian had a Coke, which I noted came from a gun in the bar and looked, I thought, a little weak.

Even though we'd eaten breakfast foods for supper, we both opted for dessert, Ian the chocolate cake and me the carrot cake. Both of the cakes were "homemade" and fresh; they both arrived covered in commercial whipped cream; the chocolate cake also got squirts of chocolate syrup.




It was nice getting to try Georgetown Cafe finally, since most of my eating-out friends like Svet and Tony are food snobs who don't like diner food; in fact, when Tony was in D.C. last January, we walked in to Georgetown Cafe and he refused to eat there, making us land at the incredibly overpriced and mediocre Cafe Milano. Ian will no doubt drag me to the cafe again, so I'll have to try some of the grill sandwiches and the entrees, which are really the true test of a diner, especially one that doesn't have chicken-fried steak.

Kaz Sushi Bistro, Washington, D.C.

With the proliferation of the ubiquitous sushi bar in nearly every pan-Asian restaurant around the country, Japanese food has started to become common and mundane. A few places, though, maintain the tradition of food as art so highly prized in Japan, and it can be particularly exciting when Japanese chefs trained both in the cuisine of their homeland and the cuisine of the West fuse the styles into creative Japanese-American dishes; thus is our restaurant choice earlier tonight, Kaz Sushi Bistro in downtown D.C.'s West End.

Kaz is located on the upper level of a storefront near the Uruguayan Embassy. The decor is simple with classic Japanese lines and furnishings; Japanese-style watercolors of fish decorate the walls. As expected from a Japanese restaurant, service was speedy, quiet, and efficient.

My dinner companion started with a grilled baby octopus appetizer. I sampled one of the little octopi and it was tender, tasty, and had a spicy kick to it. The photo below is a little misleading, since the dish was served in a square bowl, not a plate, and there was more to the serving than it appears. In the bottom of the bowl was a fine julienne of pickled carrots and daikon (Japanese radish), and scallion sprouts garnished the top.



For her next course, she chose several different types of sushi, including clockwise from the top left, a spicy tuna roll, eel, salmon, and uni (sea urchin). I noticed that the gari (pickled ginger) looked very pale and fresh.



I selected the unadon bento box for my meal. This included two big pieces of barbecued unagi (eel) on a bed of Japanese rice, with a seaweed side dish, a clear vermicelli and mushroom dish, some light vegetable tempura, and an American-style tossed green salad in a creamy sesame dressing. The unagi was good, but I especially enjoyed the seaweed and the vermicelli.



Our desserts turned out to be wonderfully creative and memorable. My friend had the green tea tiramisu. A thin layer of cake was covered with a strongly green tea flavored mascarpone cheese mousse and garnished with a tiny dice of cherry jelly; a red bean paste was squirted decoratively on the plate.



I had the lychee panna cotta with mango sorbet, which was excellent. Both of the fruit flavors exploded in the mouth and complemented one another well.



We also had some very interesting Japanese wines with our meal. We each had one of the two sake tasting flights, each with three different cups of ice cold sake. We both thought that our favorite sake of the flight was our respective "light" wine; the other wines were good, too, and their flavors differed widely, including one of mine which had been aged in cedar casks and had a very peppery flavor.



With dessert, we both had a glass of choya, a very traditional Japanese plum port wine. Our waitress brought a tray to the table with a glass for each of us that contained a small, green, Japanese plum and a large plum-filled decanter with the choya, which she poured for us tableside. The wine was sweet and syrupy and had an intense but pleasant green plum flavor and also a flavor with reminded me somewhat of red hot candies without the "hot."



Kaz ranks highly on my sushi bar list in D.C., up with one of my favorites, Sushi Taro. I'm looking forward to a return trip to Kaz to try out some of their many larger tasting menus, including eight-course gourmet samplers of the cold and hot "small dishes" featured by Chef Kaz Okochi (who we saw in the dining room tonight visiting with one of the other large tables). These small dishes give the chef the opportunity to fuse Japanese cuisine with American tastes, and he does it with skill and aplomb.