Georgia Brown's, Washington, D.C.

This was an odd week at the office, since all the other full-time staff flew to Detroit for a series of conferences and meetings, none of which were my projects, so I got to stay in D.C. all alone with just our summer intern and me in our great big office yesterday and today. Sometimes it was eerily quiet! Anyway, since this was his first week at work, yesterday I decided to take the North Carolinian out to lunch at Georgia Brown's.

Georgia Brown's, located straight across McPherson Square from our building, specializes in American Southern cuisine, more specifically recipes from South Carolina and Charleston. Georgia Brown's is an interesting contrast to D.C.'s other fine dining Southern restaurant, Vidalia, where the recipes are more broadly Southern and the Vidalia style is more re-engineered, updated, and showy, while Georgia Brown's tries to be more down-home—at least as down-home as one can be with $7 soups and mid-$20 entrees at lunch.

The restaurant, which is only two blocks from the White House, achieved a certain degree of fame in the last presidential administration. It is said that it was one of the Clintons' favorite restaurants, but that's okay; I'll eat there anyway.

The decor is rather unexpected and challenging to describe. It certainly isn't anything "homey" or evoking memories of antebellum plantation homes on slow, steamy, summer days. Instead, the walls are lined with high, comfortable, elegant banquettes and the walls and partitions are distinctly modern, with an unusual, undulating ribbon-like artwork hanging from the ceiling over one of the dining rooms. The only thing that reminded me of South Carolina were the people in the establishment, as most of the staff was black dressed in white jackets, and probably 98% of the patrons were patrician whites, much as one sees in the private clubs of the rather racially divided South.

We started with iced teas, mine unsweetened and garnished with a wedge of lemon and a sprig of mint, and Andrew's the "regular" tea—which in the South means the tea is brewed and lots of sugar is added while the tea is still hot so the sugar dissolves properly. The person who brought the teas got the orders switched, so we got to sample one another's tea, and I have to say that regular tea was really, really good.....if I wasn't trying to maintain my 32" waist line, I definitely would have ordered one.

Now, it's time to get down to business and talk about food. Andrew started with the house salad, which was a very large bowl full of mixed greens with ripe-looking tomatoes, Vidalia onions, sweet corn kernels, spiced peanuts, and blue cheese crumbles and what appeared to be a vinaigrette. His main course was the Carolina gumbo. Again, it was quite a large bowl, and seemed loaded with meats like shrimp, crab, chicken, duck, and Andouille sausage, and, as with all gumbos, okra, green peppers, onion, celery, tomato, and rice. He ate it all, so I gather it was good.

My first course was the Charleston she-crab soup. It was intriguing. Naturally, it was a cream-based crab soup, and it was garnished with crab roe. It had an unusual sourness to it, though, and since the menu indicated that the soup contained sherry, I suspect that the sherry used was old and had turned. While I'd originally come to the restaurant planning to order their big shrimp salad, I succumbed to temptation and ordered the shrimp and grits, partially because I like it, and partially to compare their offering with that I had last month at Vidalia. As it turned out, they were both good in their own way. I definitely liked the grits here much better. They were were creamy and good and there was quite a nice serving of them (unlike Vidalia, where there were very few grits). Over the grits was ladled a stew with a half a dozen jumbo shrimp with the heads and tails still on (I forgot to ask the kitchen to decapitate them for me) and quite a lot of Andouille sausage slices. I didn't eat all the stew, but I scraped up every little bit of the grits.

One thing that surprised me was the basket of cornbread and biscuits. Now, I didn't try a biscuit, so I can't comment on them, but I did eat some of the cornbread. It was made in sticks with yellow cornmeal, and it was sweet! In the South, white cornmeal is probably more common than yellow, but what surprised me most was the fact that it was sweet. That's a Yankee thing!

The dessert tray looked quite tempting with a chocolate walnut pie and a bourbon-spiked pecan pie, and I was intrigued with the idea of a sweet potato cheesecake, but I abstained from dessert. Andrew had the peach cobbler with vanilla bean ice cream and seemed to enjoy it.

Too bad I didn't bring my camera. Some of the food was very photogenic!

Who won the shrimp and grits competition? Well, it's a toss up. They're very different dishes, so it's hard to compare and they are both good in their own way.

After lunch, we actually went back to the office and got work done!

La Madeleine Bakery Bistro, Georgetown, D.C.

After finishing our dinner at Vietnam Georgetown, we walked across the street to La Madeleine Bakery Bistro for dessert. La Madeleine is actually a national franchise based in Dallas with about a half dozen stores in the D.C. metro area alone; even though they are a chain restaurant, their decor feels very homey and almost too original to be a national design. The best way to describe the food here is to say it's a French version of a fast food restaurant. The boulangerie includes all manner of French breads and rolls, filled croissants, and a big selection of French and European desserts. The bistro has quick-to-make salads plus quiches, gallettes, pochettes, and friands, all of which are really eat-in-hand items (though one is permitted to use a fork), some crêpes, and sandwiches. In the evenings, the bistro features country French style plats, though I didn't see anyone in the restaurant eating those. There is also a coffee bar with both hot and cold drinks. Prices for all seemed quite moderate.

As we were there just for dessert, we didn't try any of the food or breads. Leo selected a fine looking slice of Sacher torte and a glass of raspberry lemonade. I had a big individual fresh fruit tart with a cafe chocolat frappé (coffee, chocolate syrup, and ice put through a blender and topped with whipped cream). My tart was quite nice, starting with a very thin chocolate cookie molded into a bowl shape, then filled with a smooth crème patisserie and topped with blueberries, grapes, kiwifruit slices, mandarin oranges, and sliced strawberries.



We chose La Madeleine for dessert since Vietnamese food is very heavily influenced by French cuisine, especially since the long French occupation of Indochina during the middle part of the 20th century.

Vietnam Georgetown Restaurant, Georgetown, D.C.

A couple of dozen years ago during my internship days, I ate in a rather downscale corner restaurant in Georgetown that served what was to me at that time a very exotic cuisine called Vietnamese. Tonight I went back.

Vietnam Georgetown Restaurant is located on a busy corner along M Street in east Georgetown. It's still a fairly non-descript place, although they now have nicer decor and black, lacquered tables with comfortable and unrickety chairs. They also have a liquor license now, which I don't recall them having on my last visit. We were seated immediately in the middle of the dining room, and, while the place was never completely full, they had a rapid turnover of tables and a steady stream of new patrons to fill the vacated tables.

Leo started with the chå giò, a pair of those rice paper-wrapped spring rolls which were deep fried and crispy before being served and accompanied by a little bowl of fish sauce.



For his main course he selected the ever-popular phô bò, a thin soup with slices of beef, some vegetables, and a bunch of rice noodles. He liked both items, and particularly commented on the authenticity of the food and the unusualness of an American Vietnamese restaurant actually using the "correct" type of noodles.



I chose to begin with the chim cút quay. Two tiny quail were halved and cooked; the menu says that they were roasted, but they were so flavorful and crunchy, I suspect that they were fried instead (especially since I noted a little grease on the bed of leaf lettuce underneath them). Other than the leg bones and scapulas, I was able to eat all of the other bones.



A little bowl of a sweet yet hot red pepper sauce came with the quail. The next course was a delicious bò lúc låc, slices of Vietnamese steak marinated in garlic sauce and then stir-fried with slices of garlic cloves. I found the meat very flavorful and tender.

Marshall's Bar and Grill, Washington, D.C.

Last night after he returned from his big weekend in New York City, Leo wanted to go out someplace for dinner, so we walked up to Pennsylvania Avenue and started walking west towards Georgetown, when we decided to try a place in the far West End we'd passed countless times, but at which we'd never before eaten: Marshall's Bar and Grille.

Marshall's is wedged in where L Street splits off from Pennslyvania, right next door to that big Mormon center. It's a two-level building with the bar upstairs and the restaurant on the ground level. It's also an interesting mix of contradictions. The restaurant features a bunch of tall, casual booths and banquettes that look very much like a casual bar, but yet over the speakers they were playing Beethoven and Mozart. Also eclectic is the menu, which starts off with Lebanese appetizers, then moves to Mexican; salads are very California-influenced; burgers and sandwiches are very American; there are lots of Italian-style pasta entrees; and the main entrees include steaks and crabcakes, a lamb shank, a roasted chicken, and international chicken entrees from Lebanon, India, and Italy.

Leo ordered fried clam strips for his appetizer and the linguine al frutti di mare for his entree. The waiter forget to bring the clam strips, so Leo had to do without and opted not to have them with/after his pasta. "Fruitti di mare is the Italian phrase for "fruits of the sea," or, in American, mixed seafood. Now, I'm not positive since we didn't discuss it, but it appeared to me that there was only tail-on scampi in the dish; he reported it was quite good, though, and liked it better than a similar dish at Au Pied Bistro. He also had a glass of their house pinot grigio. I tasted it and it was nicely crisp with a bit of a green apple taste, but highly acid, so Leo wasn't quite so sure he liked it; I had him wait until he got his food to try it again, and one he had the cream sauce and pasta to counterbalance the acid, it turned out to be quite a pleasant wine and an excellent accompaniment for that particular dish. For dessert he selected the amaretto cheesecake, which turned out to be an Italian style cheesecake with a full amaretto flavor; I tasted it and it was nice, but I thought the thin layer of cheesecake had been baked in too hot of an oven, letting it develop a somewhat granular texture.

I had iced tea and the California chopped salad. The salad was huge. There was a large bed of chopped greens, including a lot of leaf and romaine lettuce, but also raddiccio and arugula. Mounded on top of the greens were diced grilled chicken, some still-warm crumbled bacon, bleu cheese crumbles, roasted red bell peppers, chopped tomatoes, half of an avocado, and some very interesting corn relish. For dessert I ordered their apple-berry cobbler à la mode, which turned out to be quite unusual. The cobbler was served in an old-fashioned sundae glass and the apple and unidentified berry filling were very dark colored and highly, almost overpoweringly, spiced with cloves.

We weren't served any dinner rolls, since they ran out of them earlier in the evening.

While they had a few service glitches, we both thought our food was pretty good. We discovered that their kitchen stays open until midnight every night, so we'll probably head back there again soon.

Loeb's Deli, Washington, D.C.

Svet came downtown today and we went to a late lunch at Loeb's Deli on McPherson Square. It's an old style delicatessen where people stand in line to order at a window behind which one can watch his sandwich being made. It's a fairly good sized place with both ample indoor and lots of outdoor seating. The only downsides I found to this place is that it's a little pricey and they don't take plastic.

We both had sandwiches. Svet ordered a cheesesteak sandwich without green peppers and I had the Loeb's Special, which is a corned beef and sauerkraut on rye/white marble bread. Both came with kosher pickle spears. My sandwich had an ample serving of corned beef and the sauerkraut was mild. I also had a little slice of their New York-style cheesecake, which was okay for a deli, though nothing spectacular. I think Svet also had a bottle of vegetable juice.