Charlie Palmer Steak, Washington, D.C.

Yesterday was summer intern Drew's last day working at CLEO. Since we were both off for the afternoon, it seemed a great opportunity to celebrate with lunch at one of the few remaining Restaurant Week hold-overs, the celebrated Charlie Palmer Steak, just a few steps from the Capitol. Joining us were Robert, who offices next door to Charlie Palmer's, and Ryan, who hates to be left out of any party.

Charlie Palmer Steak is one of those high dollar steakhouses where one ordinarily needs a lobbyist's expense account to afford lunch—their regular lunch menu has a $19 shrimp cocktail and a $36 New York strip steak with à la carte side dishes like sauteed spinach for $6 and mashed potatoes for $5. I'm scared to look at their dinner menu. Nevertheless, it's a popular place, and when a restaurant charges these prices and stays in business for years, you know it has to be good.

The decor is traditional yet starkly contemporary at the same time. They take full advantage of a window wall with views of the Capitol and the east end of the Mall. We were escorted to a four-top table near the windows. At each place, the waiter put a block of aluminum and then inserted the legal paper-sized menus in a frame holding the menus starkly upright in front of us. Meanwhile, an assistant selected two different kinds of bread slices and put them on our bread plates, while another offerred our choice of still or sparkling mineral water. Ryan, displaying the keen wit and quickness of thought of an Ivy League college senior, had learned quickly after Thursday's $7 bottle of water and immediately piped up that he'd like tap water.

Robert and Ryan both started their luncheon with the rather redunantly named crisp cod brandade cake with piquillo pepper coulis, salad of greens and herbs, and dill oil. I say it's redundant, because a "brandade," or, perhaps more completely, a "brandade de morue Nîmes," is a classic French fish cake usually made of pureed salt cod and potatoes that originated in the south of France in the city of Nîmes. Now, this brandade has been on the special R.W. menu for two weeks now, so I was rather amused that when we asked the waiter for details about the dish, he was tongue-tied and clueless, and he merely described the appearance of the dish and said it was good (usually in a restaurant of this calibre, such a question would result in a litany of memorized excruciating detail far beyond the intent of the original question). They placed the brandade, which looked rather like a fried salmon patty, on top of a pool of the pepper coulis, topped it with a little bit of greens, and decorated the plate with a drizzle of the dill oil around the perimeter. Both guys said they liked their appetizer, but I didn't hear any further details.

Meanwhile, Drew and I were having the English pea velouté. An assistant brought us cream soup spoons followed by soup plates garnished with thick, truffled crème frâiche surmounted by a pea sprout and with a few tiny black pepper brioche croutons strewed around the plate. Then, another assistant came with a silver soup tureen and a ladle and filled each of our plates with a hot, bright green pea soup. The velouté was not as thick as I'd feared it might be. It had a bright, distinctly pea taste to it, and, while I'd have preferred the peas be cooked just a little more, it was pleasant.



The other three guys all chose the same main course: marinated grilled hanger steak with yellow corn polenta and an eggplant and roasted pepper caponata. A little bouquet of herbs lay atop the polenta in the center of the plate. All of them seemed to like their steak, and Drew mentioned that the polenta was very "dense."



I picked the pan roasted chicken with garlic mashed potatoes and an oyster mushroom ragout. It was surprisingly good! I received a roasted chicken leg (dark meat is my favorite) which had had the thigh deboned and only a stylized bit of the drumstick bone remained. The meat was tender and highly flavorful; the outside was crispy with a salt and herb rub. The potatoes were fine, as were the small oyster mushrooms, though I'd have liked to have had more mushrooms.



We all managed to order all three of the dessert options. Robert had the dark chocolate terrine with candied hazelnuts and hazelnut ice cream. The terrine was dense and looked very nice, and the ice cream was served in a little chocolate cup.



Drew ordered the cheesecake and got a small, individual round of cheesecake cut in half and turned, then topped with a little lace tuile cookie that was filled with citrus flavored ice cream. Little spots of cherry, raspberry, and pineapple compote dotted the plate as garnish.



Ryan and I both had the strawberry shortcake with strawberry sorbet. Like Robert's hazelnut ice cream, the sorbet came in a little chocolate cup, and I loved it! It was very dark strawberry red and had an intense strawberry flavor. The shortcake part had a house-baked shortcake split open and filled with a mix of strawberries, blackberries and a tarragon-scented whipped cream. While it was good, we both were expecting an Oklahoma-style shortcake where the amount of berries in this version would have merely amounted to a garnish on top of the whipped cream back home.



I'm glad that Restaurant Week gave us the chance to try this very good restaurant. Both the kitchen and the dining room performed well. Charlie Palmer has a large, well-trained professional waitstaff and we were pleased with the service we received.

And thus, we had a pleasant afternoon saying goodbye (sort of) to Drew. Then, after our nearly two hour luncheon, Robert had to go back to the office to spend about fifteen minutes there before taking the rest of the afternoon off. Ah, such a busy job!

Butterfield 9, Washington, D.C.

We met for a late lunch today at Butterfield 9 downtown just southeast of the White House. They always come up with very creative menus for Restaurant Week, which they have extended another week, and I've always had great luck with them at lunchtime. Today's lunch was no exception and we had great food and great service.

We managed to order different things for everything for a change. Now, I just need to figure out how to take better pictures and stop overexposing things (although food on white plates on white tablecloths always presents a challenge).

Beginning with a cold cantaloupe soup, Jon started off the creative menu combinations. His soup was enriched with crème frâiche and garnished in the center with some cherry compote. He liked it, saying that it was pleasantly sweet without being too much so.



For his main course, he chose the chicken, an interesting presentation in a riesling wine reduction studded with candied oranges and served on a bed of escarole with some cherries and olives as garnishes and strewn with toasted pine nuts.



His dessert was a traditional vanilla crème brulée served in a little square dish and accompanied by a soft ginger snap. The top sugar crust was cold, so it had been made in advance instead of being broiled immediately prior to service; he liked it nonetheless.



Ryan began his meal with an expensive $7 bottle of sparkling mineral water. He chose the sweet yellow corn soup with green pepper crème frâiche and chive oil surrounding a little mound of conch strips in the center of the soup plate. The warm corn soup smelled good, though Ryan thought it tasted like canned creamed corn to him, and he (not surprisingly) didn't like the conch at all because it was chewy and he didn't like the texture.



He was being very adventurous today, though, because he followed the corn-conch soup with the salmon and calimari entrée. Two nicely grilled cigars of squid rested under the edge of a nice slab of basil roasted salmon. He liked the salmon, though he wasn't overly fond of the squid ink glaze under the fish, and he gave me his squid, since he doesn't like that, either. I thought the squid was tender and delicious. With the salmon came an assortment of halved cherry tomatoes, some wilted spinach, and little sprouts of broccoli.



He got a very pretty square of chocolate cheesecake for dessert garnished with black cherries and candied almonds. The cheesecake looked to be on a chocolate cookie crust and the chocolate-swirl cheesecake mixture was topped with a layer of chocolate ganache. A big glass of milk accompanied his dessert.



I began with the arugula, endive, and white asparagus salad. I was excited that they served the newish red endive hybrid, something not that commonly seen out of California. Mixed in the salad were blue cheese crumbles and walnuts, and everything was tossed in a light plum vinaigrette.



For my main course, I picked the braised pork osso bucco. Now, osso bucco has long been a favorite of mine, but it ordinarily is made from veal leg shank rather than pork, so this was a new experience. Butterfield 9's osso bucco was nice, but it wasn't the fall-off-the-bone tender that is usually a feature of the veal version. They did not, alas, provide me with a marrow scoop, since the primary reason osso bucco is served is so the diner can eat the delicious bone marrow inside the "bone hole" (the words "osso bucco" mean "bone hole" in Italian); I was, however, able to use the sharp, thin, point of the meat knife to extract the bone marrow from the shank bone. The pork rested atop a bed of cheesy risotto and the entire dish was "garnished" with a number of braised vegetables. I wanted to eat every last morsel from the plate, and was tempted to lick my plate clean!



For dessert, I had cantaloupe sorbet garnished with a fresh strawberry half, which was fine, though rather mundane.



We had a lovely time at Butterfield 9 today and we're looking forward to a repeat visit. I'm also looking forward to having Jon cook me some Syrian food after he gets settled into his new U Street apartment next week!

Here are Jon and Ryan in their Kody poses:

Pizzaria Uno, Georgetown, D.C.

After wandering through Georgetown to see and photograph the CNO Canal and the famed "Exorcist" staircase following Evensong tonight, Ryan was hungry, so we wandered in to Pizzaria Uno, a Chicago-based chain which originally served as a simple pizzaria but now has evolved to have a full menu in that national-franchise-bar-with-food tradition.

The great excitement of the menu, though, was our dinner: a bacon cheeseburger deep-dish pizza. You know, of course, how much Ryan loves hamburgers. It was, surprisingly, actually pretty good (although it could have used about three more minutes in the oven so that even the thickest parts of the crust would be fully baked). They topped the pizza with ground beef, cheese, bacon bits, chopped dill pickle, and diced tomatoes with a mustardy sauce underneath. It was just like eating a real burger!



We had a nice waiter, but the service was extremely slow. I don't know if he was really, really busy with other tables in another room of the restaurant or what, but we had many long periods when we didn't see him. Perhaps he's new; when he brought our change, he failed to break the large bills, which meant we didn't have the right denominations for a 10-, 15-, or 20% tip and he ended up with less than we should have left him. Oh, well, he'll learn.

Bangkok Joe's, Georgetown, D.C.

About 11 o'clock last night, Leo decided he was hungry. Surprisingly, since we live right on the edge of a large university (GWU), there are very limited options for late night dining, so we decided to walk towards Georgetown, thinking we could try several places along the way and then if worst came to worst we could always go to the old stand-by Bistro Francais, since it stays open til 4 a.m. or so on Saturday nights. We got to Washington Harbor and tried several places, finally discovering that not only was Bangkok Joe's open (til 11:30), but it was also participating in Restaurant Week.

Bangkok Joe's, as you might imagine from the name, is a Thai restaurant. They are a little more than that, though, with a lot of Asian fusion menu items and a big dumpling bar. They have a long, narrow space in the northernmost building of the harbor's festival marketplace, and they've chosen to decorate it with a vibrant, contemporary Thai theme. All the way down the center of the dining room is a long, low dividing wall that serves as the banquette back to a series of two-top tables; a striking, long light fixture runs above the banquettes made up of art glass globes shaped like calla lillies.

We were seated in a comfortable raised booth along the window wall of the dining room. Our table was decorated with a large black vase filled with bright red chopsticks. Tall, thin, aluminum, abstract sculptures were on the end of the dividers between the booths, and I'm not sure if those were intended as coat hooks or they were merely decorative art.

Leo decided to do the R.W. dinner menu, and started off with a glass of Hugel Pinot Blanc, a pleasant, though very light, wine. For his first course, he chose the grilled scallops with Thai salsa and sweet potatoes, which was prettily arranged on what I'm beginning to think are ubiquitous long rectangular plates.



For his main course, he had the lemon grass crusted salmon with red curry sauce and a mound of black sticky rice garnished with fried wonton strips, presented artfully on a large square plate and garnished with long chives. Leo, who usually is quite critical of Asian restaurants, was quite impressed with the red curry sauce and enjoyed both his large piece of salmon and the sticky rice quite a bit. I tasted the sauce (it was good and not overly hot) and the rice and thought the rice had a nice nutty flavor and a tooth to it that reminded me of brown rice. Leo says the black color comes from spices.



I wasn't hungry enough for a three course meal, so I opted to have a simple entree salad, in this case the Yum Seafood Salad. I got a nice bowl of greens and vegetables with a spicy red pepper and lime dressing, topped with a very ample quantity of seafood, including warm scallops and squid, mussels, clams, and chilled boiled shrimp, all in a very pretty presentation. I thought all the seafood was nicely done, especially the squid, which is so very easy to overcook at less attentive restaurants.



Leo's dessert was a plate of "Sorbet 4-Ways," an interesting mix of tomato-basil, lemon-ginger, mango, and lychee sorbets, each of which were quite good and had a very intense fruit flavor. I tasted all of them and I was particularly intrigued by the tomato-basil sorbet.



We're planning to go back to Bangkok Joe's to try their other menu items, as well as to partake of their dumpling bar.