Tapeo, Arlington, Va.

Last spring after the Wolfgang Puck Express in Pentagon Row closed, the space was remodeled and turned into a new restaurant, a Spanish tapas bar called Tapeo. They've been open all summer, and we'd yet to go there, so after a little shopping expedition yesterday, we popped in about one o'clock for a late lunch.

At first, we weren't sure if Tapeo was open, since the place looked empty. Only one table off in a corner was occupied, and that by but one person. A waitress materialized immediately after we entered, though, and escorted us to a table along the banquette wall.

The dining room is attractively designed with a bar running across one wall and a banquette on the other. Chairs at the tables are substantial and upholstered in oxblood leatherette. Walls were painted a calm basil green with light grey, and all had a very contemporary look.

	Leo started off with a "real Madrid martini," a vodka martini with pineapple juice and a splash of Chambord (and how that's "real" and from Madrid, I've no idea). Here he is modeling the martini in his Kody pose.
I decided to start with a bowl of soup, and asked our waitress (who, judging from her accent and a phone call she took and I overheard, is Russian) whether the gazpacho or almond soup was better, she said to get the sopa de ajo, or garlic soup. I followed her advice. It was okay, though I daresay I wasn't overwhelmed.
	This being a tapas bar, we chose four tapas to share. The first to arrive was pulpo con cachelos, a spiced diced octopus and potato dish served cold. Leo liked it; I was less thrilled.
Next came the croquetas de pollo, a couple of chicken rolls deep-fried and served on a bed of mixed greens. They were tasty and I should have liked more. They came with some sort of white dipping sauce that was rather oddly bland and seemed to be sour cream based.
	A cute little roasted quail with the drumstick bone sticking up called codorniz con alioli came next. The quail was stuffed with bacon and placed atop some mashed potatoes, then all was sauced is a slightly sweet sauce with raisins and pine nuts. I liked the quail, but Leo didn't like it because it had bones in it.
Also coming then was a dish of scallops on a bed of mashed potatoes sauced in a bright yellow saffron cream and decorated with chopped parsley called vieras al azafran. It was nice and I particularly liked the cream sauce.
	At the end of the meal we shared a dessert of spiced pears poached in red wine served with some surprisingly good homemade vanilla ice cream. It's not really a summer dessert, but it was very tasty.

On the whole, I enjoyed our experience at Tapeo and I'm sure we'll be back again. I'm not quite certain what to think of the food, though. It wasn't bad and I don't want to say anything negative about the restaurant, but the food was rather unspectacular and bordered on the mediocre (within the context of other tapas bars I've sampled). Much of the food seemed to have an unexpected blandness when I was expecting more fire or zip. So, we'll just have to see how things progress after another visit there.

Adventures in domesticity

Last night housemate Leo got in a cooking mood. After dragging me with him to our neighborhood Watergate Safeway (with some interesting purchases including rhubarb, mushrooms, and Spam), he kicked me out of the kitchen so he could prepare some magic dish. I "helped" by printing out his recipe for him, but I still didn't know what was going on, since he found the recipe on a Hong Kong Web page and it was written in Chinese. Close to midnight, I began to smell something baking. He'd make a cake called a "strawberry-rhubarb crumble." It was an interesting concoction with a base of sliced angel food, a homemade cake batter over that, sliced fresh strawberries and fresh rhubarb, yogurt, and some kind of butter, egg, sugar, and flour "crumble" topping.

But there was a little problem. The recipe didn't translate well. The first problem was it said to bake the cake at 200 degrees....well, Leo assumed that meant 200 degrees Fahrenheit, when it actually meant Celsius (200˚C=392˚F). Then there was the matter of reading conversion tables....and the mistaken assumption that two adjacent tables were providing equivalencies across the entire row.....so that when the recipe said to use "100 grams of flour," Leo saw next to that that 100 grams=1 teaspoon. Well...100 grams of flour is actually about 3/4th cup and there are about 36 teaspoons in 3/4th cup!

Other than the translation problem, Leo only made one little error in cooking technique. He was supposed to cream butter and sugar, but our butter was in the freezer, he was impatient, so he melted the butter before creaming it with the sugar and adding the eggs. Of course, the excess butter and significantly insufficient flour created an interesting problem as the cake slowly began to bake: the butter melted and rose to the top, giving the impression that the cake was deep-frying in butter!

About this time, I was called in for a consultation.

The overflowing butter was hitting the bottom of the oven and creating clouds of smoke in the kitchen!

It was a simple fix, actually. It just needed a cookie sheet underneath and the windows opened. Of course, the "crumble" was not going to happen, but by increasing the oven temperature to 400 and extending the cooking time, we were able to create a sort of "strawberry-rhubarb-yogurt clafouti." Leo thought it was a failure, but I found it an interesting experiment; it was unique, but it actually tasted pretty good.

* * * * *
Meanwhile, I took the extended cooking time as an opportunity to pop some frozen chicken fingers into the oven. While they baked, I made a big pan of milk gravy (flavored with a touch of chicken base, but I should have added more pepper). I'm not a great fan of chicken fingers, so I ate a couple and then reverted to having bread and gravy. I'd planned on having leftover gravy that I could use this morning for sausage, biscuits, and gravy, but we ate the whole bowl—a surprise, since I didn't expect Leo would like thick, Southern-style, milk gravy. Must have been that third martini.

Mark's Kitchen, Takoma Park, Md.

Last night I discovered a rare breed of American diner....a vegetarian American diner! Now, this wasn't just a vegetarian cafe—I've been to those before, where one catches angry glares from fellow patrons because one is wearing leather shoes—but an actual diner with normal American diner food like beef hamburgers, crab cakes, club sandwiches, fries, ham and cheese omelettes, pancakes, and French toast, and then an extensive selection of vegan things with tofu, spinach, barley, brown rice—even tofutti "ice cream"—and other tree-hugger type foods. Then, to make things even more interesting, there are several Korean items on the menu!

Where did we find such an ecclectic place? Takoma Park, Maryland, just across the D.C. line.

My friend Robert had just flown back home after a holiday weekend in Atlanta and was anxious to go out for dinner, so he talked me into making the long trek up to Takoma Park, where we walked over to Mark's Kitchen, a comfortable tradition in Takoma Park for over fifteen years.

Our fun waitress guided us through the menu, recommending this, suggesting that, explaining details, and we ended up with a very entertaining and delicious dinner.

Robert chose the tofu royal sampler box, served in a traditional Korean sang dinner box. Beginning with the compartment in the lower right corner of the box and then moving clockwise, he got four rectangular slices of grilled firm tofu. Next was brown rice with a mung bean pancake. The things that look like black beans are actually honey soybeans, and the, next were sauteed shitake mushrooms. The long vertical compartment contained several thin, crispy sheets of roasted seaweed—the green nori used as a wrapper for sushi rolls. Then in the final compartment were long, sauteed green beans. Everything was very pretty and Robert said it all tasted very good.

My entree was officially called spinach tofucakes, and they were designed to mimick the ubiquitous crabcakes one sees on menus all over Maryland. The dish starts with a base of brown rice, then two fried spinach and tofu cakes were placed atop the rice. Some diced mango and a few chunks of roasted sweet potato were tossed over the dish, then everything was crowned with a handful of mesclun and all was dressed in a sort of raspberry soy sauce vinaigrette. A few sauteed long green beans garnished the plate. The tofu cakes were interesting, though I would have liked them to have been seasoned just a bit more. The menu said onion and mushrooms were mixed into the spinach-tofu mixture, but I would still have liked a little more intense flavor, since tofu is extremely bland by itself. The whole thing was quite a creative melange, however.

Desserts were an interesting mix of the innovative and the traditional. Robert ordered the key lime pie. It was a surprisingly thick—almost deep dish—layer of key lime filling in a graham cracker crust. At first I was a bit dismayed that there was neither a whipped cream topping nor a meringue (my favorite) topping on the pie until I remembered we were in a place catering to vegetarians, some of whom do not eat cream or eggs. I think I should have garnished the pie slice with something, perhaps a thin slice of lime or maybe some candied lime peel, so it didn't look so bare.



My gingerbread sundae was quite creative. Three pieces of gingerbread were arranged around a scoop of ginger ice cream, then topped with a sort of sweet ginger root compote, and all garnished with whipped cream. It was yummy!



After dinner, I got a tour of Robert's house and met two of his roommates, a lawyer and an actor. Then, as a gentle rain began to fall, I settled in for the long Metro ride back to Foggy Bottom.

Trader Joe's grocery store, Washington, D.C.

After dinner Sunday night, we walked over to the brand new Trader Joe's store that opened Friday here in the West End. It's an interesting grocery store that reminds me a lot of Whole Paycheck Foods with all their organic and specialty food items and most especially because of their prices. I saw ground beef for $4.19 a pound and a packet of smoked salmon for $8.99 that I saw earlier that day at Harris-Teeter in Pentagon City for $6.99. They have an unbelieveable collection of what I'll call high-end convenience foods, though, and I'm hoping their presence will have a big impact on our Safeway store in the Watergate complex so Safeway brings up their level of cleanliness, service, and selection.

One of the fun things I found was an aisle with a whole selection of gourmet soups in milk carton-type cartons. The frozen foods case was filled with all kinds of fabulous cheesecakes and desserts. In fact, they were giving away samples of some of their cheesecake topped with a mango sauce and then garnished with grated chocolate. Speaking of which, they had big blocks of dark, milk, and white Ghiardelli cooking chocolate for sale at decent prices. Other freebies included pure blueberry juice and coffee with real cream.

About a third of the store is devoted to beer and wine. They don't do common stuff, though; the beers were all exotic imports, mostly European. They had a really big selection of inexpensive wines, too, including a lot of house branded stuff. Leo picked up four bottles of wine, a shiraz and a chardonnay each for $2.99 and a merlot-carmenère blend and a pinot grigio each for $3.99. We're anxious to try them.

The checkout lines are designed to make the shopper walk along a long aisle with French bread baguettes, gourmet candy, and all kinds of high end chocolate so the shopper is tempted to pick up a few extras on the way to the cash register. I suppose that's better that the National Enquirer.

We signed up for the grand opening drawing, and if we win, we get a Trader Joe's shopping bag and we can fill it with whatever we want....that could be several hundred dollars' worth in that store!

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

Leo got back from his holiday weekend in New York City this evening, decided he was hungry, and dragged me along with him for dinner at Marshall's Bar and Grille here in the Foggy Bottom/West End area.

He started with a caipirinha, or a Brazilian margarita, a most interesting concoction made from a Brazilian sugar cane liquor called cachaca instead of tequila and Rose's lime instead of the orange-flavored Triple Sec. He liked it a lot and thought it was a great, light, summer drink.

For his dinner, he started with fried mozzarella cheese with marinara dipping sauce. He thought the cheese could have been fried a little longer so the cheese in the large rectangular pieces could have been melted a bit more, and, from the looks of the plate, I think they were a bit on the greasy side. He ate all of it, though.



Then, for his main course, he had a salmon burger with fries, the "burger" being a piece of salmon fillet rather than a hand-formed salmon patty. He said he liked it better than a regular beef burger.



Sorry about the salmon burger picture: I forgot to take pictures when the food arrived, so Leo had already eaten half before I remembered....I also forgot to take a picture of my food, but you didn't really miss anything visually. I had their California chopped salad, something I've had here before, a big plate of greens with grilled chicken, roasted corn, blue cheese, bacon, and avocado.

They actually had bread on hand for a change and brought us large round rolls while we waited for our food.

Old Ebbitt Grill, Washington, D.C.

After our tour of the Department of the Treasury last Thursday, Ryan and I walked across the street for a quick late lunch at the Old Ebbitt Grill. Old Ebbitt is truly one of the "old" restaurants in Washington, since it was founded in 1856. While they've modernized and remodeled the restaurant and bar over the years, there are still a lot of artifacts in the bar area which date back to the mid-1800s.

I had the Steak House Salad, a spinach salad with green beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, scallions, and gouda cheese with a sliced steak on top. Large croutons decorated the salad bowl and the salad was dressed in a mustard-tarragon (at least I think it was tarragon) vinaigrette.



My luncheon companion had the bacon cheeseburger with a little side salad in lieu of French fries.



The food was good and wasn't too terribly expensive for a downtown restaurant. Service was adequate; our waiter was a bit of a space cadet, though. They had some fabulous desserts on the menu, including a blueberry cobbler, a strawberry-blackberry shortcake, and a chocolate walnut pie, but we chose to abstain. Alas.