Heritage India Dupont, Washington, D.C.

My friend Rachel and I went to lunch at Heritage India Dupont yesterday, after having to reschedule our plans made before the holidays and before I booked my travel plans. Heritage Dupont is the sister restaurant to the original Heritage India in the Cleveland Park neighborhood north of Georgetown. Naturally, they offer Indian cuisine (spot, not feather). Leo and I discovered this place rather by accident early this month during a Christmas shopping expedition, and we found it to be the best Indian place we'd tried in the D.C. area. I told Rachel about it at a cocktail party and she was excited; she's a vegetarian and loves Indian food. So, off we went.

Heritage is on Connecticut Avenue just south of Dupont Circle. It's beautifully decorated as a sleek, contemporary restaurant and bar, but with large, ancient, Indian artifacts and structural elements such as doors, windows, and lintels along the walls as decoration, and with colorful paintings of Indian royalty. As typical with Indian restaurants, they have a large, efficient staff tending to the tables. Part of the fun aspect of Heritage is that in addition to all of the traditional Indian restaurant dishes, they have an entire menu section of "contemporary street fare" that is very much like an Indian version of tapas, and even an Indian-inspired selection of pasta dishes.

Rachel and I started by sharing a pakora, an appetizer dish of battered and fried vegetables. An unusual combination of yogurt and spicy plum sauce accompanied the vegetables. The batter here is light and crispy without being oily.



For our main course, we shared the Begumi platter, an assortment of their vegetarian curries with pilau rice, presented on a huge silver tray. My favorite curry of the four provided was the palak makai, a creamed spinach and corn dish very reminiscent of saag paneer. Rachel and I had very different tastes....my 1st, 2d, 3d, 4th were her 4th, 3d, 2d, 1st! LOL That worked out well, though, so we could have second tastes of our favorites. Along with the curries and rice came a big plate of lettuce, cucumber slices, and tomato wedges (more like plain vegetables than a salad) and some of the best, thickest raita I've ever had with both cucumber and tomatoes in it with a little snipped mint on top. Raita is fresh, homemade yogurt with vegetables that often accompanies spicy Indian dishes, since the yogurt is great for putting out mouth fires. We also ordered some onion kulcha for our bread.



Rachel surprised me a bit and chose the "American" raspberry sorbet for her dessert. She got quite a large serving, and ate every bit, so I can only guess it was good.



I was more traditional and chose the kulfi, a pistachio-flavored, frozen, dairy dessert that is the ancestral precursor to today's ice cream and sherbets. I found their version to be very good.



I've been to Heritage twice now, and I can't wait to go back. The atmosphere and service are excellent and every time, the food has been top-notch. If you're looking for a nice Indian restaurant, I highly recommend this place.

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

A couple of weeks ago, Leo got home late from the office and wanted to go eat, so we went to the neighborhood "utility" restaurant, Marshall's Bar and Grille for a quick dinner.

Leo had an interesting daily special Mediterranean penne pasta dish with sundried tomatoes, garlic, black olives, and mozzarella cheese.



I had a daily special seafood salad. The term "seafood salad" just does not adequately describe this delicious salad. The base of the salad was some kind of puffy bread, which I guess must have been some kind of southern or western Asian flatbread. On top of the bread was a layer of regular, iceberg-heavy, salad greens. But on top of that was a wonderful melange of excellent seafood, including shrimp, scallops, and squid rings, all in large quantity, tossed with chopped tomato and onions, and dressed in a light, spicy, lemony dressing. Large lemon slices had been cut and put together like a three dimensional lemon slice and used to crown the top of the seafood. It was all so good, I practically wanted to lick the plate.



Leo had one of those weird cosmopolitan-type drinks, but I forgot which one. He said it was too sweet (which is why I drink ultrapremium gin martinis very very dry and without any weird little additions or adulterations). Meanwhile, I stuck to my iced tea.

La Chaumière, Georgetown, D.C.

Leo likes to celebrate birthdays with big dinners at nice restaurants. This year was no different, and we agreed upon La Chaumière in the east end of Georgetown, where Leo took me last night for my birthday this year. It's a place we've both been wanting to try for a couple of years, but we've never been around at the right time or when there were open tables, so this was something to which both of us were looking forward.

It was worth the wait.

La Chaumière—"the thatched cottage"—is a French place approximating a French country inn restaurant. The interior is arranged around a large, central fireplace, and French art and country tools and items adorn the walls. The menu is rather pricey, so we noticed the full dining room was filled with an older, well-dressed crowd, with almost all of the gentlemen in jackets and ties and the ladies in dresses.

We started by ordering a bottle of petit chablis from bin 15, but I forgot to write down the name of the winery. It was a lovely wine. I've missed chablis, which was the "vogue" white wine when I was in college, but today it seems like pinot grigios are the new vogue, supplanting the chardonnays, and chablis are seldom seen. It's too bad, since chablis is a more complex, fuller-bodied wine, especially since the cheap bottles for the "vogue" wine are no longer omnipresent.

Sorry about the dark, off-color, food photos to follow. The restaurant was full, the tables close together, and the patrons rather upscale, older, and quiet, so I thought the flash would be too disruptive and I tried to photograph everything using ambient lighting.

Our first course was a dozen huitres fraîches, which we split. The oysters were sharp and crisp and quite nicely plump. In addition to the traditional cocktail sauce and lemon wedges, a spicy vinegar also was offered for dipping. The oysters were clearly not the standard, every day raw oyster, but my French was not good enough to be able to ask our waitress exactly from whence our oysters came.



We diverged on our second course. I chose the soupe du jour, a very nice butternut squash purée enriched with just a little cream. There were still little pieces of squash in the soup to give it some texture, and I thought it quite good.



Leo, on the other hand, had one of their house specialities, the boudin blanc. This was a plump little link of a mild chicken and pork sausage served with little roasted apple chunks and sauced. He raved about the dish and the complexities of flavors, saying the apples provided a nice, refreshing sour balance to the sausage.



Our third courses were wonderful. Leo had the St. Jacques Provençale, the sea scallops with garlic and tomatoes. They were quite large, and the photo does not put the plate in proper scale. He reported that the scallops themselves were excellent, but he found the garlic, tomato, butter sauce to be a bit too salty.



I had one of the daily specials, fried sweetbreads with wild mushrooms—ris de veau frits avec les champignons sauvages. They were divine! Sweetbreads are one of my favorite foods, but due to their high perishability and their delicacy, they aren't often found, and amongst those places, few do them well. That certainly wasn't a problem at La Chaumière. My huge, oversized serving of sweetbreads rested upon the braised mushrooms and the dish was garnished with fanciful waffled potato crisp "wings."



For the fourth course, we ordered a salade maison, asking to split it. Well, we were only charged for one salad, but we each received this huge plate of their mixed French lettuces. If those were each just one-half, I can't imagine that salad as a subsidiary course—it would be a meal by itself! I liked the house dressing—a classic vinaigrette spiked with dijon-style mustard—and it was nice to have the salad in its traditional, proper place in the meal.



The fifth and final course—which we'd ordered at the beginning—was soufflés, a Grand Marnier one for Leo and a chocolate one for me. Soufflés are soufflés; either they come out or they don't. These, obviously, did, and were just fine. They came with individual sauce boats of crème anglaise to add as wanted, and I thought it tasted faintly as though spiked with a little brandy or cognac.





After dinner for coffees and demitasses (which neither of us ordered), Leo had a French 75 and I had a Hennessey VS cognac. I found it interesting that there is no bartender at La Chaumière; the waiters themselves have to act as bartender for their tables! Our waitress did not know what a French 75 was, so Leo told her the basics but not the truly correct recipe. He'd only mentioned champagne, gin, and lemon juice, forgetting to tell her about the sugar and the bitters. Oh, well, I think at that point, we didn't really care. I tasted a sip and it reminded me rather of a lemon mimosa (instead of the usual orange juice) with an odd punch from the junipery gin.



Thus we had a wonderful dinner.

After we walked home, though, there was more to come. Leo had gone to Bread and Chocolate and ordered this absolutely light, airy, and divine strawberry cream cake coated in slivvered almonds as a birthday cake! And, with that, we had a bottle of Trittico prosecco while I opened my birthday present. All this, and Leo didn't tell me to not have dessert at the restaurant! This is why I gained six pounds over the holidays.



Thanks, Leo, for everything!