El Pike, Falls Church, Va.

Well, the Nintendo Ian bought last night was defective, so we had to make another shopping excursion tonight to exchange it. We decided to go to Falls Church, Virginia, this time instead of Maryland. After completing the transaction, Ian decided that Mexican food sounded good for dinner. We had passed a place called El Pike on the way to the store, so we decided to try it.

Well, El Pike isn't a Mexican restaurant. It's Bolivian. And the food is very different.

They have a fairly large dining room filled with inexpensive restaurant tables and chairs. A dance floor with some musical instruments was on one side of the room. A bar was in the back of the other. Decor was simple, consisting of a few unusual masks hanging on the walls. Our waitress is a Spanish speaker; her English was quite a bit more limited than my meagre high school Spanish.

We started with an appetizer, selecting the corn con queso, thinking it would be a cheese dip for tortilla chips. We didn't get any tortilla chips. And it wasn't a dip. Instead, our choclo con queso was a round piece of white farmer-style cheese and some corn on the cob with the biggest, white corn kernels I think I've ever seen. I'm not quite sure what the proper etiquette is for eating this dish, so we just nibbled on the corn then took little bits of the cheese. I gather this is a popular food, since I later noticed some South American-looking people at the bar eating it.



Ian had the pollo saltado, a variation on the traditional Peruvian lomo saltado, for his main course. He liked it, saying the chicken had a very good flavor, and practically licking his plate clean. A "saltado" dish generally features strips of meat marinaded in wine or vinegar with spices, then cooked with lots of peppers, tomatoes, and onions and served with fried potatoes. The version at El Pike included both fried potatoes and parsley-sprinkled white rice.



I had a traditional Bolivian dish called silpancho. With a similar base of fried potatoes and white rice, the silpancho is basically a lightly flour-dredged piece of steak pounded thin and then pan fried. Chopped onions, hot peppers, tomatoes, and cilantro topped the steak and the entire dish was capped with a couple of fried eggs. The meat was very tasty, but it was initially hard to eat since it rested on the potatoes and rice on a plate that was full to the brim, restricting leverage for cutting without making a big mess.



For dessert, Ian ordered the rice pudding, but it turned out they were out of it, so we managed to get out without the additional calories. The tab was very inexpensive (by Washington standards), with the big serving entrees costing around $10 or $11. Then we left to return to the District, braving tonight's gale-force winds.