Maggiano's Little Italy, Washington, D.C.

This afternoon, Leo and I ventured up to Friendship Heights to do a little shopping for some new spring clothes. That whole neighborhood from Mazza Gallerie up to the Saks Fifth Avenue is a great outdoor shopping strip, and this afternoon's beautiful, sunny warm weather made shopping a lot of fun.

We ended up getting hungry, so we popped in to Maggiano's Little Italy for a very late lunch/very early dinner. There was a big table with a family with a lot of young children in the dining room, so Leo insisted that we sit in the bar so we didn't have to hear the kids. Of course, the problem for me with sitting in the bar is that the televisions were all turned to ESPN to basketball games, and then at the same time they were playing old Frank Sinatra music over the restaurant's sound system.

On to food. Leo's bar theme of the night was peaches. He started with a frozen peach bellini. I tasted it....I think they were using frozen peaches along with the champagne and peach schnapps. Tasted like a bellini to me, but Leo didn't like it cause it was too sweet and he couldn't taste the alcohol. So, after he finished that, he ordered a Georgia peach ice cream martini. I sampled it, too, and it was a typical sweet vodka-based martini, but I didn't detect a cream taste or feel.

Meanwhile, we nibbled on a half order of fried calimari for an appetizer. The calimari was okay, but a slight bit limp. I've had better before, but these weren't bad. They also included tentacles in addition to the rings.



For my main course, I chose the braised beef cannelloni. Four hand-made cannelloni were stuffed with a beef-flavored two cheese mixture, covered with a cream sauce, and topped with shredded beef. It was intensely flavorful and good. The only issue I had was that the dish was a little too salty.



Leo decided upon the zuppa di pesce—fish soup—that was actually an enormous bowl of linguine tossed in a tomato sauce with mussels, shrimp, squid, and fish and I don't know what else. A lemon half rested on the pasta for zesting and two toasted bread slices garnished the bowl, looking like rabbit ears. The picture below does not fully convey the size of this bowl of pasta; the dish was easily enough to serve four people! I think they must have started with a full pound of dried linguine, as much pasta as there was. Well, Leo ended up picking out all the seafood and then could only eat about half of the pasta.



After all that pasta, Leo couldn't do dessert. I didn't want any either, but I had a large cappuccino that came with a chocolate chip biscotto that took the place of my dessert.