Clyde's of Georgetown, Georgetown, D.C.

After the Senior Convocation at Georgetown this past Thursday, Ian and I went to celebrate with a special graduation dinner. He chose Clyde's of Georgetown for our festivities. Now, Clyde's is now an important restaurant management company in the Washington area with probably a dozen or so places including other Clyde's, 1789, The Tombs, Old Ebbitt Grill, and others, but it originated back in the Kennedy Administration so all the young idealists who'd come to the District to be a part of Camelot would have a place to eat and drink. It occurred to me that I'd never gone to Clyde's before, and I really don't know why. It's one of those local "institutions," and it was renowned even back when I was at GU decades ago, but I guess I must have thought it was too expensive or something back then (though considering their "burger" origins, I'm just not sure about that). Today, though, Clyde's is a popular place with a full restaurant menu and a packed dining room. We had reservations, but I noticed that those who tried to be walk-ups were being told there was an hour and a half wait for a table.

Even though we were nearly fifteen minutes late for our reservation, since Ian was futzing with his tie and ultimately chose not to wear it, they led us right to a booth in the side dining room. While we looked over the menu, we shared an order of lemony hummus redolent with olive oil. It came with wedges of pita bread and a lot of crudité-type vegetables.

It took a while to get through the menu. It wasn't particularly large, but it had a lot of different and unusual items on it. For our first courses, we decided on salads. Ian got a Caesar salad with the dressing on the side, and it was a good sized bowl with crisp and fresh looking romaine, plus big croutons and large shreds of parmesano reggiano.



I picked the baby beet salad. They took both red and yellow beets and put them on a big bed of mesclun, tossed in an orange dressing that nicely complemented the beets. A handful of feta cheese crumbles garnished the center.



For our main courses, Ian requested the tagliatelle carbonara without the bacon. This dish is a reimagination of the classic spaghetti carbonara, with slightly differently shaped pasta using the wide tagliatelle strips (think fettucine, but much wider), and instead of tossing beaten egg in with the hot pasta, they put a fried egg on top.



I tried something very new for me: skate wing. What's a skate, you say? It's a sea creature closely related to sting rays and manta rays. It was prepared à la meunière (lightly floured and fried in butter) and served with butter and capers. It had rather a strong taste that I'm not sure if I liked or not. Mashed new red potatoes with the skins on and a wisp of sautéed broccoli rabe accompanied the skate.



For dessert, Ian had a Clyde's brownie with ice cream and whipped cream garnished with a mint leaf.



I had the chocolate croissant bread pudding, which was different. The plate first had chocolate put on it, then a thin layer of custard-soaked pieces of croissant was placed on top before the whole thing was baked.