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.

India Curry House, Arlington, Va.

Last night we said goodbye to Bruce before he headed back to Canada today with dinner in Clarendon. Jon and Robert joined Matt and me as we all went to dinner.

Bruce is not much of one for variety and exploration. Even though there are at least two dozen restaurants within a two block radius of my office, Bruce wanted to go to the very same restaurant where we went last week. Then, once we got there, even despite my encouragements to do something different, he ordered exactly the same food as he did last week. To refresh your recollection about last week, check this link.

So, off we went to India Curry House for dinner. We needn't recap Bruce's meal, nor Matt's, who also ordered the same thing (channa masala for Bruce, lamb korma for Matt, and each ordered vegetable pakoras as appetizers). Robert had the beef biryani and ordered it extra spicy. He said it wasn't that hot; I'm not sure if it turned out to be really, really hot, or if he just didn't like it, because he only ate half of the dish.



Jon ordered the butter chicken. He didn't comment about it, but he ate all of it, so I gather it was decent. His appetizer was a couple of vegetable and potato samosas, which he did say were good. All of them shared the three Indian style sauces—tamarind, cilantro, and onion chutney—plus a huge platter of basmati rice and garlic naan.



I decided to get the meat thali platter, an assortment of meats and curries. I was particularly impressed with the tandoori chicken—Indian barbecue—that was flavorful and juicy, having a very nice smoky taste to it. The other dishes weren't specifically identified, but I'm going to guess one was beef saag (with spinach) and the other was lamb rogan josh. There was a decent lentil dish, a bowl of raita cucumber and yogurt sauce, and some great, hot, freshly tandoor-baked naan. The yellow dish in the photo was their version of kheer—rice pudding—with a fruity flavor I wasn't quite able to identify.



So, after a fun week in the District of Columbia, Bruce has returned to the chilly climes of Toronto.

Uno's Chicago Grill, Georgetown, D.C.

Last night after dining at Bistro Francais, where they very annoyingly were out of everything I wanted (no artichokes; no Dover sole; no roasted chicken), and I ended up with a boring chef salad whilst Ian had his usual omelette aux fines herbs et fromage suisse, Ian wanted dessert.

So, we walked down to Uno's Chicago Grill. There, Ian selected the mega-sized Uno Deep Dish Sundae—the one with the huge chocolate chip cookie baked in a pizza pan and topped with vanilla ice cream, hot fudge sauce, and whipped cream. I tasted some of Ian's dessert, but otherwise, he made short work of it. Please note in the photos below the scale of the pizza pan compared to the full-sized dinner plate and the flatware.