Froggy Bottom Pub, Washington, D.C.

Wednesday evening while my nephew was occupied with some business matters, his visiting friend Brian and I ventured out to catch dinner. We ended up just on the other side of our Metro stop at Froggy Bottom Pub, a bar with an assortment of casual bar-type foods that is just across the street from the GWU campus.

They were going to seat us outside on the patio, but I declined, since the place was stuffed with smokers. We ended up inside in a booth, and that was just fine. We had a great waitress who's a high school chemistry teacher down in Arlington, and she offered up suggestions and opinions as we asked.

We both started with their side salads, which were pretty good as far as those sorts of things are concerned, with nice chunks of cucumber and tomato in addition to the the lettuce. Brian had the "Bottom Cheeseburger" and I had the "Froggy B. Lasagna." I thought the burger looked nice. The patty had been hand-formed and the cheese was melted over the top. It was accompanied by some surprisingly good potato salad made with new red potatoes and what tasted like a mayonaisse/sour cream mix.



My lasagne (their incorrect Italian spelling notwithstanding) was pretty good, too. It was made with real ricotta instead of cottage cheese, and the sauce was rich but way too sweet for my personal tastes (but most people like sweet sauce).

Bistrot du Coin, Washington, D.C.

My nephew's college friend Brian is visiting this week and he wanted to go shopping at non-mall type stores, so we went to look at the little boutiques around Dupont Circle. After looking for a while, we were a little hungry, so we stopped in to Bistrot du Coin to get some dessert and a touch of wine. While we drank a pot Lyonaisse (a/k/a small pitcher) of some 2003 Alsace Edelzwicker, Brian had the fondant au chocolat semi amer, a tasty looking bittersweet chocolate fondant baked in a tiny round cake topped with crème chantilly and a mint sprig and sauced with chocolate and custard.



I had the La Tropezienne, a big round brioche split and filled with a stiff custard, surrounded by orange blossom-scented custard sauce and garnished with sliced almonds and powdered sugar.



Brian was quite fascinated with the traditional small-bowled, green-stemmed Alsacian wine glasses with a matching pitcher that the bistro used for serving the wine.

IHOP, Arlington, Va.

Saturday evening, Ian and I got together again for dinner, and this time we went—where else?—to the IHOP in Ballston. They've made a few changes to the IHOP. Those blue plastic coffee carafes have been replaced with bronze-toned ones, and the syrup racks and jars also are new. The menu's a little different, and the food portions, Ian thought, were smaller than before. Otherwise, I thought it was still the same old, poorly managed, IHOP we've visited for years.

Ian got his standard chicken finger dinner. He ordered his Caesar salad with dressing on the side, and it came already dressed with a good deal of water in the bottom of the plate, and the waitress brought it with the main course rather than as an appetizer.



I got a breakfast platter with pancakes.....the menu gave us a fruit option to top the pancakes, and I ordered the black cherry compote without whipped cream.....you can see what showed up: strawberries, blueberries, and whipped cream.



Ian had his usual fried banana cheesecake with vanilla ice cream for dessert. SInce after I complained about the pancakes, the waitress brought me two more with the cherries on top, I let the pancakes serve as my dessert.

Alamo Grill, Georgetown, D.C.

My friend Ian came down from New York this weekend. I met Ian on his arrival and we caught the Circulator there at Union Station and rode over to Georgetown to have dinner. Last year, we had gone to a place called Alamo Grill, where, after we'd called first to confirm hours and told them we were coming, they closed their dining room over an hour before their normal closing time because it was a slow night and refused to serve or seat us! For some reason, Ian insisted that that was where he wanted to go to dinner Friday night, so there we went.

We were seated in a corner table by the window. A couple of mariachi-style guitarists were playing duets together, standing in the doorway between the dining room and the bar. It was fun at first, but they did get rather annoying as the evening wound on. We were brought the usual chips and salsa, with large mostly yellow chips but with a few blue corn chips thrown in; I thought the salsa rather thin and ordinary.

Ian ordered the arroz con pollo, a fairly classic Latin American dish. I was not impressed. Normally, the chicken and rice are stewed together, and it can be a wonderful entree. In this case, the chicken was cooked separately and looked like sliced commercial chicken breasts, it came with a huge quantity of sliced green bell pepper (not a normal ingredient), and it was all sauced with this sort of translucent-looking, nondescript gravy. Ian ate it, but I wouldn't have liked it at all.



I had the grilled chicken salad. It was edible, though once again, not impressive. A commercial chicken breast had been grilled and sliced up, then laid with two half slices of tomato atop a mound of big pieces of iceberg lettuce with a few bits of romaine thrown in to help qualify the salad as "mixed greens."



What's worse, I thought the price point for the food at Alamo Grill was rather high, especially given the quality levels. Also disappointing was the mediocre and largely absent service.

They did redeem themselves somewhat with their dessert offerings. Ian had a great big piece of German chocolate cake that was delicious. I tasted some and the cake was moist, there was a flavorful mousse-like frosting between the layers, and they used decent quality dark chocolate on top as a garnish.



I had the flan. The flan looked awful, but the taste and texture were very good once one got to the actual piece of flan.



While I had tried to keep an open mind for Alamo Grill after our previous visit had left a bad taste in our mouths, I'm afraid Friday night's visit did little to improve my opinion. It's just not a place that I'm going to put on the regular rotation.