Georgia Brown's, Washington, D.C.

After our "lovely" experience at Mass last night, we decided to self-medicate a little bit and drown our sorrows in some good old down-home cooking at the South Carolina/Southern style restaurant Georgia Brown's on McPherson Square just around the corner from the church. Sometimes the place is packed and we were taking a chance without a reservation, but we were fortunate to be able to get right in and be escorted to a table.

It was the Connecticut Yankee Laurent's first time in a Southern restaurant. Naturally, there were a lot of foods he didn't know what were, and he got to see good old Southern sweet tea on the menu, just like the tea Ryan used to make us at home. I tried to provide him some menu guidance, but he kept trying to think in healthy Yankee terms and didn't really listen to me.

He started with a margarita, not realizing that that drink was a bit more southern than what we had in mind. Meanwhile, I just had tea, of course, and it came with a lemon wedge and a sprig of fresh mint.

We didn't really order in courses. Laurent's dinner all came from the nightly specials list. He got a bowl of shrimp bisque enriched with some crème fraîche that he scraped clean.



Then, he ate a petite salmon salad, a very, very interesting construction of hand sliced citrus and salt cured salmon lined up across the bottom of a rectangular plate and topped with a pile of arugula, onion, and halved cherry tomatoes; a pile of fresh mozzarella balls, and a pile of quartered artichoke hearts, all drizzled with a blackberry gastrique dressing. I thought it was an unusual presentation that looked quite appealingly delicious.



I had a simpler meal. I merely ordered the beef short ribs. The meat is amazing. It's fall-off-the bone tender, presented boneless after having been braised in a red wine and fig. It's presented on a bed of creamy grits infused with blue cheese that were just dreamy, and the plate is finished off with several baby carrots glazed in a dilled butter sauce arranged around the beef. Some frizzled leeks garnished the top.



For dessert, we opted to split a peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream. The peach cobbler here is always a little unusual, in that they use a crumble topping made from oats and crushed vanilla wafers cookies. The dish also has a darker color since they use brown sugar in both the topping and the fruit mixture. Our cobbler arrived garnished with a couple of fresh strawberries and some mint. Laurent, who'd claimed he didn't want dessert, ate most of it.



So, we had a nice dinner. Laurent particularly enjoyed the waiter, though I thought he was a bit long-winded in his spiel and descriptions of menu items. There were several families with small, small children in the restaurant last night, and I really just can't imagine where the common sense of the parents is to even think about bringing a small child to a restaurant of this caliber. The mothers at two tables clearly were not having a good time and not able to take advantage of their meals. I guess some people just have more money than sense. The only other excitement was a man getting sick in the men's room. The staff eventually loaded him up in a taxi; later, I noticed one of his table companions trying to figure out how to get home, since, apparently, the sick guy was their designated driver.