Laurent's Birthday

It's Laurent's birthday!

About a dozen of us got together tonight to celebrate with a little dinner at Bistrot du Coin up on Dupont Circle. We'd reserved a table up on the mezzanine level to avoid the noise and congestion on the main dining room floor, and yet we still had plenty of noise and a very festive atmosphere upstairs. Having a party at a busy restaurant on a Friday night is always a challenge, and since they were so busy, they really packed the chairs around as few tables as possible, even with two chairs on each end of the long table.

It was after ten when we left the restaurant. I came on home, but the kids all headed out to the bars for drinks and dancing.....to J.R.'s, I think, at least to start.

It was impossible to keep track of who all ate what, but here are a few food pics from the evening.


Les Hors d'Oeuvres





Les Plats Principeaux





Les Patisseries





Here's what you're looking at. In the appetizer category, there's French onion soup, salade d'artichaut et asperges (artichoke heart and asparagus salad), salade de chèvre chaud (salad with hot chèvre goat cheese), salade frisée aux lardons (frisée lettuce salad with a fried egg and crumbled bacon), and a salade de magret et gésiers de canard fumé (smoked duck salad). In the main course category, there's le steak maison (house steak with fries and bearnaise sauce), moules Normandes (mussels Normandy prepared with white wine, cream, leeks, celery, mushrooms, potatoes, and bacon, served with fries—this is what I had, and yes, they were delicious!), ravioles du Royan (mushroom and herb ravioli) and a seafood ravioli du jour, poulet rôti au four (roast chicken), and steak tartare (raw chopped beefsteak). Desserts included La Tropezienne (custard-filled brioche), chocolat liegois (sort of a chocolate ice cream sundae with caramel and chocolate sauces), fondant au chocolat (a baked bittersweet chocolate fondant cake with whipped cream), and a clafoutis aux poires (pear clafoutis).

The Heights, Washington, D.C.

Kevin and I were both in town this afternoon, so we decided to go to lunch at The Heights across from the Columbia Heights Target store. It's always nice lunching in this neighborhood because there aren't large quantities of office workers or tourists crowding the restaurants, so our time was quite leisurely. The Heights also has a nice luncheon special with your choice of a sandwich or a salad, plus your choice of either an appetizer or dessert, plus a beverage, for only $17.

Kevin started with the soup du jour, a carrot-ginger broth that was not a cream soup or potage and rather unexpected. As it turned out, it was a fun idea, but Kevin didn't like the soup at all. I traded appetizers with him and ate the soup, but it was definitely odd. There was a strong carrot presence with a little carrot pulp, plus flavors of ginger and butter, but what I couldn't quite place was a rather unpleasant medicinal taste, almost as if a little Pine-Sol had been added to the soup pot.


I ordered the ginger calamari flash fry, a really nice bit of lightly done squid with both squid rings and baby squid that had been very lightly breaded and then flash fried with ginger and scallion. They presented it with lettuce and shredded red cabbage, plus chopsticks as an eating utensil. I thought it delicious.



Kevin's main course was a bare burger, simply grilled, and accompanied by fries and a dill pickle spear. I got an unusual but tasty BLT sandwich with the standard BLT ingredients plus a provolone cheese-topped crab cake. The only thing I would have done differently with the crab BLT is make the crab cake a flatter patty instead of the thick cake they used.




I hope they feed their waiters at The Heights after their shifts are over. Our waiter and the other two I saw were all ***so*** skinny! I thought our service was fine today, though Kevin was a bit miffed. He seemed to think our waiter was flirting with me. Always a bad thing, waiters, when you flirt with just one of the people at your table, but you don't flirt with the one paying the tab and your tip!

Tastee Diner, Bethesda, Md.

After dealing with even more government bureaucracy this afternoon, I was in Georgetown, and Ian decided he wanted to go to dinner. The challenge, though, was that he wanted to go someplace where 1) he could have breakfast food, and 2) he'd not been before. Now, Number Two isn't that hard of a challenge, but the challenge is requirement number one. While lots of places in D.C. have breakfast, that isn't something they offer at five o'clock, and if you ask for something, they have all kinds of excuses why they can't do it from "the grill isn't set up" to "the evening cooks don't know how to do breakfast food." I'll refrain from opining on the validity of such arguments. Nevertheless, we tried to think of some place. Then it occurred to us. We've heard of a place in Bethesda called the Original Pancake House that's supposed to be good. So, we hopped on a bus and then transfered to the subway and went to Bethesda and found the Original Pancake House.

And they were closed.

Apparently, in Bethesda, they think people should only eat pancakes for breakfast or lunch, as they close at 3 p.m. Probably just as well; I looked at their posted menus, and they are very, very proud of their pancakes.

Ian hadn't eaten all day and was hungry, so we acquiesced to going around the corner to our old standby, Tastee Diner, which is open twenty-four hours a day.

Ian had a provolone cheese omelette with home fries and probably half a bottle of ketchup (those of us old enough to have grown up during the Reagan Administration will remember that that would count as several servings of vegetables for the day!).


I had the daily blue plate special, a baked ham dinner with Brussels sprouts and candied sweet potatoes. Yum yum!



I'm not used to two meals a day, so now I feel stuffed! Ja ja!

Corner Bakery Cafe, Washington, D.C.

Busy day today dealing with bureaucracy. In between, I got to have lunch with Laurent and see his new office with the window and the view of the Capitol dome. He took me to lunch at Union Station at the Corner Bakery Cafe. He had a tuna salad on wheat sandwich with kettle fried chips and a bottle of some disgusting looking vegetable juice "health" drink.


I had a chicken chopped salad and a little cup of one of the soups du jour, roasted poblano corn chowder, both of which were quite good.

Florida Avenue Grill, Washington, D.C.

I needed some help with some manual labor here at the house tonight, so I bribed Robert to come down with the promise of a free dinner at his new favorite eatery, the Florida Avenue Grill. Thus far, neither of us have come down with food poisoning, though the night is still young.

We discovered tonight that they do not cook breakfast all day long. Breakfast is only available until 1:30 p.m. They only do night breakfast on Fridays and Saturdays after 9 p.m., when they stay open til 4 a.m.

We also got to watch them make their iced tea. Unsweetened tea just isn't available, and when I asked the waitress about it, she got the most confused look on her face! They brew their tea with great big commercial tea bags in big kitchen pots with hot water and sugar. Then, they add a bunch of lemonade to it before putting it into their fountain bubbler.

Our food choices tonight were limited to sandwiches and some dinner selections. Robert picked the pork chops smothered in brown gravy, and selected baked macaroni and cheese and candied sweet potatoes as his sides. He liked them.


I got the beef spareribs with macaroni and cheese and candied sliced beets. I was amazed at how good the spareribs tasted.



My complaint here remains the same. The food is very tasty, but I continue to have major concerns about their food handling and safety practices. Our food all got dished up from their steam table by our waitress (who didn't wash her hands first or put on plastic gloves). She brought the food directly to our table, but when it arrived, it was warmish, but it wasn't hot. The U.S.D.A. recommends that hot foods be stored at temperatures at least 140º Fahrenheit, and they just weren't anywhere near that. My other complaint isn't really a complaint so much as noting their traditional recipes are very, very old school.....it seems like everything, even the macaroni and cheese, has added sugar! Good thing I'm skinny and not on a diet.

Indique, Washington, D.C.

Peter was hungry last night and wasn't looking excitedly at the Chipotle burrito he'd just bought for dinner. So, we agreed to meet in Cleveland Park for dinner, where we decided upon Indique for our non-burrito repast. Indique, and its sister restaurant in Friendship Heights, Indique Heights, provides "unique Indian flavors" in an elegant, upscale atmosphere. At the Cleveland Park location, we had our choice of sitting out on the sidewalk patio (too hot, sorry!) or inside either on the main level or upstairs. We picked the downstairs in the bar area by the street windows. Ordinarily that would have been a great choice had it not been for a couple of middle-aged women carrying on their conversations in their outdoor voices instead of their indoor voices.

The food was lovely, though. Each table had a wood boat of three Indian sauces, green, purple, and red-orange, which I'll guess were cilantro, tamarind, and tomato. The stylish menus are a little more limited in scope than I usually see at Indian restaurants, but here they have concentrations in items from the tandoor and they offer appams (spongey rice breads) served with a variety of meat and vegetable stews, plus the usual assortment of curries. We both opted for "Indique platters" because they sounded particularly interesting and unique.

The lamb shank "Bhuna" called to me. They took a large, meaty, lamb leg shank and braised the meat until falling-off-the-bone tender with tomatoes and spices until the sauce took on a dark richness. It was exquisite. The spice was somewhat hotter than I had expected (or, maybe, wanted), but the Indians say that hot, spicy foods are perfect for when the weather outside is hot and sultry. The lamb was garnished with flash-fried bean noodle threads.


Along with my lamb came a very large platter of accompanying side dishes, with (clockwise from bottom center) basmati rice, lettuce and tomato salad, dal (lentil soup), lemon saffron rice, a potato and vegetable timbale, and mixed curried vegetables including peas, carrots, broccoli, and cauliflower.


Peter was braver. He found a dish that had a menu line that said, "not for the faint-hearted," and decided he was up to the pepper and spice. So, he ordered the chicken Chettinad, flavored with what they called "telecherry peppercorns." I'm not sure if he'll ever order it again. He did eat it all, but I could tell from the surprising relative silence from him during the meal that it was rather hotter than he expected. I gave him a little bit of my lamb, and he ate it, not noticing any of the spice in the lamb, so when he offered me a bite of the chicken, I deferred. He had similar side dishes to mine, except his were all on the same plate.


WIth our meal, we had some garlic naan bread.



After dinner, I thought my meal was pretty filling, so I opted not to do dessert. Peter didn't like any of the available Indian options, so we left and went next door to the Cold Stone Creamery, where he had a "Cookie Doughn't You Want Some" concoction with vanilla ice cream, cookie dough, chocolate chips, fudge sauce, and caramel sauce.

Certainly ended up being better than an old burrito, eh?

Marshall's Bar and Grille, Washington, D.C.

A little dessert and champagne buffet awaited donors and sponsors at the Kennedy Center Sunday night after the performance of Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter, but Jim, Meredith, and I decided not to stay and went on in quest of dinner, as it was still early by the time we got out about 9:15.

There's nothing worth doing in the Watergate complex anymore, so we walked into Foggy Bottom to go to Notte Bianchi at the George Washington Inn. They closed early. So, we walked to Dish at the River Inn. They were closed. So, we started to walk to Circle Bistro at One Washington Circle Hotel, but Meredith got the big idea to call them before we walked all the way over....and they were already closed! Whatever happened to the concept of Washington being a cosmopolitan, international city that didn't roll up the sidewalks at 9 p.m.? Each of these restaurants, we saw other people trying to eat, as well.

We ended up walking over to Marshall's Bar and Grille, a place I've done multitudinous times, but a new place to Jim and Meredith.

Jim got the linguine al frutti di mare. Since he was away washing his hands when the waiter came, Meredith decided for him that he wanted it with the plain, boring seafood broth instead of the wonderful, rich, cream sauce. It had lots of nice looking scallops.

Meredith and I both got the California chopped salad with grilled chicken, roasted corn, romaine, radicchio, avocado, diced tomato, roasted peppers, blue cheese, bacon, and a simple vinagrette. It's an okay salad, but I never get excited about it.

Didn't get any pictures, since I've had both of these things before and there are probably already pictures in the archives somewhere.