Mahogany Prime Steakhouse, Tulsa, Okla.

Since I was in Tulsa on business Monday, my friend Tony insisted on getting together for dinner. So, I gave him a challenge: find a place where neither of us had previously dined. His solution? Mahogany Prime Steakhouse in the St. Francis area of south Tulsa.

Mahogany has been open for about five years now, and I was aware of it when I used to live in Tulsa but for various reasons never made it in. Today it's the original flagship restaurant for a small chain with branches in Omaha and, as of earlier this year, Oklahoma City. Their specialty is prime aged beef.

Steak is something Tulsans take seriously. After all, the mainstay of the local economy is oil and cattle. Tulsa has had a checkered history, though, when it comes to fine dining with steak. Certainly there are a number of decent, basic, mid-range steak restaurants, but high end places have been limited. It wasn't all that long ago that when visitors came to town and wanted a big steak dinner, when they asked for the name of the best steakhouse in town, if they didn't have reciprocal private club privileges that would get them admitted to the Summit Club or the Petroleum Club, I would have to recommend the Outback Steakhouse chain! In the mid-20th century, several top places opened with restauranteurs from the local Lebanese community, so diners got not only steaks marinaded in Middle Eastern seasonings but tabouli, stuffed cabbage rolls, and barbecued bologna. A couple of them are still in existence, though they are just a shadow of their former glory. About five years ago, Tulsa got Mahogany and the high-end national franchise steakhouse Fleming's.

Since then, Mahogany has developed a reputation for high quality steaks, lobster, and wines at high, high prices. I know several people in Tulsa who swear by Mahogany and say that it's the best restaurant by far in town. So, it was with that background and reputation that Tony and I anticipated our visit.

The evening began auspiciously, with a couple of friendly hostesses saying we could have a table in about fifteen minutes. So, we decided to sit at the bar and wait. On the bar in lieu of the usual peanuts and bar mix were bowls of cashews and in-shell pistachios with large serving spoons in each. But what really caused me to drool were the countertop bottles behind the bar. They had literally thousands of dollars of ultra premium liquors sitting out, including Louis XIII cognac and a fifty-year old MacAllan scotch in a $1,200 Lalique crystal bottle which our bartender Clayton kindly displayed for us.



While Tony had a Sapphire and tonic, I sipped a glass of Casa Lapostolle Chilean sauvignon blanc. No sooner had we gotten our drinks, though, did our waiter come to fetch us to our table. There, we were presented with two large lists of very expensive wines and our menus, which were short and simple and printed on simple white card stock, then laminated. This is where the first chinks in their armor started to appear. First, we had a long wait for our waiter to reappear and take our orders. Then, after he took the orders, he had to come back again and confirm what we had told him. In addition, he had introduced himself as the restaurant's wine expert, but when I queried him a bit, not being a stranger to the finer points of wine myself, I discovered that his "expertise" was limited to California wines and he eventually admitted he knew nothing about French or New World wines.

I was still looking forward to an hour's drive back to my parents' house, so I continued to nurse my sauvignon blanc for the evening, but I selected for Tony an Italian Tiefenbrunner pinot grigio for his first courses and then an Australian Penfold's Bin 2 shiraz-mourvèdre blend for his beef course. He loved the pinot grigio pairing, especially once the food arrived, but the Penfold's was a bit sweeter and more port-like than I'd expected, so it wasn't as ideal for the meat.

We started with a shrimp cocktail. Shrimp cocktails have been a steakhouse specialty for decades, so I thought trying theirs would be fun. Instead of the expected stemmed bowl on ice, the shrimp arrived on a small plate atop a little bit of shredded lettuce and accompanied by cups of cocktail sauce and a mustard cream sauce. I wasn't a fan of their cocktail sauce—it was redolent with diced red pepper and that wasn't a flavor I wanted. I was also surprised to find the shrimp terribly ordinary. They were large, not jumbo, and I thought the six tail-on crustaceans were slightly overcooked. Not exactly what I expected for an $11.99 appetizer in Tulsa, America.

In between courses, Tony took the opportunity to explore the men's room. He came back to report on its faux-luxury, complete with terry cloth fingertip towels by the lavatories and a flat-panel television set to ESPN over the urinals.

For our next course, Tony had the lobster bisque and I had an iceberg lettuce "wedge" salad. Tony used to work for the local daily newspaper, so in consulting his former colleague the food reviewer's column on Mahogany, we found that he highly recommended the "silky" soup. Of course, I've never respected that reviewer's columns, but I was trying to be polite. What Tony was served was a little crock of a thick, brown potage he described as being like potato soup with no lobster flavor, and when I sampled a little taste of it I found it to be overwhelmingly seasoned with black pepper. As he reached the bottom of his bowl, he finally discovered quite a number of little chunks of lobster meat.



My course was somewhat more successful. Wedge salads are another steakhouse tradition, usually a simple quarter-head of lettuce on a plate with blue cheese dressing and occasionally a slice of ripe, red tomato. I got the traditional wedge (though somewhat drowned in excess dressing), but it was extraneously supplemented with long scallions, shreds of carrot, and crumbled bacon.



Our steaks arrived with a little procession of our waiter plus two servers bearing the smokingly-hot plates. After the plates were placed before us and we received the usual hot plate warnings, Tony was particularly chagrined when the two servers whipped out little miniature flashlights to shine upon the meat as they witnessed the diner cutting into the steak and confirming that it was cooked "correctly." Even though he later confessed that his steak was more medium than medium rare, he was too surprised by the flashlights and all the attention to give a truthful answer. The parade seemed somewhat disappointed when I declined to cut into the meat under their observation. Next, our waiter appeared with a plate of asparagus, thinking that we'd ordered it (we hadn't), even though we'd originally had a long conversation about whether or not we could order creamed spinach in light of the national E. coli scare and then he'd come back to confirm our orders. We declined the asparagus.

The steaks were good. I found mine properly cooked and nearly fork-tender. The only problems were the meat was so hot it was dangerous at first to eat and the meat had been heavily doused with melted drawn butter—definitely not kosher. They also had seasoned highly the meat with lots of salt and pepper, too much so for Tony's tastes. I would have liked to have tasted my meat without the butter so I could better appreciate the quality and flavor.





Dessert was the "Nick's bread pudding" with cognac cream sauce and blackberries. Unfortunately, this is when my camera decided to run out of batteries (which also explains the above poor photography), so I wasn't able to capture it for you. We shared a little round bowl filled with bread pudding, topped with sauce, then garnished with two blackberries and a mint leaf. Technically, it was plural blackberries. Once again, the food was treacherously hot, and it was difficult to cool off the bread pudding. The sauce was not to my tastes. The menu described it as a cognac sauce, but I detected the distinct taste of anisette or licorice, a flavor I detest. The waiter confirmed that it included a "drop" of ouzo (a Greek anisette liquor). Yuck.

So, what was my final analysis of Mahogany? Well, it's definitely not the best restaurant in Tulsa. There are at least three places I would rate clearly above them and several others which also could be in the running. Further, they're not the best steakhouse, with Fleming's (a chain) in Utica Square standing head and shoulders above them. It has potential—it wasn't a hideous evening—but they clearly have missed the mark for their aspirations. I also note that while the price tag for the meal wouldn't be all that unusual for a dinner here in the District of Columbia, a $140 pre-tip tab for two is exhorbitantly expensive for Tulsa, especially since we had very little wine or alcohol and we split two of the courses. Thus I expected better—much better.

The evening wasn't a total loss, though, since we accomplished our goal of going somewhere we'd never been and I had a chance to fellowship with my friend Tony. Here's a picture of him in his Kody Pose. Oh, and did I ever mention that it was Tony who introduced me to Kody?

Murphy's Steakhouse, Bartlesville, Okla.

My first dinner back in Bartlesville this weekend was at the six decades-old diner out on the west side of town, Murphy's Steakhouse. This is a place I've gone since I was but a wee child, and everyone in Bartlesville goes there, from ranch hands to Phillips Petroleum executives. You never know who you'll see when you go out.

I'm starting to feel a bit old, though, since I remember when the founders of the diner still cooked and presided over the cash register; today, not only has their son retired from running the place, their grandson now runs it.

Not much has changed inside the restaurant, though. They still have the same old booths with the same old vinyl banquets, the same style plates and plastic glasses. I've always been in awe of the waitresses here and their ability to carry three or four hot plates full of food on one arm and two or three plates in the other hand.

The menu is much the same, too, and we ate the traditional foods at Murphy's, which, interestingly enough, isn't steak.

I had a hamburger steak. It's one of the great traditions here. They take an oversized hamburger patty, cook it on the grill, cover it with grilled onions, drown it in their own brown gravy, and serve it up, hot and steaming. Along with the steak is a shredded iceberg lettuce salad with a delicious garlic dressing I've gotten no where else, and a huge baked potato dripping in butter and sour cream. This is definitely not the place for dieters and those watching their cholesterol levels! It's really enough food for two, especially if you were to get a second salad, but everyone always gets their own.

My parents each chose the other Murphy's tradition, the "hot hamburger." This is a big tower of food made by starting with a couple of pieces of thick toast on which is placed a big grilled hamburger patty, then it's topped with a mound of hand-cut French fries, and then covered in brown gravy. In the case of both of these entrees, the plates in the photos are really much larger than they appear (look at the baked potato plate—that's the size of a normal plate at many diners). The food's still good here; in fact, I think it's improved somewhat over a slump they had a few years back.

Once we were done, we waddled home.

Jacob's Spring Grille, DFW Airport, Tex.

All the security policies at airports these days make it very difficult to socialize with locals when traveling through major airport hubs. The DFW Airport in Texas is no exception, with all the restaurants there inside the secured area. This is in contrast to Reagan National Airport in D.C., where the "good" restaurants are on the outside in the shopping and ticketing areas, and inside the secured areas are just fast food kinds of places.

My friend David was able to come meet me during my layover yesterday, and since my flight from D.C. was over an hour late, he got to investigate and scope out the situation. He determined (we didn't yet know I wouldn't leave town until 7:30) our only option was the Hyatt Regency Hotel next to the airport terminal.

So, off we ran, out the terminal and through the parking garages to the hotel, where we found Jacob's Spring Grille, a typical hotel eatery I would categorize as being in that niche between coffee shop and expensive restaurant. They had a pasta bar with a chef making pastas to order, but we both opted to order from the menu.

David had a classic reuben sandwich with curly fries and a cup of coffee.



I had a chicken cordon bleu croissant sandwich served with curly fries and an interesting red cabbage, walnut, and dried cherry slaw garnished with long threads of carrot and beets. A honey-mustard sauce for the sandwich was drizzled around the plate.



I had actually ordered the sweet potato fries instead of the curly fries, an error the waitress noted when the expediter brought out our food. Soon we got a plate of sweet potato fries with no extra charge.

Here's David's Kody Pose:

Beacon Bar and Grill, Washington, D.C.

After wandering around with a tour group all morning, when I took them back to their hotel, lo and behold, who should I espy in the restaurant but Robert and his Atlanta friend Jason! There they were at the Beacon Bar and Grill partaking of the all-you-can-eat and all-you-can-drink breakfast buffet.

We've gone to the Beacon Grill for a long time. That all-you-can-drink bloody Marys, mimosas, or champagne thing is a great deal. When we used to go, though, we would have our choice of half a dozen or so brunch entrée choices with no buffet, and it used to cost $17.95 per person. Then, for Easter 2005, they decided to have a buffet, and I guess it went well, because they converted the Sunday brunch to buffet only, increasing the price to $19.95. It was still a pretty good deal.

In the past year and a half, though, they raised the price to $21.95, and then today the price had inched up to $23.95. Now it's not quite such a good deal. What's more, a year ago, the buffet used to be impressive; today, though, the buffet was showing the financial pressures of all all-you-can-eat operations. The formerly impressive salad bar was down to two different lettuce salads and one mixed vegetables in vinaigrette dressing salad. The wide variety of meats and hot vegetables is down to one table and the second table has been replaced with an omelette bar. The bread table assortment is down to bakery muffins, danish, and croissants with no loaves of artisanal breads. The only egg dish on the buffet was an egg, peppers, and cheese casserole that was "thin" tasting and lacking richness (and if one didn't like green peppers, there was no alternative). Now, nothing here at the Beacon is actually bad now, but I'm just disappointed that not just one but both money and food changes are taking place, and a $30 brunch (with tax and tip) is no longer such a great deal.

Jason, however, loved the place. I guess they don't have good brunch places in Atlanta.

Five Guys Famous Burgers and Fries, Georgetown, D.C.

After his great, notorious, and debaucherous Labor Day weekend in Atlanta, my friend Robert reciprocated the hospitality of his Atlanta friend Jason here in D.C. this weekend, and brought him over to meet me tonight. We sat around and chatted a bit whilst we awaited the arrival of the always-late Edward and his friend Sylvester, then we walked over to Georgetown to try to find some restaurant Jason had liked on a previous visit but didn't remember the name, address, or details of the menu (I'm good, but pinpointing a restaurant with a narrow door, a fireplace, and hamburgers somewhere in Georgetown with no more detail than that is too much even for me).

After traversing Wisconsin Avenue from the river all the way up to upper Georgetown, Jason gave up and we decided to dine at Five Guys Famous Burgers and Fries, not only because they have decent, inexpensive burgers, but mostly because everything in Georgetown was crowded and there was no line at Five Guys.

Now, while I generally like the Five Guys chain, dining at this store always makes me a bit melancholy since I remember decades ago back in my undergraduate days dining at this spot when it was the twin restaurants of Aux Fruits de Mer and Au Pied du Cochon. When the two old French restaurants closed, the Mer location was razed and something with a really deep basement now is being built in the old spot; Five Guys has taken over the Pied location. Au Pied du Cochon ("the foot of the pig") was a Georgetown institution for decades, serving up simple country French food 24 hours a day to locals and drunken college kids alike. It even picked up some international notoriety in 1985 when a KGB colonel "defected back" to the Soviet Union just three months after defecting to the U.S. when he disappeared from his CIA handler while he had allegedly gone to use the men's room, but instead slipped out the back door.

But, enough history....today it's a Five Guys and we old people just have to deal. I did notice, however, that this is one of the slower and dirtier Five Guys locations, which is something given how most of them are rather dirty anyway because of the peanut shells everywhere.

Naturally, we all had burgers except for Edward, who had a little tiny grilled cheese sandwich. Robert had an order of regular fries and Jason had Cajun-spiced fries.


Sylvester, Edward, Jason, and Robert

Rumor has it that the group (plus others) are going to brunch on the morrow, probably sometime after noon. We shall see what transpires.

Sushi Taro, Washington, D.C.

Thursday evening my friend Kody finally succeeded in dragging me over to see his new apartment in the east Dupont Circle area. Afterwards, we caught a break in the rain and walked over to Sushi Taro, where Kody took me for dinner. He'd never been there before, and, since I knew he liked sushi, I'd told him he had one of the best sushi bars in town right there in his neighborhood.

It was, as always, crowded and bustling. They had a big party group in the Japanese seating area, where all the low tables (for sitting on the floor) had been pushed together for one long surface. In the main dining area, there were only two tables empty right then, one a four top-and one two two-tops pushed together, which the staff separated giving us one and soon thereafter seating a couple of guys at the other table. Not long after we arrived, the sushi bar itself also filled up to capacity.

Once we were seated, we seem to have been forgotten for a little while, abandoned with no water and with just one menu between the two of us. I was a little worried by this inauspicious beginning, especially since the little table just eight inches away from ours with the two newly-arrived guys had menus, a la carte sushi information, water, and a waitress, but once our (different) waitress "discovered" us, the service was attentive and excellent the rest of the evening.



Naturally, we began with a bottle of sake. We selected a bottle of Shochikubai Nigori sake, an excellent unfiltered, milky-white sake served cold which, unbeknownst to me when we ordered, is actually a wine made in northern California rather than in Asia. I really liked it a lot and Kody thought he detected hints of coconut in the slightly-sweet wine. It was nice before dinner and it went particularly well with the food.

To start the meal, we each received little bowls of miso soup, a traditional Japanese clear soup made with fermented soybeans, a few small cubes of tofu and a little bit of seaweed. There version was clean and delicate.



As a first course, we also ordered some ika ring age, the Japanese version of Italian calimari or rings of squid breaded and deep-fried, but our Japanese wasn't good enough for a loud, noisy restaurant, and we ended up with the ika yaki, a dish I think ended up being superior to what we ordered. They cut the tentacles off the squid and grilled them, glazing them along the way with a ginger soy sauce. They had a wonderful grilled flavor and we enjoyed them quite a bit. There was quite a large serving, too, and I think there were a couple of tentacles left over (we didn't want to fill up on squid before dinner!).



For a main course, Kody ordered the sushi combination platter, and he got a beautiful (and quickly made!) platter of seven different large sushi nigiri and a large tuna roll cut into half a dozen pieces. It looked delicious and the price (at $16.50) was very reasonable, too. The accompanying gari (pickled, sliced ginger root) was very fresh, too, as evidenced by the yellow rather than pink color. I discovered, though, that while Kody had frequented the social sushi bars back in Tulsa, he'd never really had sushi nigiri; he went to those Americanized places where they specialized in those bizarre roll combinations, and that's what he was used to eating. I hope he enjoyed the "Japanese" style of sushi, instead of the American kind.



I ordered a sushi and sashimi bento box, and when it arrived, it was absolutely beautiful! I had about half as much sushi as Kody had gotten, plus I got three pieces each of salmon, tuna, and bonito sashimi (for those of you not familiar with sushi bars, sashimi is basically sushi without the rice). In addition, I had some shrimp and vegetable tempura that was crisp and light, a couple of gyoza fried dumplings, a brown seaweed, several Japanese vegetable salt-pickles, and a mound of finely shredded daikon white radish. Everything was excellent. As always, I marvel over the quality of their sushi and sashimi—I've been to many significantly more expensive places and Sushi Taro's food could stand up to any of them.



Kody decided that we should drink dessert. We started with a saketini, in essence a gin martini made with sake instead of vermouth and garnished with a big wedge of lemon instead of an olive. Since I'm a fan of martinis containing only a few molecules of vermouth, this drink wasn't really to my taste, and I thought the fermented sake lended a slightly sour taste to the martini.



We made up for it on the next go-round, though, with having a shochu cocktail (I forget the cutesie name they called it) that resembled a cosmopolitan with shochu instead of vodka and lemon instead of orange all colored with red cranberry juice. Shochu is an intriguing 50-proof liquor that is starting to become popular on the East Coast and already they say that in Japan, shochu is more popular than sake. What's interesting is that it's a distilled liquor made from rice, barley, and sweet potatoes, and the Japanese market it as a no-calorie alcohol! While Kody drank his shochu, I had a very nice glass of cold Kinsen plum wine.



Our quick snack before had to go home and study ended up being a three hour dining experience!

Don Lobo's Mexican Grill, Georgetown, D.C.

Last night we at last ventured to Don Lobo's Mexican Grill, a little locally-owned restaurant on M in east Georgetown, which is on a strip with several restaurants we frequent. It's very small and narrow, occupying the ground floor of a row house. The dining room is decorated in the red, white, and green of the Mexican flag and they have vinyl gingham checked coverings on the tables. It was close to their closing time, so there was only one other table in the dining room and we had our choice of tables.



Leo started off, as usual, with a cocktail, this time selecting their sangria. We noticed that the sangria was made-to-order both times he ordered one. Leo was pleased that the sangria had some alcohol in it with a distinct wine taste, instead of being diluted with lots of fruit juice; a bunch of apple chunks soaked in orange juice floated on top of the glass. I tried a sip of one of the drinks and it was pretty good.

While we waited for our food, we got the traditional chips and salsa; the salsa here is noteworthy. The sauce was served hot! I mean temperature-wise, not spice (of course, it had plenty of spice, too!) The salsa had a rich, smoky taste with a touch of sweetness and was a deep reddish-brown color. It was unique and very good.

When dinner arrived, Leo got a "ranchera platter." It included a cheese-filled chile relleno and a grilled pork enchilada, along with rice, beans, pico de gallo, lettuce, and sour cream. He particularly liked the pork enchilada, a surprise since he usually doesn't eat pork.



I had two chile rellenos stuffed with chicken, and they were surprisingly good. The chicken was juicy and well flavored, and there was certainly a spice kick to the dish. Rice and beans, which were unremarkable, and a little green salad filled out the rest of the plate.



After dinner, we split a Mexican fried ice cream. This was an interesting version, with the ice cream having been rolled in corn flake cereal before being fried. It was a simple preparation with a yummy honey sauce over the top.



Don Lobo's was nice, being much more authentic than what I usually get served in D.C., much more what I'm used to from eating with Mexican families back in Oklahoma. Olé!

Chevy's Fresh Mex, Arlington, Va.

Tuesday night Ian and I went to Chevy's Fresh Mex in Arlington. Chevy's is, of course, a national chain we've often visited before, but it was Ian's first time there. Their food, as is typical of national franchises, is always very consistent and it's an acceptable chain at which to eat.

Ian chose the smothered salsa chicken burrito, asking for the guacamole on the side and no red sauce "smothering" the burrito. The special request was met; however, it appears that there was some guacamole inside the burrito which he had to pick around. Their version of Mexican rice and a choice of pinto, black or refried beans (he chose the refried) came with the burrito, and all of that plus the usual lettuce and tomato garnish and scoop of their "corn tomalito," sort of a sweet corn pudding made with corn and masa, was far more food than any one person needs to eat.



I had the spinach, mushroom, and artichoke enchiladas, enrobed in a green pesto cream sauce. It was pretty good for a lacto-vegetarian entree. The refried beans were nicely flavored and the rice was inoffensive (I hate the soggy tomatoey kind).



Speaking of soggy, they seemed to be having plumbing problems. The restrooms had flooded and flooded the back hallway as well; I don't know if it was related, but we noticed another pool of water on the far side of the dining room that appeared to be emanating from a wall common with the kitchen.

Ian wanted some fried ice cream for dessert, but that's not on the menu. Our waiter was nice enough to bring him a small complimentary ice cream cone instead.

They're here!

The fresh figs are in the grocery stores!

September is always the magic month when these luscious fruits make their brief annual appearance. Now, pretty much everybody has had a Fig Newton cookie, and probably a big percentage have had a dried fig to eat, but these fresh fruits are a completely different sensory and taste experience. They are so sweet and juicy and good!

Ian and I went shopping in Arlington Tuesday night and then after dinner at Chevy's (where Ian proceeded to call every vegetable by its grocery store numerical code) we stopped in at a Harris Teeter store to look at the produce. I found a nice little plastic container of black mission figs that weren't too terribly overpriced, so I bought it and brought it home.

I tried to get Leo to eat one, but he touched one and didn't like the feel or the texture or some such excuse and he wouldn't eat it. Well, that left all the more for me to eat. The whole container's gone now!

Above is a picture of some of the figs I brought home. Ignore the white haze on the whole figs—that's reflection from my flash on the white plate. I'll have to get some more while they're here, and maybe I'll wander over to Dean and Deluca and pick up one or two yellow figs. They make wonderful, simple desserts—I love fresh figs!

And, by the way, I've never liked Fig Newtons.

Tapeo, Arlington, Va.

Last spring after the Wolfgang Puck Express in Pentagon Row closed, the space was remodeled and turned into a new restaurant, a Spanish tapas bar called Tapeo. They've been open all summer, and we'd yet to go there, so after a little shopping expedition yesterday, we popped in about one o'clock for a late lunch.

At first, we weren't sure if Tapeo was open, since the place looked empty. Only one table off in a corner was occupied, and that by but one person. A waitress materialized immediately after we entered, though, and escorted us to a table along the banquette wall.

The dining room is attractively designed with a bar running across one wall and a banquette on the other. Chairs at the tables are substantial and upholstered in oxblood leatherette. Walls were painted a calm basil green with light grey, and all had a very contemporary look.

	Leo started off with a "real Madrid martini," a vodka martini with pineapple juice and a splash of Chambord (and how that's "real" and from Madrid, I've no idea). Here he is modeling the martini in his Kody pose.
I decided to start with a bowl of soup, and asked our waitress (who, judging from her accent and a phone call she took and I overheard, is Russian) whether the gazpacho or almond soup was better, she said to get the sopa de ajo, or garlic soup. I followed her advice. It was okay, though I daresay I wasn't overwhelmed.
	This being a tapas bar, we chose four tapas to share. The first to arrive was pulpo con cachelos, a spiced diced octopus and potato dish served cold. Leo liked it; I was less thrilled.
Next came the croquetas de pollo, a couple of chicken rolls deep-fried and served on a bed of mixed greens. They were tasty and I should have liked more. They came with some sort of white dipping sauce that was rather oddly bland and seemed to be sour cream based.
	A cute little roasted quail with the drumstick bone sticking up called codorniz con alioli came next. The quail was stuffed with bacon and placed atop some mashed potatoes, then all was sauced is a slightly sweet sauce with raisins and pine nuts. I liked the quail, but Leo didn't like it because it had bones in it.
Also coming then was a dish of scallops on a bed of mashed potatoes sauced in a bright yellow saffron cream and decorated with chopped parsley called vieras al azafran. It was nice and I particularly liked the cream sauce.
	At the end of the meal we shared a dessert of spiced pears poached in red wine served with some surprisingly good homemade vanilla ice cream. It's not really a summer dessert, but it was very tasty.

On the whole, I enjoyed our experience at Tapeo and I'm sure we'll be back again. I'm not quite certain what to think of the food, though. It wasn't bad and I don't want to say anything negative about the restaurant, but the food was rather unspectacular and bordered on the mediocre (within the context of other tapas bars I've sampled). Much of the food seemed to have an unexpected blandness when I was expecting more fire or zip. So, we'll just have to see how things progress after another visit there.

Adventures in domesticity

Last night housemate Leo got in a cooking mood. After dragging me with him to our neighborhood Watergate Safeway (with some interesting purchases including rhubarb, mushrooms, and Spam), he kicked me out of the kitchen so he could prepare some magic dish. I "helped" by printing out his recipe for him, but I still didn't know what was going on, since he found the recipe on a Hong Kong Web page and it was written in Chinese. Close to midnight, I began to smell something baking. He'd make a cake called a "strawberry-rhubarb crumble." It was an interesting concoction with a base of sliced angel food, a homemade cake batter over that, sliced fresh strawberries and fresh rhubarb, yogurt, and some kind of butter, egg, sugar, and flour "crumble" topping.

But there was a little problem. The recipe didn't translate well. The first problem was it said to bake the cake at 200 degrees....well, Leo assumed that meant 200 degrees Fahrenheit, when it actually meant Celsius (200˚C=392˚F). Then there was the matter of reading conversion tables....and the mistaken assumption that two adjacent tables were providing equivalencies across the entire row.....so that when the recipe said to use "100 grams of flour," Leo saw next to that that 100 grams=1 teaspoon. Well...100 grams of flour is actually about 3/4th cup and there are about 36 teaspoons in 3/4th cup!

Other than the translation problem, Leo only made one little error in cooking technique. He was supposed to cream butter and sugar, but our butter was in the freezer, he was impatient, so he melted the butter before creaming it with the sugar and adding the eggs. Of course, the excess butter and significantly insufficient flour created an interesting problem as the cake slowly began to bake: the butter melted and rose to the top, giving the impression that the cake was deep-frying in butter!

About this time, I was called in for a consultation.

The overflowing butter was hitting the bottom of the oven and creating clouds of smoke in the kitchen!

It was a simple fix, actually. It just needed a cookie sheet underneath and the windows opened. Of course, the "crumble" was not going to happen, but by increasing the oven temperature to 400 and extending the cooking time, we were able to create a sort of "strawberry-rhubarb-yogurt clafouti." Leo thought it was a failure, but I found it an interesting experiment; it was unique, but it actually tasted pretty good.

* * * * *
Meanwhile, I took the extended cooking time as an opportunity to pop some frozen chicken fingers into the oven. While they baked, I made a big pan of milk gravy (flavored with a touch of chicken base, but I should have added more pepper). I'm not a great fan of chicken fingers, so I ate a couple and then reverted to having bread and gravy. I'd planned on having leftover gravy that I could use this morning for sausage, biscuits, and gravy, but we ate the whole bowl—a surprise, since I didn't expect Leo would like thick, Southern-style, milk gravy. Must have been that third martini.

Mark's Kitchen, Takoma Park, Md.

Last night I discovered a rare breed of American diner....a vegetarian American diner! Now, this wasn't just a vegetarian cafe—I've been to those before, where one catches angry glares from fellow patrons because one is wearing leather shoes—but an actual diner with normal American diner food like beef hamburgers, crab cakes, club sandwiches, fries, ham and cheese omelettes, pancakes, and French toast, and then an extensive selection of vegan things with tofu, spinach, barley, brown rice—even tofutti "ice cream"—and other tree-hugger type foods. Then, to make things even more interesting, there are several Korean items on the menu!

Where did we find such an ecclectic place? Takoma Park, Maryland, just across the D.C. line.

My friend Robert had just flown back home after a holiday weekend in Atlanta and was anxious to go out for dinner, so he talked me into making the long trek up to Takoma Park, where we walked over to Mark's Kitchen, a comfortable tradition in Takoma Park for over fifteen years.

Our fun waitress guided us through the menu, recommending this, suggesting that, explaining details, and we ended up with a very entertaining and delicious dinner.

Robert chose the tofu royal sampler box, served in a traditional Korean sang dinner box. Beginning with the compartment in the lower right corner of the box and then moving clockwise, he got four rectangular slices of grilled firm tofu. Next was brown rice with a mung bean pancake. The things that look like black beans are actually honey soybeans, and the, next were sauteed shitake mushrooms. The long vertical compartment contained several thin, crispy sheets of roasted seaweed—the green nori used as a wrapper for sushi rolls. Then in the final compartment were long, sauteed green beans. Everything was very pretty and Robert said it all tasted very good.

My entree was officially called spinach tofucakes, and they were designed to mimick the ubiquitous crabcakes one sees on menus all over Maryland. The dish starts with a base of brown rice, then two fried spinach and tofu cakes were placed atop the rice. Some diced mango and a few chunks of roasted sweet potato were tossed over the dish, then everything was crowned with a handful of mesclun and all was dressed in a sort of raspberry soy sauce vinaigrette. A few sauteed long green beans garnished the plate. The tofu cakes were interesting, though I would have liked them to have been seasoned just a bit more. The menu said onion and mushrooms were mixed into the spinach-tofu mixture, but I would still have liked a little more intense flavor, since tofu is extremely bland by itself. The whole thing was quite a creative melange, however.

Desserts were an interesting mix of the innovative and the traditional. Robert ordered the key lime pie. It was a surprisingly thick—almost deep dish—layer of key lime filling in a graham cracker crust. At first I was a bit dismayed that there was neither a whipped cream topping nor a meringue (my favorite) topping on the pie until I remembered we were in a place catering to vegetarians, some of whom do not eat cream or eggs. I think I should have garnished the pie slice with something, perhaps a thin slice of lime or maybe some candied lime peel, so it didn't look so bare.



My gingerbread sundae was quite creative. Three pieces of gingerbread were arranged around a scoop of ginger ice cream, then topped with a sort of sweet ginger root compote, and all garnished with whipped cream. It was yummy!



After dinner, I got a tour of Robert's house and met two of his roommates, a lawyer and an actor. Then, as a gentle rain began to fall, I settled in for the long Metro ride back to Foggy Bottom.

Trader Joe's grocery store, Washington, D.C.

After dinner Sunday night, we walked over to the brand new Trader Joe's store that opened Friday here in the West End. It's an interesting grocery store that reminds me a lot of Whole Paycheck Foods with all their organic and specialty food items and most especially because of their prices. I saw ground beef for $4.19 a pound and a packet of smoked salmon for $8.99 that I saw earlier that day at Harris-Teeter in Pentagon City for $6.99. They have an unbelieveable collection of what I'll call high-end convenience foods, though, and I'm hoping their presence will have a big impact on our Safeway store in the Watergate complex so Safeway brings up their level of cleanliness, service, and selection.

One of the fun things I found was an aisle with a whole selection of gourmet soups in milk carton-type cartons. The frozen foods case was filled with all kinds of fabulous cheesecakes and desserts. In fact, they were giving away samples of some of their cheesecake topped with a mango sauce and then garnished with grated chocolate. Speaking of which, they had big blocks of dark, milk, and white Ghiardelli cooking chocolate for sale at decent prices. Other freebies included pure blueberry juice and coffee with real cream.

About a third of the store is devoted to beer and wine. They don't do common stuff, though; the beers were all exotic imports, mostly European. They had a really big selection of inexpensive wines, too, including a lot of house branded stuff. Leo picked up four bottles of wine, a shiraz and a chardonnay each for $2.99 and a merlot-carmenère blend and a pinot grigio each for $3.99. We're anxious to try them.

The checkout lines are designed to make the shopper walk along a long aisle with French bread baguettes, gourmet candy, and all kinds of high end chocolate so the shopper is tempted to pick up a few extras on the way to the cash register. I suppose that's better that the National Enquirer.

We signed up for the grand opening drawing, and if we win, we get a Trader Joe's shopping bag and we can fill it with whatever we want....that could be several hundred dollars' worth in that store!

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

Leo got back from his holiday weekend in New York City this evening, decided he was hungry, and dragged me along with him for dinner at Marshall's Bar and Grille here in the Foggy Bottom/West End area.

He started with a caipirinha, or a Brazilian margarita, a most interesting concoction made from a Brazilian sugar cane liquor called cachaca instead of tequila and Rose's lime instead of the orange-flavored Triple Sec. He liked it a lot and thought it was a great, light, summer drink.

For his dinner, he started with fried mozzarella cheese with marinara dipping sauce. He thought the cheese could have been fried a little longer so the cheese in the large rectangular pieces could have been melted a bit more, and, from the looks of the plate, I think they were a bit on the greasy side. He ate all of it, though.



Then, for his main course, he had a salmon burger with fries, the "burger" being a piece of salmon fillet rather than a hand-formed salmon patty. He said he liked it better than a regular beef burger.



Sorry about the salmon burger picture: I forgot to take pictures when the food arrived, so Leo had already eaten half before I remembered....I also forgot to take a picture of my food, but you didn't really miss anything visually. I had their California chopped salad, something I've had here before, a big plate of greens with grilled chicken, roasted corn, blue cheese, bacon, and avocado.

They actually had bread on hand for a change and brought us large round rolls while we waited for our food.

Old Ebbitt Grill, Washington, D.C.

After our tour of the Department of the Treasury last Thursday, Ryan and I walked across the street for a quick late lunch at the Old Ebbitt Grill. Old Ebbitt is truly one of the "old" restaurants in Washington, since it was founded in 1856. While they've modernized and remodeled the restaurant and bar over the years, there are still a lot of artifacts in the bar area which date back to the mid-1800s.

I had the Steak House Salad, a spinach salad with green beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, scallions, and gouda cheese with a sliced steak on top. Large croutons decorated the salad bowl and the salad was dressed in a mustard-tarragon (at least I think it was tarragon) vinaigrette.



My luncheon companion had the bacon cheeseburger with a little side salad in lieu of French fries.



The food was good and wasn't too terribly expensive for a downtown restaurant. Service was adequate; our waiter was a bit of a space cadet, though. They had some fabulous desserts on the menu, including a blueberry cobbler, a strawberry-blackberry shortcake, and a chocolate walnut pie, but we chose to abstain. Alas.

Charlie Palmer Steak, Washington, D.C.

Yesterday was summer intern Drew's last day working at CLEO. Since we were both off for the afternoon, it seemed a great opportunity to celebrate with lunch at one of the few remaining Restaurant Week hold-overs, the celebrated Charlie Palmer Steak, just a few steps from the Capitol. Joining us were Robert, who offices next door to Charlie Palmer's, and Ryan, who hates to be left out of any party.

Charlie Palmer Steak is one of those high dollar steakhouses where one ordinarily needs a lobbyist's expense account to afford lunch—their regular lunch menu has a $19 shrimp cocktail and a $36 New York strip steak with à la carte side dishes like sauteed spinach for $6 and mashed potatoes for $5. I'm scared to look at their dinner menu. Nevertheless, it's a popular place, and when a restaurant charges these prices and stays in business for years, you know it has to be good.

The decor is traditional yet starkly contemporary at the same time. They take full advantage of a window wall with views of the Capitol and the east end of the Mall. We were escorted to a four-top table near the windows. At each place, the waiter put a block of aluminum and then inserted the legal paper-sized menus in a frame holding the menus starkly upright in front of us. Meanwhile, an assistant selected two different kinds of bread slices and put them on our bread plates, while another offerred our choice of still or sparkling mineral water. Ryan, displaying the keen wit and quickness of thought of an Ivy League college senior, had learned quickly after Thursday's $7 bottle of water and immediately piped up that he'd like tap water.

Robert and Ryan both started their luncheon with the rather redunantly named crisp cod brandade cake with piquillo pepper coulis, salad of greens and herbs, and dill oil. I say it's redundant, because a "brandade," or, perhaps more completely, a "brandade de morue Nîmes," is a classic French fish cake usually made of pureed salt cod and potatoes that originated in the south of France in the city of Nîmes. Now, this brandade has been on the special R.W. menu for two weeks now, so I was rather amused that when we asked the waiter for details about the dish, he was tongue-tied and clueless, and he merely described the appearance of the dish and said it was good (usually in a restaurant of this calibre, such a question would result in a litany of memorized excruciating detail far beyond the intent of the original question). They placed the brandade, which looked rather like a fried salmon patty, on top of a pool of the pepper coulis, topped it with a little bit of greens, and decorated the plate with a drizzle of the dill oil around the perimeter. Both guys said they liked their appetizer, but I didn't hear any further details.

Meanwhile, Drew and I were having the English pea velouté. An assistant brought us cream soup spoons followed by soup plates garnished with thick, truffled crème frâiche surmounted by a pea sprout and with a few tiny black pepper brioche croutons strewed around the plate. Then, another assistant came with a silver soup tureen and a ladle and filled each of our plates with a hot, bright green pea soup. The velouté was not as thick as I'd feared it might be. It had a bright, distinctly pea taste to it, and, while I'd have preferred the peas be cooked just a little more, it was pleasant.



The other three guys all chose the same main course: marinated grilled hanger steak with yellow corn polenta and an eggplant and roasted pepper caponata. A little bouquet of herbs lay atop the polenta in the center of the plate. All of them seemed to like their steak, and Drew mentioned that the polenta was very "dense."



I picked the pan roasted chicken with garlic mashed potatoes and an oyster mushroom ragout. It was surprisingly good! I received a roasted chicken leg (dark meat is my favorite) which had had the thigh deboned and only a stylized bit of the drumstick bone remained. The meat was tender and highly flavorful; the outside was crispy with a salt and herb rub. The potatoes were fine, as were the small oyster mushrooms, though I'd have liked to have had more mushrooms.



We all managed to order all three of the dessert options. Robert had the dark chocolate terrine with candied hazelnuts and hazelnut ice cream. The terrine was dense and looked very nice, and the ice cream was served in a little chocolate cup.



Drew ordered the cheesecake and got a small, individual round of cheesecake cut in half and turned, then topped with a little lace tuile cookie that was filled with citrus flavored ice cream. Little spots of cherry, raspberry, and pineapple compote dotted the plate as garnish.



Ryan and I both had the strawberry shortcake with strawberry sorbet. Like Robert's hazelnut ice cream, the sorbet came in a little chocolate cup, and I loved it! It was very dark strawberry red and had an intense strawberry flavor. The shortcake part had a house-baked shortcake split open and filled with a mix of strawberries, blackberries and a tarragon-scented whipped cream. While it was good, we both were expecting an Oklahoma-style shortcake where the amount of berries in this version would have merely amounted to a garnish on top of the whipped cream back home.



I'm glad that Restaurant Week gave us the chance to try this very good restaurant. Both the kitchen and the dining room performed well. Charlie Palmer has a large, well-trained professional waitstaff and we were pleased with the service we received.

And thus, we had a pleasant afternoon saying goodbye (sort of) to Drew. Then, after our nearly two hour luncheon, Robert had to go back to the office to spend about fifteen minutes there before taking the rest of the afternoon off. Ah, such a busy job!