La Tomate, Washington, D.C.

This weekend I had my first houseguest in Washington! My friend Ryan flew down from New Hampshire for a quick weekend getaway from the two feet of snow they've had up there at Dartmouth.



We Metroed up to Dupont Circle and walked up Connecticut Avenue, where we found a charming little Italian restaurant called La Tomate ("the tomato").

La Tomate seems to be a very Italian Italian restaurant; I heard management speaking to the staff in Italian, so when the hostess greeted us, I requested our table for two in Italian, and we got a prime window seat. There were so many fabulous things on the menu, we had a hard time deciding what to order! While we perused the menu, we sipped on a simple, crisp prosecco.

I thought it was funny that Ryan wanted to eat at an Italian place. As it turns out, two food items he doesn't like are tomatoes and mushrooms, and he also doesn't like hot, spicy foods! He tends to have rather bland white trashy food preferences (LOL....he's gonna read this and be mad at me), and what he wanted for dinner was a fettuccine Alfredo with shrimp, but that wasn't on the menu (it's an American invention).

They had a dish with black fettuccine with shrimp, sundried tomatoes, and porcini mushrooms that I thought sounded wonderful, but when I explained to him that the way they make the fettuccine black is they use squid ink, that plus the tomatoes and mushrooms made him shy away. He ended up ordering the spaghetti arrabbiato with lobster, and when I explained to him that the "arrabbiato" means hot and spicy, he had the poor waiter tell the chef not to put peppers in it!

I had a really nice sea bass which was presented on a mound of mashed potatoes surrounded by sauteed spinach, and the fish was topped with a sautee of leeks bonne femme. A half lemon in cheesecloth was also on the plate, but I didn't use it. For starters, Ryan had a salata mista which was a "normal" house salad, but I did notice that his onions had been cooked, and I had the vegetable soup, which was a puree of zuccini, leek, and spinach. The bread basket had an onion foccacia, a slender loaf of soft French-style sourdough, and an interesting thin country loaf of wheat and rye flours, and it was accompanied by a tapenade of ripe black Italian olives. For dessert, Ryan had a very pretty chocolate torte in three thin layers with a white and dark chocolate fondant icing. I had the lemon cake, which was a lemon curd tart dusted with confectioner's sugar and sprinkled with pignoli (pine nuts).