Cactus Cantina, Washington, D.C.

After another Summer Music Festival performance at the National Cathedral tonight, my friend Bob from the State Department (who'd dragged me out to the concert tonight) and I wandered up the street a bit from the cathedral close and had a little late evening supper at Cactus Cantina, a "Mexican" place that's a part of a small local chain. For some reason, the restaurant's decor included not only the traditional Mexican-looking stuff, but several posters and a big display case of Plains Indian regalia such as a feather war bonnet, a porcupine-quilled pipe bag, a beaded buckskin shirt, and other articles near the entrance. I'm not really sure why they had the Indian stuff there, since there weren't any Indian food items on the menu, and nothing else at the restaurant referred to it. Odd. Very odd.

The restaurant was loud, noisy, and crowded. The menu was pretty standard "contemporary"-Mex. Service was rather young and untrained, but typical for this type of restaurant. A few times, I noticed our waitress slowly reaching for our table nearly suspended in limbo as she was busy giving the Suzie Sorority fake "hiii-eeee" to other female patrons she seemed to recognize.

I ended up ordering the spinach enchillada platter. It had two enchilladas in flour tortilla wrappers, stuffed with a lot of too-intense spinach (probably from them using a goodly quantity of chopped frozen spinach inside), covered with some kind of strangely flavorless white sauce, and topped with a few slices of avocado. A big helping of plain white rice was on the plate, and a small bowl of black beans came along on the side There was also a mound of salad on the platter, but I wasn't expecting the large amount of shredded cabbage along with the lettuce and tomato.

Bob had a combination plate that looked very good. There was a taco, a tamale, and an enchilada with ample shredded beef on the plate, plus salad like mine, and he got some Spanish rice with a bowl of brown beans. We were tempted to get dessert, but it was late and we really weren't still hungry, though I was quite curious to try their strawberry-almond charlotte.