Restaurant Kolumbia, Washington, D.C.

As many of you have heard, roommate Leo and his date had a fancy, expensive dinner at Restaurant Kolumbia prior to their breakup on the walk home (was it the food's fault?). Fortunately, I was able to get their notes and opinions before the breakup. Here are the details of the meal.

Valentine's Day can be one of the most challenging days of the year for any chef and restaurant, and it was no different for the Middle Eastern-Asian fusion Restaurant Kolumbia in Washington's downtown West End. Unfortunately, the staff wasn't quite up to the challenge of the crowds and the food was disappointing, as well.

For Valentine's Day, Chef Jamie Stachowski created a special five course tasting menu with an optional associated wine flight. The food was $90 per person and the wines were $25 per person; credit card deposits were required to secure the reservations for either the 7 p.m. or 9 p.m. seatings. A live jazz band played during the course of the evening.

As diners were seated, they were offered an angel-deviled quail egg as an amuse-bouche. Quail eggs, as many of you know, are tiny little things, maybe one inch or less long. The deviled eggs used Cajun-style spices and lots of green herbs. Amusingly, the amuse-bouche was only one half of an egg. Along with the amuse-bouche, they served the wine for the first course, a Domaine de Martinolles Cremant 2000, which is one of those non-champagne French sparkling wines.

The Cremant, which had been so nice by itself and with the amuse-bouche did not fare so well with the first courses. One was a salmon Napoleon, layers of crackers and smoked salmon in an "avocado goat cheese embrace," and the other was three warm oysters in an artichoke covered with a sesame-tasting black sauce called "black knight sauce." Leo liked the oysters but thought the overall dish hard to eat (artichokes can be a pain in a formal setting).

The second courses were early salads. The "Breakfast in Bed" was an ordinary spinach salad topped with a soft poached egg, bacon, and grapefruit segments, and the alternative was an endive, fennel, and blood orange salad with beet carpaccio and an hazelnut emulsion. The blood oranges were a bit crunchy, so perhaps they were insufficiently ripe and out of season. Paired with the salads was a Domaine d'Elise Petit Chablis 2004, but instead of serving it, they served a red wine.....perhaps the Domaine Charvet Moulin a Vent Beaujolais 2004 slated for the third course?

The third food courses got mixed reviews. On one hand, the porcini mushroom timbale with crispy sweetbreads and perigord sauce was good, but the fish "pot au feu" made of balls of sole with winter white vegetables was "horrible" and "not fresh." No wines were served with this course.

The highlight of the fourth course was the wine, a 2000 Montenidoli Chianti Colli Sensi. The food, on the other hand, demonstrated the kitchen's stress. When taking the intial orders, wait staff did not inquire as to desired doneness on the beef. Consequently, Leo's date was chagrinned that the filet mignon arrived extremely rare. The internal lobster stuffing in the filet was okay, though. Leo suffered a similar but much scarier fate: rare, greatly undercooked squab. I told him regardless of the slowness of the evening's service, he should have sent that back to the kitchen. The squab was very sweet, having been basted with lavendar honey, and came with a quince and date pate Leo thought reminded him of sweet potato chunks.

They both chose the baba amour for dessert, which they decided was the lesser of the two evils. The vanilla pillow cake was a small, very sweet, marshmallow-tasting cake served with rum syrup and what was supposed to have been tropical fruits with passion fruit foam, but which they described as merely a strawberry-banana sauce. They were glad, though, not to have ordered the chocolate fondue, since what they saw on other tables was just strawberries with chocolate sauce. The wine for the desserts was excellent, though; they poured a 2003 Domaine Larredya Jurancon "Selection" with a sweet, green apple flavor.

The bill for two, including tax and tip? $305.

As an overall impression, the food fell well below expectations, but more annoyingly, the service was dismal and understaffed. They were only poured four of the five wines in the wine flight (something they only realized in retrospect), and the wines weren't served with the food on a timely basis or with the correct courses. In fact, they had a long wait after getting the dessert wine before the dessert ever showed up. Then, most annoyingly, after requesting a check, they had to wait over fifteen minutes for the bill to arrive. They've pledged never to return to Restaurant Kolumbia.

Well, I can't say I didn't warn them before they made their reservations.