Leo likes to celebrate birthdays with big dinners at nice restaurants. This year was no different, and we agreed upon La Chaumière in the east end of Georgetown, where Leo took me last night for my birthday this year. It's a place we've both been wanting to try for a couple of years, but we've never been around at the right time or when there were open tables, so this was something to which both of us were looking forward.
It was worth the wait.
La Chaumière—"the thatched cottage"—is a French place approximating a French country inn restaurant. The interior is arranged around a large, central fireplace, and French art and country tools and items adorn the walls. The menu is rather pricey, so we noticed the full dining room was filled with an older, well-dressed crowd, with almost all of the gentlemen in jackets and ties and the ladies in dresses.
We started by ordering a bottle of petit chablis from bin 15, but I forgot to write down the name of the winery. It was a lovely wine. I've missed chablis, which was the "vogue" white wine when I was in college, but today it seems like pinot grigios are the new vogue, supplanting the chardonnays, and chablis are seldom seen. It's too bad, since chablis is a more complex, fuller-bodied wine, especially since the cheap bottles for the "vogue" wine are no longer omnipresent.
Sorry about the dark, off-color, food photos to follow. The restaurant was full, the tables close together, and the patrons rather upscale, older, and quiet, so I thought the flash would be too disruptive and I tried to photograph everything using ambient lighting.
Our first course was a dozen huitres fraîches, which we split. The oysters were sharp and crisp and quite nicely plump. In addition to the traditional cocktail sauce and lemon wedges, a spicy vinegar also was offered for dipping. The oysters were clearly not the standard, every day raw oyster, but my French was not good enough to be able to ask our waitress exactly from whence our oysters came.
We diverged on our second course. I chose the soupe du jour, a very nice butternut squash purée enriched with just a little cream. There were still little pieces of squash in the soup to give it some texture, and I thought it quite good.
Leo, on the other hand, had one of their house specialities, the boudin blanc. This was a plump little link of a mild chicken and pork sausage served with little roasted apple chunks and sauced. He raved about the dish and the complexities of flavors, saying the apples provided a nice, refreshing sour balance to the sausage.
Our third courses were wonderful. Leo had the St. Jacques Provençale, the sea scallops with garlic and tomatoes. They were quite large, and the photo does not put the plate in proper scale. He reported that the scallops themselves were excellent, but he found the garlic, tomato, butter sauce to be a bit too salty.
I had one of the daily specials, fried sweetbreads with wild mushrooms—ris de veau frits avec les champignons sauvages. They were divine! Sweetbreads are one of my favorite foods, but due to their high perishability and their delicacy, they aren't often found, and amongst those places, few do them well. That certainly wasn't a problem at La Chaumière. My huge, oversized serving of sweetbreads rested upon the braised mushrooms and the dish was garnished with fanciful waffled potato crisp "wings."
For the fourth course, we ordered a salade maison, asking to split it. Well, we were only charged for one salad, but we each received this huge plate of their mixed French lettuces. If those were each just one-half, I can't imagine that salad as a subsidiary course—it would be a meal by itself! I liked the house dressing—a classic vinaigrette spiked with dijon-style mustard—and it was nice to have the salad in its traditional, proper place in the meal.
The fifth and final course—which we'd ordered at the beginning—was soufflés, a Grand Marnier one for Leo and a chocolate one for me. Soufflés are soufflés; either they come out or they don't. These, obviously, did, and were just fine. They came with individual sauce boats of crème anglaise to add as wanted, and I thought it tasted faintly as though spiked with a little brandy or cognac.
After dinner for coffees and demitasses (which neither of us ordered), Leo had a French 75 and I had a Hennessey VS cognac. I found it interesting that there is no bartender at La Chaumière; the waiters themselves have to act as bartender for their tables! Our waitress did not know what a French 75 was, so Leo told her the basics but not the truly correct recipe. He'd only mentioned champagne, gin, and lemon juice, forgetting to tell her about the sugar and the bitters. Oh, well, I think at that point, we didn't really care. I tasted a sip and it reminded me rather of a lemon mimosa (instead of the usual orange juice) with an odd punch from the junipery gin.
Thus we had a wonderful dinner.
After we walked home, though, there was more to come. Leo had gone to Bread and Chocolate and ordered this absolutely light, airy, and divine strawberry cream cake coated in slivvered almonds as a birthday cake! And, with that, we had a bottle of Trittico prosecco while I opened my birthday present. All this, and Leo didn't tell me to not have dessert at the restaurant! This is why I gained six pounds over the holidays.
Thanks, Leo, for everything!
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