Zen Bistro and Wine Bar, Arlington, Va.

Ian and I headed to Pentagon City for some quick shopping last night before things closed. Once we got there, though, he decided he was hungry and that we absolutely had to eat dinner before we could shop. So, we ended up on Pentagon Row to dine at Zen Bistro and Wine Bar, a fairly new place that opened up just this past year.

Zen is a fairly small, narrow place in the row of trendy restaurants that flanks the wintertime ice skating rink at Pentagon Row. The decor is sleek and contemporary, with deep reds and oranges as the colors throughout. We were given large menus; page after page of the menu was filled with wines and cocktails. Finally, the very last two pages had food.

We each started off with the Zen house salad. It was a nice mix of American-style greens with large slices of cucumber and tomato with a big wad of carrots shreds on top and a couple of slices of toast all presented on white, triangular plates and dressed in a ginger-balsalmic vinaigrette.

Dinner arrived mere minutes after the salads had arrived. I always have to remember that the service à la russe European tradition of presenting foods in separate courses is not a tradition shared by eastern Asian cultures. Nonetheless, with all these pan-Asian fusion places catering to the non-Asian, trendy American crowd, I keep thinking they'll start dealing more with courses and order, especially since at this place, they are doing separate salads and desserts.

Ian chose the rice claypot for his main course. It's basically a fried brown rice with chicken. It was supposed to have had bean sprouts, mushrooms, and bamboo shoots, but he ordered it without them. I thought it was a cute presentation idea.



I had the orange peel chicken. It was pretty good, with a sweet orange sauce that wasn't too terribly sweet. My only criticism was that the chunks of chicken were just a little too big...they needed to be half that size to be easily eaten with chopsticks. The chicken came with rice molded in the shape of a pyramid.



Ian is a dessert addict, so he had to have something. He seriously considered the chocolate lava, but ended up with the chocolate mousse cake, a confection with layers of flourless mousse cake divided with layers of mousse, garnished with a large dollop of whipped cream.



I usually don't do dessert, but he talked me into it, and I got the the cabernet pear tart. The tart was rather a bit like a pear clafouti with a top layer of jellied cabernet red wine. The smallish slice was garnished with sliced almonds, a half orange slice, and with whipped cream and a cherry on the side.



I never appear in the Kody Pose lineups, so Ian insisted on taking my picture. Here, I'm holding the mango bubble tea I ordered at the beginning of the meal. It was rather an unusual bubble tea, since it was much more like a mango slushie and didn't seem to have any tea at all. Also, the "bubbles" weren't the usual spheres of tapioca, but were tiny diced cubes instead.



After dinner, **finally** we got to shop. And shop we did, until we'd completely charged up Ian's credit card.