Alamo Grill, Georgetown, D.C.

My friend Ian came down from New York this weekend. I met Ian on his arrival and we caught the Circulator there at Union Station and rode over to Georgetown to have dinner. Last year, we had gone to a place called Alamo Grill, where, after we'd called first to confirm hours and told them we were coming, they closed their dining room over an hour before their normal closing time because it was a slow night and refused to serve or seat us! For some reason, Ian insisted that that was where he wanted to go to dinner Friday night, so there we went.

We were seated in a corner table by the window. A couple of mariachi-style guitarists were playing duets together, standing in the doorway between the dining room and the bar. It was fun at first, but they did get rather annoying as the evening wound on. We were brought the usual chips and salsa, with large mostly yellow chips but with a few blue corn chips thrown in; I thought the salsa rather thin and ordinary.

Ian ordered the arroz con pollo, a fairly classic Latin American dish. I was not impressed. Normally, the chicken and rice are stewed together, and it can be a wonderful entree. In this case, the chicken was cooked separately and looked like sliced commercial chicken breasts, it came with a huge quantity of sliced green bell pepper (not a normal ingredient), and it was all sauced with this sort of translucent-looking, nondescript gravy. Ian ate it, but I wouldn't have liked it at all.



I had the grilled chicken salad. It was edible, though once again, not impressive. A commercial chicken breast had been grilled and sliced up, then laid with two half slices of tomato atop a mound of big pieces of iceberg lettuce with a few bits of romaine thrown in to help qualify the salad as "mixed greens."



What's worse, I thought the price point for the food at Alamo Grill was rather high, especially given the quality levels. Also disappointing was the mediocre and largely absent service.

They did redeem themselves somewhat with their dessert offerings. Ian had a great big piece of German chocolate cake that was delicious. I tasted some and the cake was moist, there was a flavorful mousse-like frosting between the layers, and they used decent quality dark chocolate on top as a garnish.



I had the flan. The flan looked awful, but the taste and texture were very good once one got to the actual piece of flan.



While I had tried to keep an open mind for Alamo Grill after our previous visit had left a bad taste in our mouths, I'm afraid Friday night's visit did little to improve my opinion. It's just not a place that I'm going to put on the regular rotation.