La Plaza, Washington, D.C.

Russian concert pianist Svetlana Potanina was in town tonight to play a recital at the Library of Congress. After the show, we wandered down Pennsylvania Avenue looking for a place to grab dinner, but I guess all the stuff near the Capitol is lunch only, because we ended up walking nearly to the Eastern Market Metro station before we found a strip of restaurants which were still open. We landed at La Plaza, a Salvadoran place.

I started with an horchata, a non-alcoholic beverage often thought of as "rice milk" but which is actually made of rice, almonds, vanilla, and sugar, and given the Salvadoran touch of being seasoned with cinnamon and a little ground cocoa. The waiter brought a basket of tortilla chips and a bowl of salsa, and I think their salsa is by far the best fresh salsa I've had in the D.C. area. I had thought to have just a light snack and ordered a puppusa and a tamale, but the waiter brought me the "El Cuscatleco" plate, which was a full dinner with a puppusa, the traditional pickled cabbage and hot pepper salad, a large chicken tamale, sour cream, fried yucca root, slices of fried plantain, Mexican rice, and beans. It was actually a fun dinner and I ate most of it, so I didn't complain. The puppusa, tamale, and plantain were good, the rice was okay, but I thought the yucca had a funny taste to it (probably the grease they used to fry it) and the beans were quite bland.

While La Plaza won't be a "destination" restaurant for us, it was a pleasant place while we were in the neighborhood, and they do have great salsa!

El Chalán, Washington, D.C.

Had a quick dinner at El Chalán last night with my Guatemalan friend Gustavo. Why he wanted to eat at a Peruvian restaurant, I don't know, since Guatemala is in northern Central America, just below Mexico, Peru is way down in South America, and the culinary traditions are very different. But, I've been to El Chalán before and enjoyed the food, so I was okay with it. I was particularly glad to have him along last night, since our waiter spoke no English at all.

Anyway, he had the pollo al vino, a stewed chicken dish with carrot slices, peas, onions, and a light brownish sauce with white rice. I had one of the house specialities, the lomo saltado, a wonderfully tasty dish with tender, braised strips of beefsteak with potatoes (cut like short, thick fries), onion, tomatoes, peppers, peas, cilantro, all tossed together in a zesty brown sauce, and served with a large side of white rice (why does a dish with potatoes need rice?). That's all we had—like I said, it was a quick dinner. Gustavo had to run to Maryland, so it was more of a snack to tide him over til he got back to his family.

Sin é, Arlington, VA

Never have dinner in an Irish pub when Notre Dame is playing Stanford. We made that mistake last night, and couldn't even hear ourselves chew!

Leo and I were trying to goad Ryan into eating something "ethnic" for dinner last night, and he kept wanting boring, plain, American food from national franchises. He just wouldn't do any of the Thai, Chinese, Lebanese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Italian, or French places in the area around the mall at Pentagon City, or even Wolfgang Puck's California Fusion place, but I had an ace in the hole: Ryan isn't just Indian, he's also Irish and Scot (his family claims to be direct descendants of William Wallace of Braveheart fame), and there's an Irish restaurant and pub on Pentagon Row called Sin é.

Sin é (pronounced "shin-ay") is really more of a cross between a pub and a sports bar, but they do have a full menu with half a dozen Irish dinners, eight American dinners, and a full assortment of appetizers, burgers, sandwiches, and wraps. The host found us a booth with really high walls around it to shelter us a bit from the bar noise and the television-in-every-room-turned-to-the-Notre-Dame-game environment of the evening. Leo had some kind of Samuel Adams on tap and Ryan and I drank iced Earl Grey tea while we pondered the multi-page menu.

We opted to share a couple of appetizers, and chose a basket of spicy fried calamari, small squid rings breaded and deep fried then served with what they called a garlic aioli but which tasted to me more like honey mustard dressing, and a huge plate of Irish Nachos, made with thickly sliced potato chips instead of tortilla chips which I just loved!

For main courses, which arrived just after the appetizers were delivered (so much for "courses"), Ryan had a bacon cheeseburger with a house salad, Leo had fish and chips (the fish pieces were huge and looked excellent), and I had a chopped club salad. My salad was ok, but failed on a couple of fussy technical points for qualifying as a true "chopped salad," and was really more of a normal mixed-lettuces-from-the-bag with diced fried chicken fingers and some avocado cubes tossed in ranch dressing salad.

While we didn't endulge, the dessert menu had some fabulous looking things on it, from a bread pudding with Irish whiskey sauce to a Bailey's Irish Cream cheesecake to a chocolate hazelnut cake and others.

I plan to go back to Sin é. The food was good, the prices were quite reasonable, and the service was adequate. I'll just make a point to avoid Notre Dame football evenings!

Washing dishes

There must be a genetic difference between men and women when it come to washing dishes.

At family gatherings, just as soon as people leave the table, the womenfolk quickly sweep the dishes off the table and into the kitchen, where they all stand around to socialize and wash the dishes. It doesn't matter if a female guest is a non-family member or even a just-met acquaintance, her genetic conditioning will kick in and she will go into dishwashing mode. I think if a woman knew that dishes would be left out unwashed all night long, she would be positively apoplectic.

Men, on the other hand, are perfectly happy to leave the dishes on the table after a big meal, move into the living room, and promptly fall asleep. The idea of gravy drying on the china on the table doesn't bother them one little bit.

Last night after dinner, with great effort I made myself debone the turkey and put the leftovers in the refrigerator. This morning, all the dishes, pots, pans, bowls, and the turkey carcass were all waiting on the counter to greet us. Now, as I hear all my female readers gasping, let me explain my logic that by allowing all the pots and pans to soak over night, they were infinitely easier to clean this morning. We had to hand wash everything today, and it took over an hour! I suppose it's a record for all my dishes to be washed by noon on Friday, cause usually I would have run one dishwasher load a day, and it often takes three days to get everything washed. One of the challenges of tiny D.C. apartment kitchens is that we don't have a dishwasher!

Cooking in a miniature kitchen was a challenge, too. My little oven is just barely big enough to hold the turkey roasting pan. We also have very, very little counter space, so the great logistical challenge of the meal was just finding places to set things!

Ryan's simple "white trash" menu and recipe requests were surprisingly easy and quick to prepare. Other than having to pop the turkey in the oven for six hours, there was basically nothing else to do until about an hour before dinner time, when the hardest task was peeling a bag of potatoes. Ryan couldn't figure out what my boiled potatoes were when they were sitting on the counter before the boiling cream and butter were added; I rice my potatoes instead of using a hand mixer on them, so I suppose they did look "different" to a non-cook like him. Everything else was just opening and mixing cans and boxes. I miscalculated a few grocery purchases; usually I go through a quart of cream on Thanksgiving, so now I have half a quart left over; no cream soup and using "Cool Whip" for dessert will do that. And, alas, the sad news of the week was that the lady who invented Stovetop Stuffing just died.

So, now, we're off to the Kennedy Center for a National Symphony Pops concert of all-movie scores. Ciao for now!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

The turkey is in the oven and should be done in plenty of time for our target five o'clock feast time. Got up this morning to bake the pumpkin pie. It felt strange not to be baking pumpkin challah or other Thanksgiving breads, but Ryan wanted those store-bought brown 'n serve rolls, so that's what we're having. He wants everything to be very plain and simple; I hope my doctoring of the turkey (a basil and butter rub under the skin and all over the outside, plus wedges of onion and orange inside the cavity) won't violate his sense of "nothing exotic, nothing foreign" "white trash food" (his term). I indulge his wish for simple, country food cause the Ivy League and the East Coast really is quite a culture shock for western Indian kids. This is his third year at Dartmouth, and he's never been able to go home to his family in Oklahoma for Thanksgiving, so I hope this keeps him from getting too homesick.

After the turkey went in, I fixed myself my traditional Thanksgiving cook's breakfast of slowly scrambled eggs and the turkey liver sauteed in butter with a splash of brandy. College boy was still in bed, so he didn't get any.

Here's our projected menu, as chosen by Ryan:

A White Trash Thanksgiving
Washington, D.C.
November 24, 2005

Plain Deviled Eggs with Paprika Garnish
Bread and Butter Pickles

Salad of Iceberg Lettuce, Diced Ham, Onions, Egg Slices
Cheddar Cheese, and Sunflower Seeds
with ranch dressing

Plain Roasted Turkey with Pan Gravy
Stovetop Cornbread Stuffing with Neck Meat and Giblets
Plain Mashed White Potatoes with Butter
Roasted Sweet Potatoes
Green Bean Casserole
Homemade Creamed Corn
Canned Whole Cranberry Sauce
Brown 'n Serve Rolls
Southern-Style Iced Tea

Mrs. Smith's Pumpkin Custard Pie
with Cool Whip topping

Time to check on things again in the kitchen.

Capital Q Texas-Style Barbeque, Washington, D.C.

We went to the Indian museum at the Smithsonian, which blissfully was not crowded this afternoon. I kinda wanted to eat lunch at their Indian foods cafe, Mitsitam, which was featuring smoked turkey, roast venison, grilled buffalo, and planked salmon, but holiday houseguest Ryan thought it was too expensive at $12.95 per person, so we ate a late lunch when we got to Chinatown near the movie theater, where he spent $18 on a little plate of barbequed brisket, pulled pork, slaw, beans, and iced tea! He's starting to learn Washington prices.......

I've always been curious about Capital Q Texas-Style Barbeque when I've walked past it right by the busiest corner in Chinatown. I just couldn't imagine barbeque here being any better than the dismal attempts at Mexican food. So, when Ryan wanted to eat at a non-ethnic restaurant (in Chinatown!!!) and our only choices were Hooter's, Fuddrucker's, or Capital Q, I encouraged him to pick the "non-national chain." Once I got inside and tasted the food, I was quite pleasantly surprised.

Capital Q is a small restaurant with rustic, Texas-themed decor. In the back is a food counter where you pick your meats and the attendant cuts your ribs or chops your meat to order, and also helps you pick your side items. Everything else is self-service. With that in mind, I thought the prices were just a touch on the high side for a barbeque joint—a pound of beef ribs was going for $26! My half-pound of chopped beef at $7 was worth it, though, because the meat was wonderfully flavored and juicy. Ryan had a two-meat sampler plate with nice slices of beef brisket and a big spoonful of pulled pork, which he particularly liked. The baked beans looked pretty normal to me, as did the cabbage slaw, but he didn't like the slaw because it had celery seed in the recipe. Nevertheless, I liked the place, and I'll definitely be back.

On our way out of the movie theater last night, it was snowing! The snow only lasted a few minutes and didn't stick, but first snow is always such a magical moment.

Thai Kitchen, Washington, D.C.

Leo and I went to a late dinner at Thai Kitchen on M Street in West End. We discovered it the other night while we were walking home from Dupont Circle and thought it looked interesting. The restaurant takes up a lot of square footage in a half-below-ground floor at the bottom of an office building, and their position allows them to have an entry plaza with a fountain and koi pond outside. A lot of the decor is Chinese in nature, including ba-gua feng shui items over the doors. Inside, one of the first things one see is a huge picture of the management with actress Angelina Jolie, who recently used Thai Kitchen to cater a fund raising dinner for one of her refugee charities. Continuing on down the stairs into the restaurant, one first enters the bar area, where a long bar snakes along two walls and bears a boldly decorated top. Around the corner in the dining area (bar and dining room are all one great big space), banquette line the window wall, tables and chairs are in the middle, and booths sit along the interior walls. The exposed architectural support columns are on 30-degree angles from the vertical; all are wood paneled.

The menu is very traditionally Thai and the prices are quite reasonable, especially given their West End location. Since the night air was chilly on the walk over, I started with a lovely hot tea with a light jasmine fragrance and medium amber color that hit the spot. Leo got a cocktail called "Kiss Before Dying," which was some kind of vodka, tequilla, Galliano, and orange juice concoction. We both ended up starting with Yum Nua, a grilled beef salad. The thinly sliced beef was wonderfully flavorful with a hot spicy lime juice dressing and bits of green scallion throughout. It was mounded directly on the plate next to a small pile of lettuce, which included long, curled shreds of carrot and two endive leaves.

I planned on just the salad for my meal, but Leo had another item, having selected the southern style red curry dish, Panang. There was a considerable quantity of tender chicken chunks in the center garnished with a few deep-fried basil leaves on top; a row of crinkle-cut zuccini rounds lined the edge of about one-third of the bowl. White rice came in a separate small bowl. He declared that the food here was better than that at the Thai place we usually frequent downtown.

Dessert, though, was a bit of a disappointment. Leo had the mango sticky rice and I had just mango, but, while he reported the sticky rice itself to be good, both of our mangos were very much far from being ripe. Nevertheless, he grabbed a delivery menu on the way out, so I think there's a good chance we'll be eating Thai Kitchen's food again.

Chevy's Fresh Mex, Arlington, VA

There's a little shopping center across the street from the big mall at Pentagon City called "Pentagon Square," noted mostly for the Costco, plus BestBuy, Linens 'n Things, and Border's Books, and we were there to pick up some household necessities. We decided to try one of the cafes there, Chevy's Fresh Mex. Leo said that back when he was fresh out of college with his advertising and marketing degree, Chevy's was one of the accounts on which he worked. So, it seemed like a fun place to try.

Since we came in from the shopping center and not their main door from the outside, we had to walk through the main dining room, where there were a lot of empty tables. We waited at the host's stand for probably five minutes before he talked to us, then we stood there probably another ten minutes before we were seated. He was very slowly controlling the flow of new tables into the dining rooms, and we had to wait for him to seat about five tables ahead of us (most were in the bar), answer telephone calls, and wander around the restaurant. There seemed to me to be no reason why all the tables couldn't have been seated immediately. I think, though, the problem was that they were short staffed on full-fledged waiters. There were tons of waiter's assistants and bus boys in the place, but not that many waiters. Our waiter was quite unfortunately scarce after taking our order, with the food brought from the kitchen by expediters and the assistants pooring drinks, filling chip baskets, and so forth.

Leo, who is supposed to be on a no-carb diet, started with a frozen margarita and an appetizer serving of "Dos Tamales," a large plate with one pork tamale topped with red chile sauce and one chicken tamale topped with a very hot green chile and tomatillo sauce, and all sprinkled with crumbles of white Mexican cheese. I ordered a Santa Fe Chopped Salad for my meal, so I opted not to do appetizers. Meanwhile, though, I tasted the salsa and it was very good, with a roasted tomato taste and a much darker color than most salsas; it was a touch sweet and rather thin, but I liked it nonetheless. My salad was good, too, and too big to completely finish. For a main course, Leo ordered chicken fajitas; they brought him a huge tray with a raised platform in the middle holding the hot, sizzling skillet of chicken strips, onions, and green pepper slices, with a lower compartment on the left holding a big plate of black bean (there were three different types of beans available) and Spanish rice, and on the right a plate with guacamole, pico de gallo, and sour cream. Tortillas came in a little paper bag placed on the table, but we didn't open it. One of the most interesting things on the main plate was their roasted corn salsa, which appeared to be a puree of smoky, roasted, fresh corn kernals with a powerful corn flavor and just a touch of pepper fire that was quite good. After abiding by the "no-carb" rules for his main course, Leo ended dinner with a great big flan garnished with a sliced strawberry and a little tiny, cactus-shaped sopapilla.

I thought the food at Chevy's was quite good, but I don't know if I'll make an effort to go back, since I thought the service abominable. When we paid, Leo even had to ask for his change to be returned (how dare the waiter assume he was being left a 30% tip!).

Cafe Nema, Washington, D.C.

One of my bigger culinary adventures was last weekend when I'd been at a Red Cross charity fundraiser and ended up going to a too-early dinner with a chemical engineer and a Ph.D. physicist. We wandered around the P Street strip looking for a place that opened at 5, and were unsuccessful, so we walked up to U Street to check out some new places there, but they didn't open til 6, either. Then, we just happened to notice a lower level cafe behind a staircase full of people, and Cafe Nema was open!

Cafe Nema is a Somali restaurant. For you geographically impaired, Somalia is a country on the very eastern tip of Africa, immediately east of Ethiopia and south of the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian peninsula. Just a few days before, Somalia had been in the news because of Somali pirates who'd attacked a cruise ship off the coast! Unlike Ethiopia, which was never colonized by Europeans, Somalia was British until 1960 and early on some provinces had been Italian, so their food is much more accessible to Western tastes.

Since none of us had been to a Somali restaurant before, we asked our very personable waiter to pick our meal for us. I guess he wasn't that comfortable with just bringing us stuff, so he kept questioning, and based on my dinner companions' less adventurous palates, he made the "decision." Drink orders came first. Since Somalia is one of those strict Sunni Muslim countries, I was surprised that they served beer here. I was disappointed that they didn't have iced tea! How un-American! We each got mixed green salads to start with a lemony olive oil vinaigrette that was fine, but I don't think very traditional. We all ended up with the same basic entree, a delicious stewed chicken dish called kalankal. Mine was served in the center of a plateful of rice, whilst my companions (both of whom claim Italian ancestry) had their kalanal mixed in with fettucine noodles. The flavor of the kalankal was very good, and unlike Etiopean stews, not hot at all. For extra spice, we were given tiny containers of a green mint and other spice sauce that was hot but not overpowering.

Our waiter said there were no traditional Somali desserts. That was a little disappointing, since I know that Somalia is a major exporter of bananas, but I also have to remember that desserts are not at all common in non-western cultures.

Cafe Nema was a fun place I plan to visit again. And, one of the best things, the bill for the three of us was only $37!

Lebanese Taverna, Arlington, VA

While on a Friday night shopping expedition to the Fashion Centre at Pentagon City and the "large" Harris-Teter grocery store in that neighborhood, Leo and I stopped in for an early dinner (early being the operative word, since had we arrived 30 minutes later, the place would have been packed with a line) at the Lebanese Taverna in Pentagon Row, the multi-use shopping and high-dollar apartment area just outside the mall, overlooking the outdoor ice skating rink there.

Lebanese Taverna is a part of a small, family-owned, local chain of restaurants specializing in Lebanese and middle eastern foods. I was pleased to try it, because I've always found Lebanese food to be amongst the best of modern middle eastern cuisine, and I've some familiarity with it, since all of the decades-old steakhouses in Tulsa are owned by Lebanese families and they've included tabouli, cabbage rolls, barbequed bologna, garlic sauce, and their unique meat marinade to the Tulsa culinary scene.

The Abi-Najm family does a good job presenting some of the variety of traditional Lebanese cuisine. One of the things their menus emphasize is the "mezza," which is a collection of small dishes in much the same vein as Spanish tapas (the Spanish learned the habit from their Muslim occupiers in the first half of the previous millennium). They also have a variety of hummus dishes—which they spell "hommos"—and plain chickpeas as a side item, and lots of lamb items.

Leo started with a hommos special from the mezza list, which was their version of the chickpea paste topped with a mixture of sweetly spiced ground meat, almonds, and pine nuts, served with a basket of pita bread halves. I tasted some of the meat mixture, and it was very good without too much cinnamon. I had a malfouf salad, which is a traditional shredded cabbage dish marinated in lemon juice and olive oil with garlic.

For main courses, Leo had a shrimp kabab with white and yellow rice and I had a sliced roast lamb dish (I forget the Lebanese name....shawarma??) with tahini sauce that was smaller than I'd hoped, but it was from the mezza list, so I guess it wasn't totally unexpected. What little there was was quite flavorful, though. I forget what Leo had for dessert; I had a melted white Lebanese cheese dish topped with a ground pistacchio and bulgar wheat, then drenched with orange blossom water syrup and a cup of strong Lebanese coffee.

The food here was very good, though the service was rather spotty.....had we been there in the midst of the Friday night dinner rush, I could understand, but in the early part of our visit, the restaurant was not yet full. I hear the family is opening a new restaurant and market in Old Town Alexandria next month, which should be fun.

More nouveau wine talk

Tried a glass of the Georges Duboeuf beaujolais-villages nouveau last night to compare it with the beaujolais nouveau we had earlier in the week. As you know with French wines, the smaller the controlled geographic area of the source of a wine's grapes, the higher quality the wine; a beaujolais-villages, therefore, should be better than a mere beaujolais.

The beaujolais-villages is noticeably drier than the beaujolais, but otherwise the tastes are similar, and in this case, I don't think the extra dryness is an improvement. The beaujolais-villages is only a little over a dollar more per bottle than the beaujolais. Nevertheless, for general drinking (remembering that all the "nouveaus" need to be drunk by New Years), I think I'd stick with the plain beaujolais.

Interestingly, the two liquor stores in our neighborhood with wine selections both are stocking only the Georges Duboeuf nouveaus, so I've not tried this year's beaujolais nouveau from any of the other wineries.

I miss my parish back in Oklahoma City. They would, no doubt, be pouring beaujolais nouveau this morning as a communion wine.

David Greggory Restau-Lounge, Washington, D.C.

Last night we finally got around to dining at David Greggory Restau-Lounge, a popular "retro-forward" place in the West End we've walked past dozens of times on our way to and fro other destinations. It's also been on my radar screen since May, when the establishment was rented out for the exclusive 80th birthday party for gay rights leader Frank Kameny, and if 160 homosexuals party at a restaurant, you know it's good! (For those of you who don't recognize Kameny's name, he was Ph.D. Army astronomer and WWII hero who was the first person to challenge the Eisenhower Administration's policy that gay federal employees could be fired or denied employment for "sexual perversion" in 1957, eventually going to the Supreme Court in 1961; in 1971 he was the first openly gay person to run for public office; he led the local movement that succeeded in decriminalizing sodomy in the District of Columbia in 1993; he was one of the leaders of the movement to convince the American Psychiatric Association to vote homosexuality off the list of mental illnesses in 1973.)

Located in the ground floor corner of an office building at the corner of a busy three-street intersection, David Greggory takes up a surprisingly large amount of real estate, all of which has been decorated in a starkly contemporary, yet warm way. The luxe decor even carries over into the rest rooms, where floor to ceiling panes of frosted glass serve as partitions, floors and walls are polished red and brown marble, and bright copper bowls on glass countertops serve as lavatory basins. Different styles of contemporary art from eight different artists hang on the interior walls (the exterior walls are all windows) and are available for sale. This contemporary backdrop provides the canvas for the duo-restauranteurs' culinary concept, that of taking traditional comfort foods and "updating" them with world fusion ideas and 21st century foods and techniques. It's an interesting idea and rather fun, though I think I would tire of it rather quickly if I dined here often.

While we perused the menu, Leo sipped a DGtini, a vodka martini which looked and tasted very much like a margarita. His appetizer was the chicken empanadas, which were two small empanadas filled with smoked chicken and spices, then arranged in a small au gratin dish atop lettuce leaves, some very spicy guacamole, and something they called Salsa Mexicana. I had the deviled egg assortment; they brought me a plate with three egg halves, one filled with the egg yolk mixture with heavy herbs, one with minced smoked salmon, and one with lots of bacon crumbles; the eggs rested on a bed of watercress (at first I thought it was spinach, til I tasted the pepperiness of the watercress) with three grape-tomato halves, dressed in a drizzle of olive oil. We also were served a basket with tiny round wheat rolls, small wedges of foccacia, and small slices of what looked to be a wheat sourdough loaf.

This might be a good time to mention the restaurant's penchant for pork dishes. There were a lot of pork and bacon dishes on the menu, every Wednesday they have "Pork and Pinot" night, and they've been having monthly "Aphrodisiac Bacon Dinners," the next of which is Monday night. And, kosher and vegan diners should beware: many dishes and vegetables are seasoned or garnished with bacon.

They encourage compiling different assortments of small dishes to make up a dinner here, from appetizers to half-sized entrees to full-sized entrees. I like the possibilities here, since I prefer multiple courses at dinner and modern portion size is much too large for four or five course dinners. For our entrees, we both opted for half-sized entrees, and they were plenty big. Leo surprised me and didn't order the sea scallops on grilled spinach, but he got the seared jumbo lump crabcake (he's supposed to be allergic to crab). His crabcake arrived resting on two large, crossed, steamed asparagus spears, all floating on a mirror of mango shallot puree and accompanied by a red bell pepper relish. When I asked him how it was, he said, "It was good. It tastes like chicken." I opted for "Not Quite Mom’s Meatloaf," a surprising little dish which had an individual meatloaf stuffed with foie gras mousse that was then cooked and served rare in a pool of roasted tomato sauce and then garnished with diagonal stripes of whole-grain brown mustard and a very liberal sprinkling of crumbled bacon. The meatloaf normally comes with garlic mashed potatoes, but I asked for a non-carb substitute and got a large serving of braised greens. I liked the meatloaf, but if I get it again, I think I'll ask it be cooked a bit more than rare—it's not steak tartare!

For dessert, Leo had a Tres Leches cake with caramelized bananas. The "Tres Leches" that I'm used to from the Cubans in Miami was a yellow cake soaked with three milks—cream, coconut milk, and rum—and then frosted with whipped cream. David Greggory's version reminded me a bit of a banana upside down cake, with gooey banana slices militantly arranged on top, the cake being banana flavored, and, sadly, there was no rum involved. Don't know about the coconut milk, either, since Leo reported only banana taste. While he devoured the entire piece-of-cake-for-two, I drank a little espresso macciato.

One of the other little niceties of David Greggory was their free little boxes of matches—except they didn't contain matches, they are filled with little candy red hots.

On the whole, David Greggory is a nice restaurant (or "restau-lounge", as they call themselves) with a much higher standard and level of service than one would expect for their more modest West End prices. There were plenty of waiter's assistants running around tending to the tables, but our actual waiter was unfortunately scarce; in his defense, though, he and another waitress got pulled shortly after our arrival to tend to a party of 19 lawyers who came in without a reservation. So, next time you're on the M Street strip, consider this place for dinner and drinks.

The "official" beaujolais nouveau party

Tonight, the official beaujolais nouveau party was at the French Embassy here in D.C.. Unlike Bistrot du Coin's party last night, the Embassy party has a limited number of tickets, admission is $65 per person instead of being free, and they have actual food with the wines (the Bistrot only served bread and only had one wine).

I didn't want to go to the Embassy party alone, and I couldn't find anyone around interested in French food and wine, so I stayed home. Probably just as well, since I'd be wanting to eat and drink everything, and that's not on my diet. But, had I gone, this is what they were serving:

Menu

Salmon steak in a dill sauce
Beef Bourguignon
Ratatouille of fresh vegetables
Scalloped Potatoes
Assortment of Charcuteries, Saussisson, Ham, pates,
Mousses, Terrines, cornichon, and onions
Assortments of Cheese, fruits, breads, and crackers
Seven Grain Salad: Wild rice, green beans, garbanzo beans,
Kamut, Millet, Barley, and Tomatoes
Salade Landaise: eggs, smoked duck breast, croutons, and mesclun
with balsamic vinaigrette dressing
Desserts & Mini Pastries


Beaujolais Nouveau Wines to be Presented

Domaine Manoir du Carra
Maison Lamartine
Domaine du Perret
Georges Duboeuf
Joseph Drouhin
Bouchard Aine

Beaujolais Nouveau 2005 Report

Le beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!

Once again, it's the third Thursday of November, and the newest crop of beaujolais nouveau has been presented. I'm just in from the annual party at Bistrot du Coin, where a totally packed restaurant welcomed the new wine and uncorked the first bottles at 12:01 a.m.

The trendy bistro, up near Dupont Circle here in D.C., removed all of its tables and chairs from its floor to allow for the huge crowd, and bouncers at the door had to regulate the flow of people in and out with a line remaining outside in the cold even when I left a little before 1 a.m. A disco sound system blared Euro-Pop (or is it Euro-Trash? I forget) music for those who wanted to endulge the fantasy that there was actually enough room to dance. As one made his or her way through the crush of people to the bars, the bistrot was giving away free glasses of wine. It wasn't a terribly elegant thing—they used those large red plastic cups—but they quickly had the crowd to where they were feeling no pain.


(this was right before I left, when the crowd had thinned considerably)

They served the Georges Duboeuf wine. I do believe this is the best beaujolais nouveau I've tasted in nearly a decade. The wine is very smooth and fruity with good color and aftertaste. It's not a dry wine, and it doesn't have the feeling of being "thin" or "tannic" in the mouth as have some in the recent past. The fruitiness is a good blend of all the desirable wine notes, and there's a touch of spice in the nose. This should be an excellent vintage with broad appeal. I heartily recommend it for everyone's Thanksgiving dinner.

Menu planning for the holidays

Thanksgiving is just a little more than a week away, and along with the fun and excitement of the family gathering and meal. But, for many people, Thanksgiving is a day which has them trembling and shaking in enormous stress. Why? They are cooking the family Thanksgiving dinner.

The vast majority of my friends share one personality trait in common: Obsessive-compulsive perfectionism. That means that for them, everything has to be "just so," and when things aren't perfect, they'll fall apart to varying degrees. So, being a veteran of designing and cooking dozens of family holiday dinners, let me offer a few of tips for your holiday sanity and success to keep you from falling apart and having to overdose on your Buspar or Ativan.

First, your family isn't going to be that critical of your results. They are just glad they they don't have to do the cooking! And, if you know that the one Asshole family member will criticize your meal, just remember that if your meal is perfect, the Asshole will find something else to criticize, so just smile, relax, and ignore the Asshole.

Second, keep the menu simple, small, and manageable. They already know you have impeccable taste, so you don't need to try to impress them with some fancy-schmancy ultra-gourmet recreation of standard Thanksgiving fare. Further, if you are like me, your stove only has four burners on top and the oven will only hold one turkey and one thin, flat casserole dish. Count!

Third, avoid food poisoning your family. Use a meat thermometer (don't have one? go buy one today) to cook your turkey to the correct 180-degree inside-thigh temperature (don't rely on those worthless little pop-up thingies) and bake your stuffing or dressing in a separate pan, not inside your turkey. Don't pre-set food on the table as it gets done, cause you want to keep hot foods hot and cold foods cold until serving time.

Fourth, NEVER NEVER NEVER cook a brand new recipe for the family dinner that you've never cooked at least once before. If you are bound and determined to cook something on the 24th which you've never cooked before, be it a brand new recipe or an old family tradition, prepare it once this week for the practice and experience.

Fifth, children will be children, and the presence of multiple children in the same room increases exponentially the liklihood that something will get broken. Keep that in mind when deciding what china and stemware to use and whether or not you have objets d'art in your home which need to be put away for the day.

Sixth, stash a bottle of your favor wine/liquor somewhere where no one can find it. This is for you and your spouse/significant other Thanksgiving night after everyone has gone home.

Follow these Six Rules, and I'm sure your family Thanksgiving dinner will be a marvelous success!

Johnny's Half Shell, Washington, D.C.

Poor Leo. His glasses suddenly broke at the office this afternoon while he was sitting in front of the computer. So much for the "quality" of Giorgio Armani metal frames. He came home and we wandered out to find an optometrist; he got his eye exam, some contact lenses, some fabulous Burberry frames and lenses, and a bill—for $618.

To help Leo get over his unexpected expense, we had dinner at Johnny's Half Shell, on P Street just off Dupont Circle. It turned out to be a very nice seafood restaurant, crossing the tastes of the two owners, one from Maryland and one from Mississippi near New Orleans. I was curious but leery; the place has several good reviews but also several negative "reader comments."

The interior is comfortable and elegant. We sat towards the back by the lovely, contemporary, green marble bar, where a huge aquarium with great big goldfish and little angel fish swimming together filled the back wall. The menu had one steak entree, one chicken breast, and all of the other things were seafood; the appetizer and soup list was mouth watering and it was hard to pick just one! They had a nice list of wines by the glass and other list for by the bottle selections.

Leo started with steamed mussels in a seafood broth scented with Spanish paprika and enriched with butter. I declined an appetizer, but then changed my mind on the waiter's next pass through, selecting a half dozen oysters on the half shell. The oysters were great, being imported "raspberry point" oysters from Nova Scotia, and the juice in the shell had a special crisp brininess; a vinegar-based mignonette sauce accompanied these premium shellfish instead of the usual catsup and horseradish sauce. With this course, Leo drank a glass of Domaine de la Denante, Macon-Villages 2003, which I got to sample and it was a classic, clean, flinty French chardonnay.


The entrees were excellent. Leo had broiled sea scallops with grilled endive and butternut squash. I had the wood-grilled wild rockfish fillet in wild mushroom sauce with sauteed spinach.


For dessert, Leo had a piece of lemon chess pie in a coconut crust with a cup of coffee and cream; I continued to sip my sixth or seventh glass of passionfruit iced tea.

Johnny's Half Shell is a great restaurant. I look forward to dining there again.

Movie caterers

Nicole Kidman is in town filming some movie. I ran across the movie caterer's tent set up in a parking lot underneath the Whitehurst Expressway along the harbor in Georgetown. They were grilling lots and lots of marinated flank steaks!

Sequoia, Georgetown, D.C.

Robert rang me this evening and announced he was at the Foggy Bottom Metro stop and wanted to go to dinner while he was in the neighborhood, so, since I was just sitting here editing foliage pictures, I thought it might be kinda fun, and away we went. The Georgetown bus was sitting on 23rd Street as we were headed towards the Metro station and that gave us the inspiration to hop on and head to Georgetown. We landed at the Washington Harbor, which is the Georgetown waterfront along the Potomac River.

There are several restaurants there which overlook the harbor, and we picked Sequoia, because it had a more varied menu. I've wanted to go there for some time, anyway, since one of my friends at the DOI Solicitor's Office has been promising to take me there for months.

Sequoia is an elegant restaurant. Upon entering from the plaza, diners must go up a staircase past murals of rowers on the river to get to the main dining room. That room was occupied, though, tonight with a black tie private party for a convention of plastic surgeons; we went to the other dining room, which was still a very large room overlooking Christmas light-wrapped trees and the huge floor to ceiling window walls that allowed all tables a view of the waterfront. While a couple of large round tables occupied the corners, most all of the other tables were white cloth-covered two tops with very comfortable modern highback chairs upholstered in a soft sueded fabric. I was a little confused by the staff's attire: our waitress was in formal white shirt and apron with a black bow tie and black trousers, but the assistants and expediters were wearing casual Henley-style grey shirts with the restaurant's logo silk screened on the front. Regardless of their choice of attire, however, they seemed efficient and there were a number of people who tended to our table during the course of the evening.

After we were seated and given our menus and water, the waitress brought us a basket of bread and rolls wrapped in a white napkin. After about a minute, we smelled smoke. Suddenly, the bread basket burst into flames! The waitress had set the basket down with the napkin over the lit votive candle on our table. Fortunately, though, we were able to blow out the flaming napkins, then then staff spirited the smoking basket back to the kitchen and brought us a new basket of bread and a new candle, and strategically arranged them with a foot of space between them.

Our food was quite lovely. I started with a larger-than-expected bowl of butternut squash bisque; it had a strong cinnamon presence and was decorated with a heavy sprinkling of paprika and then a decorative drizzle of creme frâiche. For a main course, I had a Caesar salad with grilled shrimp—four jumbo shrimp with visible grill marks—decorated with two long leaves of romaine that made perfect rabbit ears! Robert had a grilled swordfish steak resting on a bed of garlic mashed potatoes and surrounded by a scattering of haricots verts, and a glass of the house chardonnay. There was a yellow sauce on the swordfish, but I forgot to ask if it was butter or lemon. For dessert, he had a tart with a poached pear encased in frangipane that looked and smelled delicious; I talked him out of getting the ubiquitous creme brulee, so I hope he liked the tart!

Dinner for the Waleses

White House Photo

Amidst all the excitement this week about Halloween and church services, I forgot to mention that the President and Mrs. Bush had some foreign relatives in to lunch and later to dinner on Wednesday. The President's cousin from England, HRH The Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, was in town to show off his new wife, HRH Camilla, Princess of Wales (but for public relations purposes currently going by her subsidiary title, Duchess of Cornwall).

My efforts to pull strings and call in favors were to no avail in getting an invitation to the black tie dinner at the White House, or even to the larger group invited to the "after dinner entertainment." The Bushes have had so few state and formal dinners, there are just too many major contributors waiting in line for tickets to such things, and poor little me didn't have a chance, especially since they only had 100 guests.

So, for those of us who missed the dinner party, here's what we missed:


Dinner Menu in Honor of Their Royal Highnesses
The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall


Celery Broth with Crispy Rock Shrimp
Newton Chardonnay "Unfiltered" 2002

Medallions of Buffalo Tenderloin
Roasted Corn
Wild Rice Pancakes
Glazed Parsnips and Young Carrots
Peter Michael Pinot Noir "Le Moulin Rouge" 2002

Mint Romaine Lettuce with Blood Orange Vinaigrette

Vermont Camembert Cheese and Spiced Walnuts

Petits Fours Cake
Chartreuse Ice Cream Red and Green Grape Sauce
Iron Horse "Wedding Cuvée" 2002

Reports are that the tables were set in gold silk cloths each decorated with large white phaeleanopsis orchids with camelia leaves. They used the Clinton china (that gaudy stuff Hillary picked out with the wide gold borders and the gold picture of the White House in the center).

I get the impression that Yo Yo Ma must be a Republican, because once again he was called upon by the President to play his cello after dinner, along with pianist Kathryn Scott.

It was a fairly low-key event for a black tie White House dinner, and there's been virtually no news coverage here in the District. I'm told Mrs. Bush looked lovely in her lacy, off-the-shoulder, satiny-looking red dress with a stunning antique garnet necklace, though some of my more acerbic friends thought she looked a little old-fashioned with the bows on the dress. The Princess wore a long, deep sapphire skirt with a matching velvet jacket trimmed in irridescent blue bugle beads and a diamond drop necklace I'm told is worth over £400,000 (that's about $700,000 American). My friends were disappointed that she didn't wear a tiara. She must be in a blue mood, cause she wore a blue suit to the luncheon that day, too.

So, I guess it's time to put my tuxedo back in the closet.

Thai Tanic, Washington, D.C.

Yesterday was my friend Doug's birthday, but between All Saints' Day Mass and him having to go to a meeting at the cathedral where he is on the parish council, he didn't celebrate, so we went to dinner after tonight's All Souls' Day Mass at Thai Tanic. Thai Tanic is usually a reliable, inexpensive place to eat (the Washington Post calls them "dirt cheap," but those Post reporters must be used to some pricey dirt; it's one of the paper's "editor's pick" restaurants, too), however, tonight the restaurant reeked of moth balls, and I've no idea why. The food was good, though, and eventually our noses got desensitized to the odor.

For appetizers, Doug started off with a chicken satay, grilled chicken on skewers served with a peanut dipping sauce. I had the potpourri mussels, a serving which was truly large enough for a main course. The mussels were steamed with slices of fresh ginger root (the surprising source of a great deal of spice heat), slivvered scallions, basil, and horizontal slices of some shiny green leaf which was the wrong size for the menu-advertised lemongrass. There was enough of the steaming broth leftover in the bottom on the bowl to make a small soup course, and I would have drunk the tasty liquid, but the main courses arrived as I was eating my last mussel and I let the waitress take my bowl away.

Doug told me he was going to order the pad thai for his main course, but when the waitress was taking our orders, he requested a shrimp pad see eew, instead. I didn't taste it, but it was a mixed dish with wide rice noodles, bean sprouts, ground peanuts, and grilled shrimp. I had one of their two daily specials, crispy roast duck. To demonstrate the high standards of service at Thai Tanic, I can tell you that I ordered my duck without rice (my ubiquitous diet), and the kitchen peeled an entire tomato in one long strip that was then rolled into a rose for my plate, flanked by two fan-cut cucumber halves, all just to keep me from having an empty looking plate. My duck was delicious. The duck was roasted, then cut into small boneless pieces which were dredged in a spice mixture and then flash deep fried. Tiny juliennes of hot Thai red chile peppers were scatterred decoratively over the top.

Very tasty dinner. Happy birthday, Doug!

T.G.I.Friday's, Washington, D.C.

After All Saints' Day Mass tonight, Leo and I went to the neighborhood T.G.I.Friday's for dinner, where we had their standard mediocre but palatable food that took 50 minutes for us to get served, and the restaurant wasn't even full. How hard can it be to bring Leo a Cajun pasta (they are frozen and only have to be nuked) or me a Cobb salad? Our poor waiter kept checking on us and saying he was bringing the food soon, but when the kitchen is inefficient, there's little a waiter can do except pray he doesn't get stiffed on his tip.

Fifty things to taste

The British Broadcasting Company asked people to vote for the top fifty things everyone should try a bite of in their lifetime. This is the final list.

1. Fresh fish
2. Lobster
3. Steak
4. Thai food
5. Chinese food
6. Ice cream
7. Pizza
8. Crab
9. Curry
10. Prawns (a/k/a shrimp, in the U.S.)
11. Moreton Bay Bugs
12. Clam chowder
13. Barbecues
14. Pancakes
15. Pasta
16. Mussels
17. Cheesecake
18. Lamb
19. Cream tea
20. Alligator
21. Oysters
22. Kangaroo
23. Chocolate
24. Sandwiches
25. Greek food
26. Burgers
27. Mexican food
28. Squid
29. American diner breakfast
30. Salmon
31. Venison (a/k/a deer)
32. Guinea pig
33. Shark
34. Sushi
35. Paella
36. Barramundi
37. Reindeer
38. Kebab
39. Scallops
40. Australian meat pie
41. Mango
42. Durian fruit
43. Octopus
44. Ribs
45. Roast beef
46. Tapas
47. Jerk chicken/pork
48. Haggis
49. Caviar
50. Cornish pastry

The original link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/tv_and_radio/50eats_index.shtml

Obviously, there are a few foods on here not common to American diners, so let me explain a few things.
• A Moreton Bay Bug is a crustacean from Australia very similar to a crawfish/crayfish/crawdad.
• Paella is a Spanish seafood and rice stew.
• Barramundi is a type of very expensive Australian fish.
• Australian meat pies are just like any other culture's kind of meat pie; cubed steak with onions are the most popular.
• Durian fruit comes from southeastern Asia; it is quite large, looks yellowish with spines, has a custardy texture with an almond-sweet flavor, and bears an unusual smell which can probably be best described as "fecal."
• Tapas are little hot or cold appetizer dishes common in Spanish cuisine.
• "Jerk" meats are Jamaican-style grilled meats seasoned with very, very hot spices.
• Haggis are traditional Scottish things made mostly of barley and minced organ meats stuffed in a sheep's stomach.
• Cornish pastries are much the same as Australian meat pies.

Stonehorse Cafe, Tulsa, OK

Yesterday I drove to Tulsa to go shopping with Tony. We had lunch at the Stonehorse Cafe in Utica Square. I'd been at Stonehorse once before over a year ago, but the kitchen was closed and all we did was have a glass of wine. Tony had actually eaten there recently, so he was raving about their pistachio-encrusted halibut with leeks and shrimp. It's a popular socialite gathering spot on the corner across from Saks Fifth Avenue and Harold's, and it seemed appropriate for our lunch since it's neither as pretentious as The Wild Fork nor as expensive as the Polo Grill or Fleming's.

The location has been a succession of popular restaurants over the years, and I've eaten in that geographic location dozens of times. The current concept is much more "urban cafe" and about a third of the dining room is partitioned off with a sleek, contemporary, glass and brushed steel wall which masks the bar area. The dining room itself is filled to the gills with so many two-top tables that every time a waitress walked by, I instinctively pulled in my elbow and leaned away from them. Our table was right up against the window, so we got a good view of the al fresco tables.

Tony started his luncheon with a cup of the lobster-shrimp bisque, which he liked a lot, and reported little chunks of lobster and tiny shrimp. I had a tiny sampling, though, and thought I could taste a bit of "can," which led me to think either the shrimp or the seafood stock were canned instead of fresh; there was enough cayenne, though, I couldn't be certain. For his main course, he had a whole California pizza, which came with mozzarella, goat cheese, roasted garlic, and sun-dried tomatoes on a hand-tossed crust.

Taking a cue from the lady at the next table, I ordered the kosher chicken salad sandwich, but on a bed of lettuce instead of on bread. I got a surprisingly large serving of chicken salad that was flavorful, yet rather plain and unadventuresome. It had a tiny bit of minced celery and chopped parsley for color and texture, but I really thought it needed a little more character with perhaps some nuts or water chestnuts or something. The bed of lettuce was a melange of mixed greens in a heavily vinegared dressing.

We both had their "tropical iced tea," which was a fruit-flavored tea with strong hints of mango and raspberry. They also offered baskets of bread consisting of pieces of round country wheat loaves cut by hand by the waiters at a special bread table near the open kitchen counters.

It was a fun lunch spot, and the prices were very reasonable, I thought.

Outback Steakhouse, Tulsa, OK

Yesterday was my father's birthday, so I flew to Tulsa for a few days. My parents picked me up at the airport and wanted to eat dinner in Tulsa, so we had to pick a place. I suggested Fleming's in Utica Square. I know it's a national franchise, but the food is upscale and decent with excellent service. My mother thought it was too expensive, so we ended up going to Outback Steak House, another national franchise.... What can I say about Outback? Alas, we didn't even have a fun waiter. It was a nice evening, though, and we had the waitress bring my father a chocolate chocolate tower with raspberry puree and vanilla ice cream for a birthday cake, which he and my mother split (I'm still dieting).


The birthday cake arrives. There was a doggy bag.

Delhi Club, Arlington, VA

After church, we Metroed over to Clarendon in northern Virginia for brunch and some shopping, since Robert had never been to the shops there. We ate at the first place we came to, the Delhi Club, a British-style Indian restaurant with a $9.95 all you can eat buffet. The food was simple and basic, but decent, though, being British style, it lacked spicy kick. I can't remember everything on the buffet, but I recall lettuce and cucumber salad with yogurt dressing, herbed jasmine rice, tandoori chicken, a chicken and creamed spinach dish, a lamb in a brown cream sauce, chunks of paneer cheese in a masala sauce, dal (lentils), and a chickpea dish. There was something called coconut penny pudding for dessert, which was a creamy grated coconut and rice mix garnished with ground pistachio nuts, but I never did find a penny in my pudding.

News about Ris Lacoste

In other restaurant news, I learned today that Chef Ris Lacoste of 1789 Restaurant is leaving after the first of the year to start her own restaurant. That's going to be quite a blow to 1789, and it makes me wonder if their corporate owners, the Clyde's group, is wanting to cut costs and quality. We shall have to see who they hire to take over next year. Lacoste has been there so long and has such a reputation and devoted following I can only imagine that friction has come up with the owners.

600 Restaurant, Washington, D.C.

After tonight's National Symphony Orchestra concert at the Kennedy Center, my friend Steven and I stopped for a late-night supper at 600 Restaurant, next door in the Watergate complex.

600 Restaurant is, surprisingly, the only place in the Watergate complex that stays open late to accommodate post-concert and post-theater crowds. I've heard that a lot of the casts, opera chorus members, and others gather in the bar after concerts and dress rehearsals, so I was anxious to try it. Once there, I could see why they just gather at the bar, since the food was a little on the pricey side (but really not that bad for D.C.). Foggy Bottom has a decided shortage of affordable restaurants with full bars.

When we walked in, we weren't sure if the restaurant was open or not. We saw quite a number of waiters sitting around, looking bored, and no customers in either the dining room or the bar. So, even though we didn't have a reservation, we didn't have a bit of trouble getting a good table! Eventually the dining room began to fill up a bit, but it was more from the Chinese opera crowd rather than symphony goers.

There were a number of very interesting entrees on the menu, from an Australian rack of lamb ($32) to a filet mignon (also $32) to a sea bass ($28) to Maryland crab cakes ($26). They also have a dinner prix fixe option adding two more courses for an additional $10, but I didn't think that was that great of a deal. We also decided we really weren't that hungry tonight, so we opted for several lighter morsels.

Steven chose the lobster bisque and a cheese tray for two. I had lobster bisque, a spinach salad, and the artichoke and borsin fondue.

I found the lobster bisque rather ordinary. It was kind of thin and garnished with a very light sprinkling of chopped parsley, and no sour cream, creme fraiche, or anything else to enrich it. The spinach salad was tasty. Had all the traditional stuff in it, with a balsamic vinaigrette dressing served in a little glass on the side. The cheese tray had a big chunk of gouda with the red wax still on it, a brie, a mild blue, and a chevre, plus berries and grapes and a whole bunch of water crackers. I'm not sure what I was expecting for the artichoke and borsin fondue. It was good, but think artichoke dip with little rounds of grilled baguette slices.

For dessert, I had a dinky bowl of fresh strawberries and blueberries with a squirt of commercial whipped cream on top. Steven had a creme brulee that looked good, but he reported that it was thoroughly chilled, which means the brulees had been prepared in advance.

By staying away from the main entree items, we were successful in crafting a decent, fairly inexpensive dinner tonight. I don't know that our late night experience is representative of 600 Restaurant's usual performance. Their credentials, reviews, and press are all pretty good, but I found our food to be fairly mediocre for an expensive restaurant, and lots and lots of corners had been cut to speed preparation and serving times.

Julia's Empanadas, Washington, D.C.

During the lunch hour today, I was in the MacPherson Square area northeast of the White House and happened upon a little shop called Julia's Empanadas at the corner of Vermont and K. Practically every world culture has some kind of meat pie, and the Latin American cultures are no different with their empanadas. I was struck by the artistry and care taken with the empanadas at Julia's, though; the pastry seams were very artistically joined and even decorated. They had a big variety of empanadas, too, including turkey, chicken, beef, spinach and cheese, and "Jamaican" (goat??), all of which they sell for the very reasonable price of $3.18. I had a "Chilean" empanada, which was a traditional beef and raisin recipe.

They also had dessert empandas, and I tried the pear and almond one, which had the pastry drawn up into a little bag shape, tied with a string at the top. I noticed on their menus that they have miniature "cocktail sized" empanadas, too, which you can order in advance for parties. It's a good place, and I look forward to going by again to try some of the other meats and flavors.

Logan Tavern, Washington, D.C.

Tonight we had a great party at one of the P street bars, but after a couple of hours, we were all hungry, so quite a few of us meandered down the street to the Logan Tavern, where we grabbed dinner and more cocktails. Below is our waiter.



Things got exciting at the restaurant when a skillet caught fire, and instead of dealing with it in the vented open kitchen, someone carried the smoking skillet to the dishwashing area and put water on it, which created clouds of smoke and set off the smoke alarms! Strobe lights flashed and an obnoxious beep beep beep......beep beep beep......beep beep beep.....pummeled our ears for a good fifteen to twenty minutes before the Washington D.C. fire department showed up to turn off the noise. At least the beeping was in tempo with the thumping of the background music. Meanwhile, the restaurant could have been burning down, but none of the guests got up to evacuate.







The restaurant gave us all free desserts for putting up with the noise. The most popular dessert at the table seemed to be a mango-flavored key lime pie. I was hoping to get to see the firemen, but even though two trucks showed up, only three guys got out and walked around. Finally, though, all the excitement died down and we got to finish our dinners in relative peace.

Hard Times Cafe, Alexandria, VA

One of Leo's friends was starring in a play at the Lee Center for the Performing Arts in Alexandria last night, so we wandered down to Old Town to see him. After the play, Leo and I walked up to King Street, where we were in quest of an open restaurant at 11 p.m. We landed at a greasy-spoon looking place called the Hard Times Cafe, which, Leo tells me, is actually some kind of small chain with over a dozen cafes in the D.C. metropolitan area. Hard Times considers itself a chili parlor, and this particular cafe was decorated with old Oklahoma and Texas area photographs, flags, and memorabilia, with some Patsy Cline record playing incessantly on the jukebox. I heard the waitress tell another table they should go select something different from the jukebox if they didn't like that Cline song which was on perpetual repeat.

Since it was my first visit, the fun waitress brought me a little chili sampler—a special square, ceramic plate with four little wells to hold the different types of chili. And the chilis were interesting: a "Texas" chili made with ground beef and a little too much grease; a "Cincinnati" chili based on a rather sweet Greek recipe including cinnamon (my Tulsa readers will recall their trips to the originally-Greek-owned Coney Islander and the unique taste of their chili, which is a similar cinnamon-scented recipe); a "Terlingua Red" chili which was meatier and spicier than the "Texas"; and a "vegetarian" chili which was an abomination composed of mushrooms, onions, peppers, and peanuts.

I ended up with a Frito chili pie made with the Terlingua Red. It was a big bowl of Fritos (they forgot to crush them!) with a couple of ladles of chili, then handfuls of diced tomatoes, onions, and shredded cheddar cheese, with a big dollop of sour cream on top. Leo ordered an "authentic coney dog," which turned out to be a huge platter with two coneys and a mound of French fries, plus a pickle spear he gave to me to eat. Little squares of sweet, cakey, "northern-style" cornbread came with our entrees.

Many of you won't like Hard Times Cafe, but I like this kind of white trash food, so there's a good chance I'll be back. I want a big plate of chili mac (spaghetti and chili)! They also have racks of ribs. The food was good, the waitress was very friendly, and the kitchen was surprisingly fast.

Chadwick's, Washington, D.C.

I had a lovely lunch yesterday of some delicious fish and chips at Chadwick's in Friendship Heights, where I met up in the rain with my friend Robert for a shopping excursion at Mazza Gallerie and other area stores. The fish was fresh, flaky, and flavorful, and I was pleased that the waitress brought us a bottle of malt vinegar, which is the traditional British fish accompaniment, instead of high-calorie tartare sauce. Robert had the same. For first courses, I had a bowl of clam chowder and he had a big basket of fried calimari and jalapeño peppers (a combination I would never have thought of, and I noticed he didn't eat the peppers).

Cafe Paradiso, Washington, D.C.

After my expedition to the National Zoo this afternoon, I stopped for a late lunch at one of the sidewalk cafes along Connecticut Avenue in the Woodley Park neighborhood. It was hard to decide where to eat, since there were probably a dozen cafes. I ruled out the Lebanese, Asian, and Indian restaurants, and still I had to pick between a New Orleans Cajun place, a French cafe, and three Italian cafes. I read the menus posted outside and narrowed it down to the French cafe and two of the Italian places, and I ended up picking based on who had waiters outside.



The lunch crowd was mostly gone by 2:30 at Cafe Paradiso Ristorante Italiano. There was one businessman sitting at a sidewalk table reading his Wall Street Journal (and a very slow reader was he, since he was still there when I left!), so I picked a table on the side with a view of the street. The cute, young, Italian waiter brought me a glass of water and a basket of slices of a country loaf of white bread. The menu had the usual selections of Italilan-American items, plus a supplemental menu del giorno with half a dozen daily specials. I chose a grilled seafood salad from the supplemental menu (mostly fish and fresh pastas), with a glass of iced tea.

The salad arrived with one great big scallop and three extra large tail-on shrimp, all grilled and warm, resting on a bed of mixed, European-style salad greens and dressed in a lemon-basil-olive oil emulsification. There was quite a nice assortment of lettuces and chichories, obviously not from a stock mix, in a large white rimmed bowl with a fan of ripe tomato wedges on one side, a light scattering of capers, and quite a number of julienned strips of sweet, cold, roasted red and yellow peppers mixed in with the leaves.

The waiter recommend the tiramisu for dessert, but I wasn't in the mood for that, so I chose the tartufo. Tartufo—the Italian word for truffle—is an amaretto-flavored chocolate ice cream ball rolled in dark cocoa. Cafe Paradiso's version had a vanilla ice cream core. The large "truffle" was presented on a big, colorful, Italian country, pottery plate with three star-shaped dollops of sweetened whipped cream and two whole strawberries as garnish.

And after eating all that, the businessman still reading his same newspaper, I wandered home.

Beacon Bar and Grill, Washington, D.C.

After church at St. John's Lafayette Square, Robert and I walked up to the Scott Circle area, where we brunched at the Beacon Bar and Grill for their Sunday brunch buffet. It's certainly not gourmet, but it's a $19 per person all you can eat spread with all you can drink of bloody Marys, mimosas, or champagne, so even if the food is mediocre, we can get our money's worth just from the liquor. We had a cute, chatty, new waitress named Gabriella from Argentina, and she kept bringing the bloodies, one after another, without us even asking—I think we must have drunk half a dozen apiece!

Bistro Francais, Georgetown, D.C.

My feet hurt.

Last night, Leo got home late from work after a hard day with office politics and was too tired to go to the gym, so we decided to walk into Georgetown to find something "non-Asian" for dinner. Our explorations got us onto the wrong road, and we ended up walking down a mile-long expressway with no way to exit. As we walked back towards civilization, we began to see some restaurants along M Street. West of Wisconsin, though, the establishments seemed to be mostly Indian, Lebanese, Chinese, or those crowded, noisy, smoky bars with food, none of which were what we had in mind. Finally, we espyed the tried-and-true Bistro Français and headed straight there.

The restaurant was crowded, but I guess the maitre d' recognized me, because we were immediately escorted to a decent table in the back dining room with an antique wood banquette on one side and an interesting view of the service bar through the window partition on the other. A non-Anglophone female brought our bread, butter, and water, then we met our charming waiter, a tall guy from Ivory Coast. His English was perfect, with an ever-so-slight cute French accent.

What to eat? What to eat? While we were trying to make up our minds, we got a bottle of one of their cheaper house bordeaux-superieurs to sip while we perused the menu. I forgot what it was, but I remember it made the claim to be like a Saint-Emilion (but if it was, it was totally unlike any Saint-Emilion I've ever drunk!). Eh. House wine.

When the waiter came back the second time to take our order, we still hadn't made up our minds, so we just plunged in and made a quick guess. I ordered a bistro salad and a minute steak. Leo asked for the seafood soup and the cold poached salmon.

My salad was a big plate of leaf lettuce with a lot of julienned beets on top and a very ripe and flavorful tomato wedge on either side (where do they get ripe tomatoes this time of year?). Their house dressing is a tasty, thin mayonnaise flavored with a bit of dijon mustard. My minute steak maitre d' hôtel was yummy. It was a large, thin, nearly square piece of sirloin cooked medium rare and topped with two little round pats of parsley-herb butter. A big pile of thin pommes frites, accompanied by a small bowl of dipping mayonnaise, overflowed the rest of the dinner plate.

Leo's seafood soup was a bit of a surprise. It was prepared very much like a French onion soup, with a large crouton in the soup and an ample amount of cheese melted on top and down the sides of the soup crock. His cold poached salmon looked nice. It was served atop a sauce of some kind (mousseline??), but I didn't taste it and Leo doesn't know the names of the classic French sauces, so I couldn't ask. He had a vegetable on the plate, but I didn't think to identify it, since another waiter from previous visits (the French one who's the exotic dancer) came to the table to say hi and chat.

Our waiter brought the dessert tray, but I didn't see anything inspirational in the way of napoleans or fruit or nut tarts, so I opted for a little cheese plate. Leo had a crème brulee. The cheese plate was simple, with a wedge of brie, a slice of a goat milk chevre of some type, and a small slice of a not-very-aged blue, with green apple slices filling up the empty spots on the plate. He brought some thick slices of a nice, crusty, country-style bread for the cheese—much better than the hard rolls served with dinner. The brie was brie. I'm not a great fan of brie, and, thankfully, this one wasn't ripe (the French like brie which has aged so much that it turns brown and runny and smells worse than dirty, damp gym shoes left in the locker all summer). The blue was tasty. It was an edge piece, so it had a bit more character than the center would have had, but it certainly wasn't a premium French blue. My favorite was the chevre, which was light and rich and had a very nice, complex flavor to it.

Leo's crème brulee must have been good, since he ate it all and kept trying to scrape the au gratin dish with his spoon to extract every last morsel. I think, though, for expediencies' sake, the restaurant had pre-made the crème brulees, since Leo reported that the hard sugar crust on the top of the cold custard was not warm.

After coffee with cream, we limped back home, walking the whole way.

Starland Cafe, Washington, D.C.

Last Friday, my financial planner picked me up in his Z4 so we could continue our previously truncated business meeting. We went zooming off with the top down, the wind blowing my hair. It was a great chance to enjoy the beautiful sunshine and warm weather. We headed out to the Palisades area of D.C., way, way out in the far western corner of the district, northwest of Georgetown, and stopped at the Starland Cafe. He said the Starland is popular in the neighborhood because they feature a lot of live musical groups during dinner. It was an interesting crowd, though I'm not so sure the luncheon patrons are the live music set—most of the tables seemed filled with local matrons. We sat out on their covered terrace overlooking MacArthur Boulevard, and we had a very friendly, peppy waitress with wild hair.

I had the Cobb salad and he had a fried crabcake sandwich with French fries and mayonnaise. I also had a warm pot-au-chocolat à la mode for dessert. What they served me was not a pot-au-chocolat. A proper pot-au-chocolat is very much like a dense, rich, dark chocolate flan or creme brulee (without the caramel or broiled sugar); what they brought was crusty on the outside and more like a baked chocolate pudding or baked fudge. Now, it was good for what it was, but I don't like misnamed menu items.

Port of Piraeus, Washington, D.C.

A few days ago, I had lunch with a financial planner. He was buying, so I let him pick the place. He picked Port of Piraeus in the "Golden Triangle" area of downtown D.C. I've walked by the place before and knew it was Greek ("Piraeus" is a city in Greece), but I was expecting a fairly fancy restaurant, given the substantial square footage it assumes in a downtown office building; it turns out it's nothing more than a big deli serving mostly Greek themed sandwiches and salads. We both ended up ordering their salad special of the day, which was a Greek salad with tuna on top. Our cell phones kept ringing and due to the press of business, our meeting was somewhat truncated, so we agreed to get together again later in the week.

Yee Hwa, Washington, D.C.

Last week we finally got around to trying Yee Hwa, a place I've often walked by in the west end of downtown Washington. Located in the bottom of an office building, it has a large burgundy canopy going out to the curb and heavy curtains in the windows. The canopy and the windows are marked simply with the words "Yee Hwa" and the two Korean alphabet symbols for the same. Now, way over in Chinatown, there's a Texas-style barbecue joint, but I've always had the feeling that Yee Hwa ain't very Texan.

After going through a small entry hall and a second set of doors, one enters a sleekly contemporary dining room that turns out to be much larger inside than the establishment appears from the street. Along the left hand side of the dining room is a long cocktail bar that looks very much as though it used to be a sushi bar. Contemporary, wood-grained tables are separated by low glass dividers discreetly etched with the Korean "yee hwa" symbols. The menu indicates that Yee Hwa is a "Korean-Japanese" restaurant and that the Washington location is a branch of a restaurant in Seoul. They also have a separate menu with a lengthy list of sake and plum wines (some of which were very expensive!) and a handful of Korean and Japanese beers.

Even though the menu featured ribs and Korean barbecue, we decided to be less cowboy, and started with haemul pa jeon, a traditional Korean seafood and scallion pancake. The pancake started out as a very large oval on the grill, and once it was cooked to a slightly crispy, golden brown, it was fan-folded on to a large round plate and then cut into squares. It came with a dipping sauce with soy sauce, chives, and sesame seeds very similar to the sauce for Chinese dumplings. Since the rice flour used for the pancake has different cooking properties than wheat flour, the interior portions of the thin pancake had an interesting, almost "gooey" (yet cooked) consistency to it. We washed this down with a vase of hot "house" sake (the $8 kind, not the $100 kind).

For our main courses, we both opted for different forms of the popular Korean dish, bi bim bap (pronounced "bee-beem-bahp"). Bi bim bap, which means "mixed meal," is an artfully arranged bowl with a huge quantity of shredded vegetables. My bi bim bap was the plain, "simple," cold version with a large bowl of vegetables that included some unusual roots and fern sprouts all topped with a sunny-side up egg, and hot rice in a separate aluminum container. I had to add the special chile-based bi bim bap sauce to taste from a small bowl on the side, then mix up the vegetables, egg, rice, and sauce with a spoon and chopsticks.

My dinner companion had dolsot bi bim bap, which is the hot version that also includes beef. Its presentation is a little different. The bowl was a dark ceramic or stone dish made very hot on the stove. The rice was put directly into the bottom of dish, where the heat from the stone made the outer portions crunchy. With the addition of cooked beef, the rest of the entree was similar to mine with essentially the same vegetables and fried egg.

We were also given nine little bowls of complementary side dishes of various Korean vegetables. Most of these were in the kim-chee family (fermented cabbage with hot chiles...rotten cabbage is an acquired taste), but there were also some shredded white radishes, some preserved slices of what looked like candied jalapeño peppers, and some glossy red mung beans. The kim-chees included radishes and some pretty little slices of a thin cucumber. My friend tasted most of these things, especially the cabbage kim-chees, and thought they were good, but I'm allergic to something in kim-chee and I steer clear (as it was, I had indigestion and was queasy the whole next day, but this happens to me every time I go to a Korean place—I guess I just can't eat Korean food, which is a shame, since the food at Yee Hwa was tasty and elegantly presented).

At the end of the meal, our waitress brought us complimentary cups of Korean sweet rice punch. It's an interesting drink, which I think was non-alcoholic. It was amber in color with a water-like consistency and had a sweet taste scented with ginger. A few little pieces of what my friend said was chopped lotus root floated in the bottom.

Yee Hwa is a very nice restaurant with good food and a lot of amenities. I was surprised at how inexpensive our meal was (my bi bim bap was only $10), especially given the ambiance, quality of service, and complimentary food items. If you're a kim-chee fan, this is the place to go for Korean cuisine.

New Big Wong Chinese Restaurant, Washington, D.C.

We had a lovely early supper this evening in Chinatown at the New Big Wong Chinese Restaurant, just a few steps from the Gallery Place Metro stop. This is another one of those "hole in the wall" looking places that turns out to be a good place to eat. Big Wong is a Hong Kong-style restaurant, and they take pride in serving extremely fresh seafood. In fact, a kitchen employee was constantly running back and forth up to the front of the restaurant to procure various live lobsters (with a pair of tongs) and fish (in a big bucket) from an aquairium near the entrance.

Leo ordered, as usual, chatting up the waitress in Cantonese, so I have no clue what we had, so I'll attempt to describe it without the formal names. The first dish to come out was similar to a chow fun, wide noodles with roast pork, shrimp, mushrooms, and scallions with a little bit of brown sauce. After a bit of a wait, we got the other two dishes, one a seafood "hot pot" with shrimp, crab legs, scored blanched squid, scallops, white fish chunks, and a bunch of tofu triangles with some reconstituted dried exotic mushrooms, carrot slices, and scallions in a translucent cornstarch sauce, and the other a dish with beef slices and lots of white onion pieces in a brown sauce. Both of these latter dishes came with steamed white rice, and pots of hot tea were complimentary.

Tony Cheng's Mongolian Barbecue, Washington, D.C.

We finally went to Tony Cheng's in Chinatown. Tony Cheng is the renowned D.C. Chinese restauranteur made famous during the Carter Administration when Cheng's regular patron Hamilton Jordan succeeded in bringing President Carter to dinner at Cheng's "Szechuan" for the "new" Chinese concept of hot and spicy food. Today, Cheng operates two restaurants in the same building, Tony Cheng's Mongolian Restaurant on the first floor and Tony Cheng's Seafood Restaurant upstairs. Leo had never had Mongolian barbecue before, so we went there.

By tradition, Mongolian barbecue is based on the cooking technique of Mongolian soldiers—Ghengis Khan and the Mongol hordes, etc., etc. They supposedly used their metal shields for cooking, putting them over the fire and heating them up like a grill, then throwing the meat and limited vegetables directly on the metal to cook. Today, Mongolian restaurants all have a large, round, drum-like, stainless steel grill they use instead of shields. Diners go to a buffet-like area to select their meats and vegetables, add sauces and oils, and then give the bowl of food to a grill-chef to cook.

The grill at Cheng's is in the middle of the dining room, and it's large enough for four to six cooks to work around. They have three sets of raw food selections arranged in a circle around the grill area. Most Mongolian barbecues I've frequented in the past have had only beef, chicken, and pork, but this one had lamb as well, plus for a small additional fee, you could have shrimp. They also had a little wider selection of vegetables and mushrooms than others I've seen. I'm used to picking my own sauces and oils, but here, the chefs take things from you (rather abruptly, I thought) and add them themselves, which doesn't always give the diner the chance to create the precise flavor combination they want.

In addition to the barbecue option, diners also have the option of ordering the Mongolian hot pot, where an electric burner is brought to the table to boil a pan of broth and then the diner selects and cooks his own meat and vegetables at the table.

When we were seated, the waiters brought pots of hot tea, a plate of roasted peanuts, and a plate of some really delicious pickled cabbage interlayered with fiery-hot red Chinese chili peppers. The cabbage was slightly salty and very sour with rice vinegar, and I loved it!

The dining room is classically decorated with elaborately carved Chinese furniture and higher quality Chinese art. Our chairs were massive upright chairs, heavily carved, and upholstered with a luxurious red and gold brocade fabric. There were a lot of waiters running around, all dressed in black trousers and bow ties with white shirts.

Tony Cheng's was an enjoyable experience. It's a little bit more expensive than I'm used to for this kind of food ($15.95 per person, all you can eat), but if you're really hungry, the food is good and the service very attentive. I do want to try the upstairs restaurant some time, and the next time I'm at the Mongolian place, I plan to try the Mongolian hot pot.

Famous Luigi's, Washington, D.C.

Sunday evening, we somehow ended up going out to eat yet again, this time walking downtown to Famous Luigi's, near 19th and L. Luigi's is one of those old-style Italian-American restaurants that's been in business in D.C. for over sixty years. All of the tables were covered in red and white gingham cloths, but I was pleased that there were no chianti bottles covered in dripped wax. Our waiter was an older Italian man.

He started us off with wines, a chianti for me and a merlot for Leo, and a big basket of calamari fritti with a marinara dipping sauce. The fried calamari pieces had a layer of raw onion pieces covering them. I ordered a simple green salad and ended up being served (and charged for!) an insalata Luigi, or their more elaborate house salad with beets, hard boiled eggs, long thin slices of carrot, tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, and pepperoncini peppers on top of iceberg lettuce.

For our main courses, Leo had the rigatoni rustici and I had the lasagne alla Luigi. The rigatoni came in a big, flat pasta bowl, and the rigatonis themselves were surprisingly large. They were well coated with a sauce of ground Italian sausage, two cheeses, and herbs in a tomatoey sauce. He liked it, and I had a sample and it was tasty. My lasagne was ok. It was very old style American (there's a big difference between Italian food and Italian-American food), and had the expected meat, mozarella cheese, ricotta, and tomato sauce layered between the lasagna noodles. It was prepared and served in an individual au gratin dish.

For dessert, I abstained, but Leo chose the tiramisu. It looked very good. They used real, traditional ladyfingers dipped in espresso, but I noticed that the whole dessert was assembled with stiff whipped cream and it didn't appear that they used any mascarpone cheese. Nonetheless, Leo loved it, and complained all the way home how stuffed he was.

Mimi's, Washington, D.C.

After Mass yesterday morning, Leo was finally awake and dressed, so we walked up to Dupont Circle to Mimi's for brunch. I went there primarily for the bloody Marys, which are a bargain at Sunday brunch. They are served in tall pilsner glasses garnished with a thick round of cucumber placed on the rim and a couple of large green olives impaled on a plastic spear and laid across the top of the glass. The rims of the glasses are dipped in spicy red seasoning salt.

Oh, I had some food, too, a gorgonzola bacon burger with French fries. Leo had the eggs Benedict with country fries, and then for dessert, he had a warm banana bread pudding with coconut ice cream. As usual, he drank mimosas.

Magic Gourd, Washington, D.C.

Leo and I had an early dinner a couple of days ago at the Magic Gourd, which is in Columbia Plaza just a block south of where we live, and it's right by the Korean grocery store where Leo likes to buy Asian convenience foods and lottery tickets.

Anyway, Leo had some tasty-looking pan fried pork dumplings and the combination fried rice (which he pronounced "too dry"). I had the "velvet chicken corn chowder" ($1.75) and the Magic Gourd Duck with steamed white rice. The chowder reminded me a lot of a Chinese buffet egg drop soup, but with the addition of a few kernels of corn and a few pieces of chicken meat in the soup. And, much like a buffet, it was presented in a small white bowl on a little saucer.

The duck dish was a little disappointing. I'd really wanted the crispy duck, a half duck chopped into pieces and deep fried, but I thought that might not be the healthiest, lower calorie option. The "Magic Gourd Duck" was a typical Chinese entree of sliced, roast duck with snow peas, bamboo shoots, and lots of black mushrooms in a rather insipid, thin, brown, cornstarchy sauce. My rice, also, was rather dry, and hard to eat with chopsticks.

Overall, it was a rather mediocre meal, and somewhat surprising for the Magic Gourd, which is usually a decent restaurant.

Dish, Washington, D.C.

Jeff is a writer for a group of tax lawyers in northern Virginia, so we've been talking for several months, but never met in person. Then, we discovered that we both lived in Foggy Bottom, so we decided to get together for dinner at Dish, the restaurant at the River Inn, which is located roughly halfway between his place and my place. It was fairly late and we weren't really that hungry, so we just had a light supper.

Jeff had the "Dishy Picnic," which was a cute little plate with two pieces of fried chicken, cole slaw, baked beans, and some hushpuppies. He said it was good, but I don't think I could get so excited about paying $19 for what seemed to me just a two-piece extra crispy dinner from Kentucky Fried Chicken.

My meal, on the other hand, was much more satisfying. I started with a bowl of their yellow corn chowder ($7). It came in this enormous, stylized white bowl with a huge, flat rim and a small, but deep, central area holding the soup. Three thin slices of jalapeño pepper arranged to look like a clover leaf and three open mussel shells all garnished the top of the chowder. The chowder was thick and rich, with lots of fresh kernels of corn, just a few potatoes (Yukon gold, I think they said), and lots of yummy bacon. My only criticism was that it was a bit too hot and spicy for what I was expecting.

After my chowder, I had their summer tomato salad, a bright, crisp, lovely dish with a big slice of heirloom yellow tomato and a big slice of heirloom "pink" tomato serving as the base for a mélange of various colors and shapes of cherry- and grape-tomatoes, all halved, and thick, seeded slices of English cucumber in a light vinegar dressing. It was very enjoyable, and probably the last of the fresh, vine-ripened tomatoes for 2005.

D.C. Cafe, Washington, D.C.

After church tonight, I had dinner unexpectedly alone at D.C. Cafe, which is an odd sort of Lebanese cuisine place and pizzaria in one in the Dupont Circle area. I had lamb shawarmas (think flautas or eggrolls made with pita bread) with a tasty tabouli (heavy on the parsley rather than the tabouli, and even had a touch of minced mint leaves), hummus, and that sour cream/yogurt and cucumber thing they use as a meat condiment, and then for dessert some kind of traditional semolina pudding with honey garnished with ground pistachio nuts.

Charlie Chiang's, Washington, D.C.

Our most recent foray into Asian restaurants was to Charlie Chiang's, a grand old Chinese place on Eye Street east of 20th (we end up in this neighborhood alot because it's near Leo's gym). This is one of those old-style Chinese restaurants that is very formal and where the waiters are attired in black tie, vest, and trousers and white shirts and aprons.

We started with two different types of dumplings, one a traditional pork-filled fried dumpling and the other the house specialty "szechuan dumpling," which were interesting small dumplings wrapped in what appeared to be won-ton and served floating in a bowl of oyster sauce, garnishing with frizzled scallions. For main courses, Leo had some kind of noodle dish (I forget which one) and I had something called Yu-Shiang pork, which was a tasty stir-fry with pork slivvers, onions, mushrooms, and other vegetables. They also brought me a cute, little, alumimum, sleekly designed, covered bowl full of some nicely tender and fresh rice.

Their dessert selection is limited to various kinds of ice cream, so we opted to stick to our diets and abstain.

Nooshi (Oodles, Noodles & Sushi), Washington, D.C.

We had a lot of fun the other night at Nooshi (Oodles, Noodles & Sushi), a big operation with an affilliated take-away location next door, in the 19th and L Street area. We'd gotten a delivery menu in the mail, so Leo immediately wanted to try it out. The busy dining room is expensively decorated in a very sleet, Asian modern design. Our table had a hammered copper top encased in clear, smooth resin, and one whole side of the dining room featured banquette seating.

I was in a sushi mood, so I started with a very nice seaweed salad that featured five different types of seaweed, each dressed differently with miso, sesame, vinegar, and other dressings. My main course was the "sushi grand" platter, a big round box with luscious tuna, salmon, whitefish, mackerel, yellowtail, eel, surf clam, and shrimp sushis, plus a good sized California roll in the middle. The gari (pickled ginger root) was very fresh, and was not yet fully pink (that is a good thing).

Leo started with the sonomono, which is a cucumber and seaweed salad with shrimp and octopus in a vinaigrette dressing, then had a main course of mee goreng, which is a Malaysian-style fried egg noodle dish with bean sprouts, carrots, cabbage, scallions, shallots, fried tofu, and pork, all with a lot of hot spices. It was very artfully arranged and had a yellow, curry-looking appearance, but I don't think it was a curry, since I tasted one of the carrot coins and didn't detect a curry flavor. For dessert, he had a ginger crème brulee that he pronounced divine. I had a wonderful, huge bowl (more than enough for two!) of fresh strawberries, bananas, mango, and pineapple which I'm going to guess were doused with something like a ginger ale, and there were a couple of little pieces of lemon grass in the mix that I chewed on for an explosion of lemon grass taste, but which were probably just in there for flavor, since the stalks were too woody to actually swallow.

It was a great evening, the waiters were all very attentive, and I'm sure we'll end up back there again sometime.

China Doll, Washington, D.C.

A rather unfortunate restaurant we recently visited was a place in Chinatown called China Doll. We went specifically for dim sum, so we were directed upstairs to the dining room there (the downstairs appeared to be much more casual). Rather than bringing a cart around for diners to select their tidbits, China Doll has them select items on a paper menu and then brings them to the table, which Leo tells me is the way it is done in the more elegant restaurants in Hong Kong. I dunno. I kinda miss the cart, cause it's always fun to try new things just cause they look intriguing.

Anyway, Leo ordered us an assortment of dumplings, a big plate of gai lan (Chinese broccoli), a big plate of chow fun (fettuccine-like pasta), and, finally, he talked me in to ordering some chicken feet.

Chicken feet are interesting. Obviously, there's not any muscle or meat to speak of on them, so I think the primarly "food" value is from the skin and the associated brown cooking sauce. The remaining foot bones, though, are attached to one another with cartiledge, and if one has the patience to suck and gnaw on bones for a while, you can extract some flavor from the cartiledge and then spit out all the little tiny foot bones.

The gai lan was great, being cooked to a tender-crunchiness and dosed with a garlicky oyster sauce. The fried dumpling were okay, but I thought the steamed dumplings were a little sticky from being over-steamed.

The chow fun was disappointing in several ways, first because the wide noodles were overcooked and clumpy and secondly because we found a piece of a metal brad or big staple in the food. What's worse, Leo and I both ended up feeling queasy and unsettled for the rest of the afternoon and evening.

Thai Tanic, Washington, D.C.

Hit a happy hour after work, where I got to drink nasty Miller beer in big plastic cups and eat cold chicken nuggets, and ran in to my friend William (the DOE lawyer). He, of course, was drinking high dollar beer out of a glass beer glass, instead of the happy hour common swill. You know how those rich government lawyers are. The bar was also passing out free samples of mango rum. Interesting. Very sweet, very little rum taste.

Eventually, he, two of his friends, and I wandered across the street to Thai Tanic for dinner. Even though the Logan Circle theater district is full of a variety of restaurants, some of which I've not yet tried, we ended up there since William is vegetarian these days. As you can imagine, Thai Tanic features Thai food, and I've had their food a couple of times before via delivery, though this was my first time actually to dine inside the restaurant. It was crowded, since it's a popular and economical place, but somehow, once again, we got seated at the table in the front window. I think I must resemble some celebrity or famous politician or something.

I can't remember all the foods that got ordered, so I'll try to hit the highlights. One guy got a blue lemonade cocktail of some type, which seemed to be a rather weak lemonade with blue curacao and he also reported a bit of a Midori (melon liqueur) taste. William had some little fried spring rolls which looked a bit greasy and resembled Mexican flautas. I had a big plate of green papaya salad, with lots of shreds of papaya, some scallion, something a touch starchy (potato?), red chiles, and lime juice. The salad was spicy, but not really hot-hot (on a scale of mild, medium, hot, and firey, I'd asked for hot), and it was not as good as the papaya and apple version I've had at Malaysia Kopitiam.

When we were ordering, we all had this prolonged discussion with one of William's friends to shame him into ordering something different for a change, instead of the dish he always orders every time he goes to Thai Tanic. He acquiesced to our peer pressure and got something different. But I can't remember what it was. The other friend had what looked to be a plateful of pork-stuffed steamed dumplings. William had a bed of white rice with chunks of fried tofu and some kind of brownish, curry-smelling sauce.

My main course was exquisite. I had grilled catfish served on a mound of green tea-infused rice, all resting in a pool of green curry sauce, and with steamed asparagus and steamed baby carrots drifting in the curry sauce. Aside from a bit of bone which had been missed in the filleting process, the catfish was nicely grilled and had no "muddy" or fishy taste to it. I really loved the green tea rice! It added quite a new dimension to the dish, with the strong flavor of the tea and also a touch of sweetness, and it made the rice a nice, deep green tea color. The carrots had been hand-trimmed, and they didn't use the commercially made "baby" carrots which have become so prevalent in grocery stores and salad bars. The green curry was also nice, and I continue to think Thai green curry is my favorite kind of curry. It's always milky or creamy, and I think that takes some of the harsh edge off the spicings.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll eat again at Thai Tanic. They also have the big advantage of being one of the restaurants where I get triple miles from American Airlines for each dollar I spend there.

L & N Seafood Grill, Arlington, VA

While we were at the mall (Fashion Centre at Pentagon City) today, we had a late lunch at L & N Seafood Grill, up on the third retail level. It's surprisingly good for a chain restaurant, and the prices were reasonable for a seafood place. Leo started with the mussels and then had shrimp creole for his main course. The bowl of mussels was huge! It must have been one of those appetizers designed to serve two. His shrimp creole was also an ample serving, and he said it was good, even though he's never been to New Orleans and had no basis of comparison.

I had some Maryland crab soup, a dinner salad, some crab-stuffed mushrooms, and a Boston cream cheesecake. The crab soup was excellent, though I thought it odd that when it arrived, it had a little "skin" on the top. The mushrooms were ok—I think I would have given the filling a bit more cayenne pepper to zip it up a bit. I really really liked the dessert. The Boston cream cheesecake is based on the concept of Boston cream pie, which you probably know isn't a pie but a yellow layer cake with vanilla pudding between the layers and chocolate frosting all around the outside. Here, the middle layer between thin layers of yellow cake was a tasty cheesecake, and they still had the vanilla pudding and chocolate frosting, and a couple of big squirts of whipped cream.

Too bad we were lunching and not dining.....they had green, fish-shaped bottles of Pescevino (that's Italian for fish-wine) white wine all over the bar, and we were curious about trying it. Maybe some time for dinner.