I went today for lunch at Westend Bistro by Eric Ripert. This was the lunch I had been waiting for all week. The interior space, located within the Ritz Carlton on 22nd st., is refined and trendy. The huge windows let in a great deal of light, which at lunch time, I found quite enjoyable. I had high hopes stepping foot into this Ripert bistro and what I found was some tasty food, but a little to be desired from the service.
I had looked at the menu on-line to get the taste buds churning and on a hot day like this, my eyes went straight to the homemade lemonade. I was so excited. I’ve been on a crazy lemonade kick these days, maybe because it is summer, but none the less, give it to me. To my disappointment, our waiter claimed that they were all out of lemonade…indeed a sad day for me, but I forged ahead with a Preakness Punch-a cleverly strong play on a mint julep.  The partner in crime and I ordered the same thing- tomato consomme, the fish burger, and the lemon beignets. 

     The tomato consomme, a type of clear soup made from richly flavored stock or bouillon that has been clarified usually through a fining process involving egg protein, came to the table as the bowl with a fine dice of feta cheese, quartered yellow and red teardrop tomatoes, and very tiny basil leaves.  The consomme was poured table side and appeared as a clear yellowish broth.  It was a good five minutes before I could dive into what looked delicious, because somewhere along the way, our spoons were lost in translation.  So I began to use the croutons to dip, unrefined I know, but it took me asking for spoons to get one…not what I would expect from a Ripert restaurant.  The flavors were intense and silky.  Imagine the tastiest tomato you’ve had just with simple salt and pepper-juicy, sweet, acidic, and full of tomato flavor.  That was the soup, all of those things in a clear broth.  The feta added a nice punch of flavor, while those tiny basil leaves really packed some heat for how small they were.  The dish was refreshing and light, but concentrated and divine-a real winner!  The kick to my face came when, after our soups were cleared, I saw a waiter (not ours) deliver to a woman two tables down from us a tall, refreshing looking glass of lemonade!  It looked so good, and I’m sure the look on my face was that of a sad puppy.  I couldn’t bring myself to ask our waiter why ten minutes earlier they were out, and now, BAM! lemonade, here, right in front of, well, not me.  If they were making some, I would have gladly waited, but alas, I stared from afar, gazing longingly at that lady’s lemonade.

     Next came the fish burger, which I have to admit I was a little sckeptical of going in.  Not of Eric, or the chef he has entrusted, it’s just, when you say fish it’s so generic, what kind of fish?  But anyway, one bite had me convinced I didn’t need to know what kind of fish, just that the burger was warm on a large brioche bun that was buttery and soft.  It was topped with fennel and an oven roasted tomato which were excellent compliments to the fish.  Served with a side salad that kept the meal light, it was a great mark of a great bistro menu.  The saffron aioli added a creamy texture and a lot of flavor.

     The dessert, lemon beignets with basil ice cream and raspberry coulis.  The presentation was beautiful with the coulis being “painted” onto the plate, thought I don’t know how much it added to the flavor of anything since it stayed on the plate, but the beignets were bursting with lemon flavor, light and doughy with a cinnamon sugar coating.  The basil ice cream was sweet which was a nice compliment to the basil flavor.  As a whole the dessert worked really well and was a nice portion at the end of the meal.  Certainly this bistro is no Le Bernardin, but that’s not what it is supposed to be.  I thought the food was much better than Central, Michel Richard’s attempt at bistro fare, and if they ratchet up service just a bit, I think it would sweep DC as one of the best upscale lunch destinations.  I must add, if there is anyone who can make food look sexy, it’s Eric Ripert.  Check out the photos on the Westend website!

     Yesterday was my first restaurant week double header…lunch at Urbana and dinner at Napa 1015 on the Hst. Corridor.  I had been wanting to try out Napa 1015 for some time, so I headed over for dinner with my partner in crime.  Napa 1015 is definitely one of those places you could drive by four times trying to find and never see it.  A simple awning with the name is all there is to indicate that a restaurant lives at 1015 Hst. NE, but once inside, the quaint, narrow dinning room is something you could easily see in Dupont Circle.  I have to put it out there, that my one disappointment came when we first arrived.  You know how every restaurant has “that one table,” the one they found room for in order to fit one more two top in, the one that sits awkwardly in the way of servers or gives you some behind the scenes action of servers filling drinks that no one is really interested in seeing.  Well, that’s where we got seated, which would be fine on a packed night, but there were several other tables available that may have been a little more comfortable.  That being said, we started the night off with ginger mojitos, which I had heard about before going.  They were refreshing with a little more than a hint of ginger with a really great balance of mint-a great starter to the evening.  A little advice though, I would head there between 5:00p.m. and 8:00p.m. for happy hour to grab one at the bar before dinner…$4 sure sounds a lot better then $10.

     The RW menu offered some interesting choices, but ultimately I chose the trio of mushrooms over creamy polenta, the vegetable crepes, and the blackberry cobbler, while the partner in crime ordered the arugula salad, the pan seared duck breast with sweet potato and pineapple puree, and the blackberry cobbler as well.  The first dishes arrived and I was impressed with the portions of both of our starters.  My polenta came pipinghot in a generous oval bowl, just the right amount to leave you wanting one more bite.  The creammy polenta was the perfect texture and had immersed whole kernels of sweet corn to add a layer of texture to the dish.  The trio of mushrooms (cremini, shitake, and oyster I believe) were well cooked, still with a firmness to them, and displayed on top of the polenta with what seemed to be the ju from the mushrooms.  To finish the dish, a little sprinkle of a Parmesan style cheese that melted from the heat of the polenta.  This dish all around was well executed, the flavors and textures went so well together, the meatiness of the mushrooms with the creamy texture of the polenta and the crisp bite you get from a kernel of corn.  Excellent.  The arugula salad could not have been more different in flavor, but maintained an excellent balance that rivaled other great salads I’ve had.  Greens were simple-arugula, but the peppery flavor married so well with the tangy and acidic grapefruit and the crisp bosc pears added a sweetness.  The lemon vinaigrette was well made and complimented the other ingredients without overpowering any one element, which is sometime difficult when dealing with an acidic vinaigrette like lemon.

     My next course was vegetable stuffed crepes with a red pepper creme sauce.  Now, I don’t think there is anything spectacular about this dish, well cooked, well seasoned, a nice presentation, and a sauce that works…I don’t need mindblowing every time.  The vegetables were well cooked-not overdone and the red pepper sauce was very good, overall a solid vegetarian dish.  The other main course was the pan seared duck breast with pineapple and sweet potato puree.  The duck was cooked to a great medium rare, but I wish the skin had been a little more crispy.  I mean, if you are going to sear a duck breast, you better get that bitch hot and crispy-it’s what makes it so good.  Ok, well not the only thing that makes it good, but you know what I mean.  The puree was tasty and the sweet elements played well with the duck.  Overall, another solid dish, with a little wiggle room for improvement.

     Finally, dessert, the blackberry cobbler with a simple vanilla bean ice cream.  The berries were tart and sweet, the cobbler topping baked golden and crumbly in the mouth, and the ice cream was smoothe and creamy.  The dessert had every element of a great finisher with all of the elements working together to create a memorable cohesive piece and again, was a great portion size.

     In an effort to be frugal, I only reserved for Restaurant Week two lunches and one dinner, but in an impromtu move, I bit the bullet and made a quick reservation for lunch at Urbana, just off of Dupont Circle.  The interior of this Kimpton Hotel restaurant is simply beautiful and quite chique.  I decided to splurge a little and have a glass of wine with lunch.  To my delight, the gentleman next to me handed over a voucher for a free drink-he was staying at the hotel, but wouldn’t have the chance to use it, so the splurge solved it’s own problem.  On a side note, many of the wines featured at Urbana come from sustainable viticulture wineries and other organic and eco-friendly selections.

     The RW menu featured a shorter list of options from the normal lunch menu.  For my three courses I chose the yellow gazpacho, the duck conft cassoulet, and the strawberry rhubarb crisp.  The yellow gazpacho had a well balanced acidity that played well with the light and crisp cucumber foam.  Also atop the soup were fennel dusted croutons that remained crunchy and a nice mix of micro greens (micro bull’s blood, micro cilantro, and micro basil) that added a nice bitterness to the whole dish.  The soup was refreshing, well seasoned, and a perfect compliment to a hot summer afternoon.

     The duck confit cassoulet was good.  For those who don’t know, confit is a preservation method from centuries long ago that consists of salt curing a piece of meat (generally goose, duck, or pork) and then poaching it in its own fat.  It, unlike the gazpacho, was a little heavy for a summer dish.  Granted, it is a cassoulet, yes.  Granted, it is duck confit, yes.  Granted, I did order it, yes.  All things aside it was good, creamy and full of flavor.  I think the one thing that turned me off were the chunks of ham in the dish.  Maybe they were chunks of duck, but if I had to guess, I would say ham.  There just seems something unrefined about tossing a bunch of meat chunks in a dish, even if it is supposed to be a peasent dish from the french country side (i.e. a cassoulet: slow cooked stew in an earthenware pot).  It’s just a little off putting.

     The dessert was by far the best RW dessert I’ve had to date: a strawberry rhubarb crisp with marscapone (a triple-cream cheese made from crème fraîche, denatured with tartaric acid) gelato.  The crisp came hot out of the oven and was a perfect mix of sweet and tangy while the smooth marscapone ice cream was delicate and mild in flavor.  Maybe it’s because I am partial to berries, but this dessert was damn good…the crisp the smooth, the sweet, the tart, and pure joy all mixed together in a little oval ramekin-delicious!  All and all a solid RW experience…I’d like to see what else Chef Bollinger has up his sleeve.

Born on the Bayou

Monday marked the beginning of DC Restaurant Week, which for the many foodies and gourmands in DC, is like Christmas in August.  Instead of sneaking down the stairs to shake and rattle the boxes that surround the decorated evergreen in hopes of discovering the surprise inside, we patiently await the announcement…and then like jumping on your parents to WAKE UP!, we fervently head to the restaurant web sites to see if they have posted this year’s RW menu.  That little morsel on the screen that gets the salivary glands going and has your mind wondering just how the plate will look and smell and has you giddy about only paying $20.09 for such delectable treats.

     My first stop on the Restaurant Week tour this year was Acadiana.  Now, before I even start with the tale of this restaurant, I must diverge for a moment.  Kind of like I explained before, I really do love just about everything involving food…smells, tastes, textures, history, the way it makes you feel (emotionally, physically, mentally), and most of all the culture that comes along with a given dish.  So, when I saw Acadiana, I thought to myself, “what the hell does that mean?”  So, I looked it up and thought that maybe you’d be interested to know what it means, too.

     Apparently, French Canadians that settled in Louisiana are Creoles and the area around the Louisiana gulf came to be known as Acadiana, because the people who settled the region there had come from Acadia-lands in the French Colonial Empire that included the maritime provinces, Quebec, and modern day New England.  So just in a name, you have this great sense of what you are about to dive into…something historical, something cultural, and something that has lasted through wars, Louis and Clark, and natural disasters.

     Located downtown, just between Chinatown and Metro Center, Acadiana sits on the ground floor of a very spacious office building on the corner of 9th and New York NW.  As I walked in, I was greeted by the hostess, who was very friendly and really looked me in the eye, not like many others who are looking at everything but you when asking for your name.  The dining room is well appointed, a spacious floor plan with vaulted ceilings and almost floor to ceiling windows.  The decor inside has hints of an old Louisiana mansion, with rustic chandeliers and several upholstered seating booths, but more so, gives me the sense of how I would expect a view of the gulf water, with blues, greens, and an open air, to make me feel.  The authentic zydeco music and some Temptations on the play list really drove the point home.

     Now, let’s ge to the food.  I must preface by saying that I have, in fact, been to both New Orleans and Baton Rouge, so I’ve had some tasty and true Cajun/creole/southern cookin’ in my time.  Acadiana did not disappoint.  To start out I had some good southern sweet tea…tea, sweetened with sugar in house.  It was delicious, though I looked across my table to find myself super jealous of the folks across the way that had the house made lemonade, sweetened with sugar cane, but with a real piece of sugar cane popping out the top, garnished with some mint.  This stuff look re-resh-ing, let me tell you.  So, I’ll just say now that my service throughout the meal was spot on.  My drink was never less than half full, my waiter was very sweet and answered all of my questions, and all of the food runners worked seamlessly throughout the dining room.

     The RW menu, to my surprise, was an assortment of the “regular” appetizers, a choice of any entree, and a choice of dessert.  I have found it pretty rare to find restaurants that leave their entire menu up for grabs during restaurant week, so boy was I excited…and daunted by the task of picking from such a great looking menu.  I wanted to steer clear of safe and get into the nitty gritty of some southern creole cooking, so the first course was a sinch-TurteSoup!  Dessert seems pretty easy, too, Warm Vanilla Bread Pudding.  The entree was a tricky one with classics like Shrip and Grits, Po-Boys, and Crawfish Etoufee.  I asked the waiter for some help and he suggested the blackened tilapia, so I went with it.  I mean, how can you go wrong with collard greens and corn pudding?

     Before the soup came, a delightful little basket appeared on my table with two of the best biscuits I’ve ever had.  Now, I can’t claim to be a connoisseur of biscuits, for all I know it was Bisquick, but they were damn good.  The best part was the “butter” that came with the warm, soft, melt in your mouth biscuits…creole cream cheese with sweet pepper jam.  I had to ask what it was, because it tasted so familiar, yet I couldn’t put my tongue on it.  Figuratively, not literally.  It was SO good.  I found myself using about half of what they gave me on each biscuit, which I think was intended for, say, four or five people.  They were even nice enough to offer more when I polished off the second in under two minutes (which I graciously accepted) and went to town on the third before realizing that I still hadn’t even started my first course yet.  Then, there it was, my turtle soup, poured table side into my bowl from a cute little pot. 

     One word describes this soup-heavenly.  I love Maryland crab soup, and this turtle soup reminded my of some Cajun cousin of the Chesapeake-a little thicker, spicy, and slower to go down, but that’s in order to savor the sweet life, which I imagine people in the south are good at.  I mean, I don’t know, never lived there, but hey, this is about what I think about life, right?  So the turtle soup…I’m not the best at identifying things when they are all mixed up in a thick brownish red broth, but part of me thinks there was some okra, onions, and turtle (obviously); the liquid delight, I can’t even begin to guess what was in there, but the soup as a whole worked.  Excellent spice (a kick, but not crazy hot), spiced well-not too much salt and a tasty array of other spices, and an overall great flavor.

     Next came the entree: blackened tilapia with sweet corn pudding; collard greens with Benton bacon; and crawfish lemon tobasco butter.  This was the most perfect piece of blackened fish I have ever had.  It was well spiced-not too salty, which can happen with the whole blackening thing.  The outside was seared with a light, crispy crust of spices and the inside was moist and flavorful.  The crawfish tobasco butter added a glossy look to the top of the fish, with just enough kick to let you know something was there, and added just enough oil to compliment the blackened crust.  The collard greens were cooked with pieces of Benton bacon, which was hickory smoked and delicious, that texture of meat fat and sweet hickory, a perfect compliment to the bitter greens and the tang of what seemed like a light squeeze of lemon over the greens.  Last, but not least, the sweet corn pudding-a creamy concoction with sweet corn that has me salivating  just remembering it.  The whole dish was married so well, like the polygamous marriage on HBO’s Big Love- the greens added the bitter and the smooth satiating flavors, the tilapia for the salty and flaky texture, the tobasco butter addingjust a little kick, and the corn pudding for the creamy and sweet-each compnent uniting in one bite proved to be a true culinary marvel in the mouth.

     Finally, the warm vanilla bread pudding.  To be honest, it left a little something to be desired.  The boubon cream and the praline ice cream were bothvery good, admittedly, but the plate was monochromatic and the taste didn’t do much to make up for it.  I ate it, but simply put not the best bread pudding I’ve ever had.  An added bonus though, is the tasty nugget of chocolate they give you with the check- a mix of chocolate, pecans, and marshmallows…rich, I only ate half, but tasty.  All and all, I’d say my trip to Acadiana was a huge success.  Many times, you leave restaurant week feeling underwhelmed and not really feeling the need to go back-Iwill be going back, maybe for the etoufee or the jambalaya.  Kudos to Chefs Tunks, Tesky, and Hutchenson and Manager Boo Kim for a Restaurant Week well executed!

One of the Greatest

     Ok, ok.  Like everyone else who saw Julie & Julia, I decided I might take the idea and run with it.  Run, because since I have started my incredible love affair with food, it’s been treadmills and adventure races to keep the pounds of butter at bay.  But I digress.  Today marks the start of the Washington, DC 2009 Restaurant Week, and I thought to myself, “I can’t imagine a better time to stop procrastinating and get to typing!”  So here I am, on a blog, about to tell you about my past, my present, and my future, which, well, has had its ups and downs, but through it all, there was food.

   Like the title of this blog suggests, I am, undoubtedly a lover of food.  I have spent years working in restaurants-everything from country clubs to semi-fast food, and even was a culinary apprentice.  What I am not, is a foodie.  I don’t mean any disrespect to the authors of The Official Foodie Handbook, circa 1981, or the thousands of self proclaimed foodies out there, but what I have seen over the past several years has really put me off to that term.  Maybe it’s where I live, or the people I have just happened to meet, but the “Foodies” out there seem overly pretentious, self righteous, and just plain think they know it all. 

   This experience for me will be more of a narrative about my own thoughts and opinions, nothing more.  I don’t proclaim to know everything about food or running a successful restaurant.  What I do know, is that I have been to some pretty damn good restaurants, and I plan on going to many more.  So take this for what it is…a lover of all things food, talking about their love of food.  You won’t see scathing reviews, or wise-ass remarks, just observations and tales from the dinner table.