DCDining.com Reviews

Boy, I’ll tell you what – I think I might have had some of the best raw bar in DC yesterday at Azur, or if not, then perhaps at least the best uncooked meal. Happy hour is from 5-7 PM, and if I understood correctly (and I might not have), it’s all day on Sundays, with a subset of the cocktails $6, and $1 Blue Point oysters. These Blue Points were good enough to make this west-coast fan an east-coast fan – I gulped down 12 for $12, and then 12 more after that. The drinks default to vodka and slightly girly, but the bartender toned down the sweetness for me, and they were more than good enough to carry me through the entire meal (at $6 per cocktail, you make do). I then ordered three small plates: Golden Tile Fish Crudo ($14) with black lime, cilantro, avocado, white asparagus, and espelette, Wild Sardine Escabeche ($14) with green apple, breakfast radish, spring onion, and olive oil, and finished with a “cheese plate,” Fresh Burrata ($14) with pea salad and herb vinaigrette. Everything was very good to excellent, and I was positively *stuffed* after the healthiest large meal I’ve had in a long time (think how healthy this food was). Super!

 Coverage initiated in Italic, for sure. (That said, Chef De Pue was there, and he can’t always be; on the other hand, he didn’t cook anything.) 

I wish to recommend Masala Art’s $9.50 Indian Lunch Buffet.

I’m generally not a fan of lunch buffets, Indian food sometimes being an exception due to its long-cooked nature, but even Indian buffets often contain cheap, poorly made dishes; not at Masala Art, however.

For $9.50, you get about ten items to choose from, all of which are well-cooked, don’t skimp on relatively expensive ingredients, and it comes with a made-to-order basket of nan which is well-worth the 5-10 minute wait.

Yesterday, two items stood out as being downright generous: 

Meen Kokam is a south Indian (Keralan) curry made with fish, coconut milk, tamarind, and kokam (a round, semi-sweet fruit in the mangosteen family). I can’t say I loved this mild curry because it was made with large chunks of swordfish that tasted like they’d been frozen (I’m just not a fan of frozen swordfish). And yet, there was such an abundance of fish that the dish was certainly generous to have on a lunch buffet.

Rara Gosht was the star of the entire buffet, a steam tray filled up with succulent, well-seasoned chopped lamb that tasted like … lamb, really *good* lamb. In this dish, you’d find the occasional quartered kokam as well (or at least I think it was kokam). For my second helping, I got about 2-3 small spoonfuls of just this on rice, poured some raita on top, added some yellow lentil curry for variation, and polished it off with a 1/4-piece of nan. This was great lamb meat, having that strong, gamey taste that I *love* in lamb, and was worth the $9.50 price of the buffet all by itself.

A Diet Coke was ($2.00, refills cheerfully offered) and I couldn’t have cared less. I felt like I was stealing from Masala Art, especially when I went back for a third round, and got a small dish of well-prepared, simple-cut, fresh fruit – cantaloupe, honeydew, apple, and good-quality mango – all dressed in what might have been the sparest quantity of simple syrup.

$9.50 for this? There should have been lines out the door. I left a $4 tip and still felt guilty for underpaying.

If this isn’t the best sub-$10 lunch buffet in Washington, DC, I’d like to know what is. You rarely see such a generous (and tasty!) lamb dish at a lunch buffet, certainly not one at this price. Masala Art isn’t making much money from this at all; it’s merely a chance to give their waitstaff some extra hours. I do hope diners will consider leaving 20% tips for this particular buffet; mine was closer to 35% and I didn’t bat an eye. These people are working hard, and not making very much money during this time of day.

Very, very well done, Atul and Surinder. Due to a recent change in schedule, you may be seeing me here more often.

Readers, please note also that Masala Art is firmly entrenched in Italic, and is absolutely one of the very best Indian restaurants in the DC area. Both Atul Bhola (the GM) and Surinder Kumar (the Chef) came from the magnificent Heritage India in Glover Park. This restaurant deserves your full support if you enjoy Indian cuisine.

Is this really the only thread we have for Le Diplomate? (Well, it’s still relevant – they are trying to hire (get this) a total of FORTY servers.)

As I approached Le Diplomate from the south, two things struck me: 1) It is much more casual and unassuming from the outside than I expected from a Starr restaurant, and 2) Once you’re inside, you realize that it’s much larger than you thought it was going to be. The corner space is extremely deceiving, and there is outdoor seating both on 14th and Q Streets. Another first impression I got when I walked in is, “My goodness, there are a lot of people working in here.”

Do not let the aura of energy emitted by the staff fool you: they are exhausted from this opening, and if you go there, you’ll see why – despite its size, the place gets packed. For example, they just started weekend brunch last weekend, and it’s already fully booked. That is amazing, and speaks volumes for this community. Plans are in the works for an all-day brasserie which even includes breakfast – a neighborhood place where you can stop in anytime, open a book (when it’s not full!), and hang out. Other than Cork, this is the first restaurant to make me wish I lived in 14UP (well, okay, maybe ChurchKey too).

After taking a lap, I almost literally bumped into Celia Laurent-Ziebold, former GM of Sou’Wester, and one of the opening managers at Le Diplomate. Celia is one of my best friends, and she advised me to take a seat quickly because it was going to get full. I pulled up a stool at the communal partition in the bar area, and started to peruse the menus, and the French comic book she brought me to keep me entertained. 

Almost $7 million went into designing this restaurant, and it shows – I read an article today that said the wooden floors were made to creak on purpose. That may sound pretentious, but pretense will be the furthest thing from your mind when you come here – Le Diplomate is as comfortable as a silk robe in springtime. They really knocked the design out of the park, especially in making the corner space work so well to everyone’s advantage.

While I browsed the menus, I enjoyed a large pour of NV Marquis de la Tour “Vin Mousseux” Brut ($9) from the Loire Valley. No, it’s not champagne, but unlike a lot of sparkling whites, this had character of its own that made it worth drinking, then ordering a second, and then a third, glass. This can’t retail for much more than $15 a bottle, and I’m going to go on a hunt for it, and use it as a house sparkler for awhile.

Celia recommended several small plates, one of which was the Steak Tartare de Parc ($15.50), a hand-chopped cylinder of filet, served with capers, a quail egg, small side salad, and crunchy slices of baguette. This was a fine steak tartare, and I didn’t realize that the slight zing I was tasting was due to bit a red chili sauce (tabasco-like) that I noticed had left a reddish complexion on the white plate. For me, there was no need to even touch the crispy bread (which I tend not to love in general) because Le Diplomate has its own bakery, and offers a wonderful bread basket with three types of bread, including the best baguette you’ll find on 14th Street. 

I shunned Celia’s recommendation of the pommes-frites, and went instead with the Radish Crudité ($6.50) which lent the crunch needed to accompany the mushy texture of the tartare. I adore sliced radishes with sea-salt and butter, and that’s all this was, and all that I needed it to be.

For my final course, I stayed with another small plate, and ordered the Mushroom Tart ($11.50), a quartered circle of pioppini mushrooms and truffled pecorino. As beautiful as this looked, there was a heaviness to it that I didn’t care for. In particular, the crust had a shortbread-like aspect that (literally) weighed the dish down, and detracted from the toppings – you’d think that pioppini mushrooms and truffled pecorino could stand up to a heavier crust, but I think it will need to either lighten up, or become thinner, for this dish to survive the summer. I had met three charming gentlemen as I was dining, and shared this tart with them – one of them described the crust as being “pot-pie like,” and that’s exactly the texture it had (the difference being that a chicken pot pie soaks and moistens the crust; here, it remained dry and crumbly). I liked this dish well enough, but there’s way, way too much else on this menu to try for me to order it again anytime soon. 

Thank you to the magnanimous GM Patrick Desotelle, who came and introduced himself, and also to Steve Uhr, who was previously at Bandolero. I suspect that over the course of the next few years, I will see many, many people here that I recognize from other restaurants. Le Diplomate is a goldmine, both for the owners, and also for the residents of 14UP.

Initialized in Italic in the Dining Guide.

Luckily for me, Woodward Table is right across H Street from Nantucket, so I could walk right on over with my new X-treme do (I look like a combination of Ivan Drago and a pencil eraser).

It’s happy hour from 4-7, with draft beers and wines (they have four draft wines) all $5. My gregarious bartender, Fred, took care of me as I was an early bird, and one of the few people there when I arrived (it was packed when I left).

Woodward Table, despite its huge bar, has a very disappointing wine list, featuring lots of mass-produced, easy-to-source names at something slightly over double-retail. I could not find a single glass of wine I wanted to order, so I went instead with a happy-hour draft special, NxNW Riesling by Horse Heaven Hills in Washington State ($5, usually $9) which was decent, but without enough acidity to support its noticeable residual sugar. A second glass later into the meal was also a draft from Washington State, the Millbrandt Chardonnay ($5, usually $9), relatively pleasant for a cheap Chardonnay. About all I can say for these wines is that they were cheap at happy hour, and easily identifiable as Riesling and Chardonnay (which is better than you can say about some). I couldn’t quite finish my Chardonnay, and ended up surrendering to a Bombay and Tonic ($7.50). Ahhhh, crap. I just dug out my bill to find out the price of the drink, and now I realize I was undercharged for an item.

Sometimes as a gesture of respect, I will immediately put my credit card on top of the bill when it arrives, without checking it. In this instance, I wish I had looked at the itemized charges. My apologies to the restaurant, and also my outstanding bartender, Fred, for not noticing this and therefore shorting them both on the bill and the tip. I will remedy this the next time I go in. 

I wanted to get the drinks out of the way so I could focus on one particularly outstanding item. In fact, it may be the single best bagel-based dish I’ve ever eaten. On the bar menu, the most expensive item (except for the burger) is The Fishmonger’s Board ($15.50). If you like bagels, cream cheese, and smoked salmon, this is the platter of your dreams. Enough for two people to split, this wooden plank is a bounty of smoked, marinated, and house-cured fish and shellfish including two types of salmon, two types of scallops, two types of spreads, smoked trout, an array of wonderful pickled vegetables, and four mini-bagels, conveniently split. It is nothing short of astounding, wonderful, and I hope and pray for everyone that Woodward Table is featuring this on their new Brunch menu – they began serving brunch on March 31st. Do yourself a favor and get this, and be hungry when you do. It’s fantastic! And I finished every single crumb.

After this magnificent platter, I was pretty full even though I hadn’t eaten all day long, but it was early, and I knew I’d be hungry at midnight if I didn’t get something else. So I ordered off the regular menu, which had a little list of daily specials attached to it. How do you not order the Benton’s Own Flatbread ($12.50) with smoked ham hock, country ham, bacon marmalade, and aged cheddar? As good as it sounds, with deep flavors of country ham and baked, aged cheddar, it’s softened by a little arugula (I think it was arugula) and a squirt of balsamic, the sweetness of which counters the saltiness of the ham. It’s a wonderful flatbread, and although I couldn’t finish it, I made sure to rip off the toppings and not deny myself any ham or cheese. If this is on the specials menu, I highly recommend it as well.

On the way out, I realized that – wine list aside – I was going to be writing a glowing report of what is essentially “bagels and cream cheese” and “a pizza.” Such is the drift of DC-area dining in recent years, and as unfortunate as I find that, at least Woodward Table does it well. There are plenty of standard items here also (rockfish, arctic char, pork, etc.), but these two had hypnotized me with their siren song.

With the exceptionally talented Joe Harran as Chef de Cuisine, presumably while Woodward Table continues to get up and running, the time to go here is now, before he has a chance to go back to Bistro Bis.

It’s ironic that because TakEatEasy *isn’t* in a gas station, it might have more trouble surviving than when its owners were at Fast Gourmet – the “cool” factor is gone, and it’s now going toe-to-toe with the likes of Malaysia Kopitiam and its other neighbors.

The decor is very casual, but a definite step up from the gas station, and on Friday and Saturday nights, it’s currently open until 5 AM, and would be a perfect pace to unwind with a meal after a long night at the bars downtown. 

I’ve only had dinner here, and nothing on the menu is more expensive than $16.50. Happy hour runs from 4-8 PM, and the deals are impressive: $5 tapas, $4 beers, and $5 glasses of wine. 

I started with an Allagash White ($4 at happy hour), and you just knew I had to get the Chivito ($15) my first time here. On the menu, it’s listed with (take a deep breath) … filet mignon, ham, pancetta, mozzarella, roasted red peppers, pickled shiitake, onions, egg, Boston lettuce, plum tomato, garlic mayo confit, served on a soft roll and with fries. Whew! Despite this, it’s not as gloppy as when it was being made at Fast Gourmet, but even though it’s toned down, and perhaps more “elegant,” dare I say? It’s still just as good, qualitatively, as it was before. Just as good, but a little cleaner. And the fries are fresh-cut, not frozen.

As much as I loved the Chivito, I may hit the $5 tapas on my second visit (all but two are $5). In particular, I have my eye on the Lengua a la Vinegreta, Croquetas de Bacalao, and Rollitos de Jamon Serrano, all three of which will be $15 total during happy hour. 

For the second half of my Chivito, I asked for a white wine, and they had Pinot Grigio, Sauvignon Blanc, and Riesling. I followed my own advice of, “When in doubt, go with Sauvignon Blanc,” and I’m glad I did because it was good wine. This was a good 5-6 ounce pour, in high-quality stemware, and the wine was good enough where I asked to see the bottle. It was a 2011 Hemisferio from Chile which is made in partnership with the legendary Spanish vintner Miguel Torres. I think it was a little after 8 when I ordered it, and I was fully expecting to pay full boat, but the bartender kindly gave it to me at the happy hour price of $5 which is pretty ridiculous for such a good glass of wine (it’s usually $7.50)

This is a casual place, and the staff is super-friendly. There’s a bar, and the restaurant has flat-screens for easy viewing of soccer games (and with these owners, soccer games are probably what you’ll be watching). It needs more publicity because the food is quite good – I saw what was being brought out, and am impressed.

TakEatEasy is comfortably initiated in Italic in the donrockwell.com Dining Guide, and should be on everyone’s lunch repertoire who works nearby. Well done, gentlemen.

Last night was Daikaya’s first “official” night of being open, and after a long walk across town, I got there at 4:30, only to discover the Izakaya opened at 5 (the ramen house is open all afternoon). 

I walked next door to Graffiato, and nursed a beer while watching baseball, then got into an empty, but eager, Daikaya right around 5, and took a seat at the bar. It’s a good thing my hip bone isn’t any wider – the seats that have backs are pretty narrow, but I’ve always had a birthing pelvis. 

The Dyson Airblade has competition in the hand-drying niche: Daikaya uses the Mitsubishi Electric Jet Towel which enables the diner, apparently, to request the check from the restroom – it has three buttons with lights: Power, Heater, and Check.

The Rickey-San ($12) is a wonderful way to start Spring, it’s a wonderful way to start dinner, and it’s a wonderful drink, period, actually I guess this is a comma, that could pretty much take you through your entire meal. It’s made with Hendricks gin, Matcha green tea soda, yuzu, and lime, and is bitingly acidic and only mildly sweet. I could drink this all night, and pretty much did.

Jessica Sidman of Washington City Paper describes my Combination Pickle Plate ($5 for three) perfectly, and the one I got looked *exactly* like the photo in the City Paper article, “Fickle Pickles: Only One Man Can Touch Daikaya’s Fermented Vegetables.” You’ll want to get these early in the meal, as if they were Korean banchan, and nurse them throughout. I loved all three (nukazuke, Napa cabbage, and takuan), but was particularly enamored with the takuan which, according to the article, is the only of the three that’s not house-made, being imported from Japan.

Ankimo ($8.50) with miso escalivada (a classic Catalan dish similar in spirit, if not in execution, to ratatouille) hints at the pan-everything lexicon that Katsuya draws upon in modifying Japanese classics. The escalivada was by no means an afterthought, and it was wonderfully made, albeit just a few precious bites. If you think about it, it’s an odd combination, but it works perfectly well.

My bartender warned me, correctly, that the Onigiri Rice Balls ($2.75) were ample, and I probably ordered them too early in the meal (but nibbled them throughout). This is one dish – which, incidentally, I haven’t ever seen in the DC area – that I know extremely well, Matt’s (my son’s) nana being from Okinawa, and this being her home-run specialty dish. Hers are to kill for, and yes, taken as a whole they’re even better than these, but both the kombu and abura-miso at Daikaya were good enough to make me crave them a day later. Interestingly, you have to wrap your own seaweed around the ball of rice (Shhhhh! Don’t tell Matt’s nana, but the rice itself was better), and I prefer mine pre-wrapped so the seaweed gets moist and loses its crackle – a minor nitpick that only a Rice-Ball Snob would even mention. Save these for late in the meal – they’ll make sure you don’t go away hungry, and won’t break the bank in doing so.

Either I’m just not remembering, or I’ve never before had, seen, or heard of, frozen sashimi, until last night, when I ordered the Ruibe ($6.50) – a traditional Hokkaido presentation of frozen (yes, still frozen) salmon sashimi with a dot of fresh wasabi, grated ginger, Sekigahara tamari, and some unannounced strips of white onion which, dipped in the tamari, were just wonderful. I’m not the biggest raw onion fan, but try dipping this by itself in the tamari and you’ll see – this wonderful flavor would never be created with regular soy sauce. As for the salmon itself, I certainly found it interesting, but also feel that some of the flavor is lost because it’s frozen – I’m going to research this dish a bit more to educate myself about it, and I look forward to trying it again after I do.

Late in the meal, I switched to beer and ordered a bottle of Coedo Shikkoku Schwarzbier ($12), a fine black lager, dark in color, low in viscosity, and mild in flavor. If you drank this with your eyes closed, you wouldn’t know it was this darkly colored. This lager would be a good transitional beer to introduce people to the world of darker-styled ales.

 I once claimed I didn’t love Rappahanock oysters, but boy I sure loved Daikaya’s Grilled Live Oysters ($2 each) which I assume were alive earlier in the day. Grilled in-shell with sake and oyster salt, the grilling and the sauce really made this *the* perfect oyster for the dish. In today’s world, $2 per oyster at non-happy hour prices is almost cheap, and if you take into account the preparation involved, these are a fine value for the money.

 Pretty well stuffed at this point, I finished the meal with the interesting Stuffed Cabbage ($8.50) which I grew up with as my mom’s extra-special dish, so this is my Ground Zero for comfort food. And Daikaya’s version did not disappoint at all, the cabbage stuffed with ground Wagyu, ground pork, a bit of onion, and rice, braised in the striking combination of dashi and butter which took traditional Japanese, modified it to traditional Eastern European, and modified that to something else still. Dunk the inner meat liberally in the sauce surrounding the cabbage.

 My first visit to Daikaya was a success, with not a single bad dish in the entire meal. I didn’t get a chance to request my check in the restroom, but I was highly amused, baffled, and befuddled by the menu which is inserted, page by page, into a magazine. I don’t get it, but I’m not complaining either. You’re off to a good start, my friends.

Bourbon Steak is having a fundraising dinner for Nick Balenger tomorrow night (please click on that link, and follow all the rest of the links – this is as important as anything I’ve ever written about).

As part of the Silent Auction, Tim Carman and I will be hosting dinner for four at Bourbon Steak. So if you’re going to this event, please bid on this generously, and Tim and I will regale you with war stories over our dinner.

I decided also to donate a bottle of wine to the auction: a 1999 Dönnhoff Niederhauser Hermannshöhle Riesling Spätlese, a wine from a difficult vintage that Terry Theise called “perhaps the greatest achievement I’ve ever seen by a winemaker.” This wine, for this auction, should easily command $100. I’m the original owner of the wine, so I can verify its provenance – please bid generously.

Anyway, the other night I went to drop off the wine, and GM Mark Politzer (the husband of our own Rachael Harriman) said he’d like to buy me a glass of wine when I came in for being so involved in the auction. The large bar, early on a Thursday evening, was absolutely impenetrable, with nothing, anywhere, table or seats, opening up for what must have been close to an hour. So while I was standing there, Mark, and AGM Charlie Berg (who, by the way, is leaving soon for Blue Hill to devote himself to becoming a full-time sommelier), were kind enough to offer me a glass of Grüner Veltliner and the perfect dish for someone standing around waiting for a seat: Marinated Nantucket Bay Scallops ($22, but comped) with orange, cilantro, and lemongrass vinaigrette. This was served in something resembling a stemless brandy glass with a spoon (I’m not sure if that’s the normal plating), and the orange and cilantro really complimented the wonderful scallops – it looked like a smallish course, but was quite an ample portion. This is the type of dish you can visualize the taste of (tastualize?) just from the ingredients list, and it was as good a combination as it sounds like because of the quality of the scallops.

Finally, I got a seat, and Charlie asked me if I’d mind if they served me a cheese course. I said I’d be happy to have one, but then later added that I’d like to order (and pay for) something first. (In the meantime, the cheese course came out, and I asked if I could have it placed in limbo until after my meal, so it was taken away and I never did get it back because I was so stuffed after my entree that I couldn’t eat any more).

With what was surely $40 of comps under the bridge, it was time to pony up. I’ve always been curious about Michael Mina’s signature dish: Michael’s Lobster Pot Pie ($68), and decided to go for it. I remember about two years ago, I wrote Mark Politzer about this dish, and said, “Is it really worth the price?” He wrote me back a one-word answer: “Yes!” The pot pie is presented in an oversized, single-serving copper pot – there was clearly a lot of food lurking underneath the browned pot-pie crust which is all I could see. The pot was then taken back and expertly plated, and wow, what a dish. An entire, huge lobster, with the meat removed but the shell included, and brandied lobster cream, baby vegetables, and wild mushrooms, all artfully presented with the shell an integral part of the visual component (and also having a functional aspect, keeping the heat in some of the chunks of lobster meat). The brandied lobster cream was bountiful and extremely rich, so there is no way that a single person is going to finish this dish and not be stuffed. It is glorious excess, and might I add that at the bar, I’m sure they’ll cheerfully bring out a share plate for two people to enjoy. At $34 per person, the price becomes much easier to grasp. I paired it with a 2009 Ramey Chardonnay ($20) from Russian River Valley, an exemplar of oak and oodles of butter, and normally something I wouldn’t enjoy on its own, but with this incredibly rich pot pie, the oak was absorbed into the brandied lobster cream sauce, and it was a very good pairing.

Bourbon Steak is frightfully expensive, with eye-popping prices. There is some serious money dining here, and a coat and tie are highly recommended. Surely I received special attention because of my donations, but I observed what was going on around me, and the service is just wonderful, and the bartenders really know how to shake a drink.