DCDining.com Reviews

I had lunch at SundeVich on Wednesday, and the sandwiches were wonderful – off the top of my head, the only pure sandwich shop I can think of that I might prefer is the Ballston Earl’s Sandwiches. Of course, Stachowski Market and Deli is right up there also.

My young dining companion and I split two sandwiches: the Beirut ($11) with grilled steak, hummus, tomato, brined vegetables (pickles), and fresh herbs (primarily cilantro); and the Seoul ($11) with bulgogi beef, kimchi, asian slaw, greens, and garlic mayo. We also split a wonderful Eggplant Dip ($4.50) with garlic, tomato, egg (which makes the dip), and spices – using thinly sliced baguette as dipping chips, and I washed mine down with a 16 ounce bottle of Diet Pepsi ($1.50).

I preferred the Beirut only because I’m a little bulgogi-and-kimchi’d out, and the flavors were both more neutral and novel (to me) in the Beirut. The dip is easily transportable if you don’t finish it, so don’t hesitate to try it, knowing in advance you’ll take some home.

SundeVich is a treasure for Convention Center sandwich seekers, although I must say the order took a fairly long time so you may want to call it in. On the way home, we also noticed a SundeVich food truck driving up a northbound street – that said, I can’t imagine that the food truck versions are assembled as expertly as the sandwiches we had in-store.

 An interesting factoid about SundeVich: three sandwiches are named after Iranian cities; none after Iraqi cities – a little ethnic strife in action here?

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.