Liberty Tavern

It is both horrifyingly embarrassing and flattering to have things you've said yourself quoted back to you. When I was in San Antonio recently, visiting my dear friend Lisa, I said that San Antonio was full of real manly men because it had lots of strip clubs and men driving pickup trucks, she recently reminded me. Sometimes salty-mouthed girls transplanted to DC say things like that. It is also flattering when a friend, in response to my eager question about whether he had read a recent blog post, says, "You wore a hoodie to the opera?"

I've written about Andy before, who met me last night at his recommendation, Liberty Tavern. After kindly forgiving me for showing up late (I won't even say how late to risk offending conscientious readers who would be offended at my lack of planning and ability to ably find parking) and almost losing our table for rushing off to buy us beers (oh, but they were good), we started indulging.

Andy and I, as you could see from a quick perusal through this online publication, have spent a fair bit of time at Cowboy Cafe. And at Asian restaurants. And eating burgers and fries together. We felt grown up last night, though, he with his corduroy blazer, me in my monochromatic get-up, and with us discussing things like ethics in the workplace, professional development, and his upcoming wedding. Like a good friend though and true to form, Andy permitted my photographing, and we began.

Liberty Tavern is pretty great. It's in (I think) a building that used to be a drugstore and has an open yet intimate feel, with good service, a delightfully expansive menu, and even bell-shaped, glass cheese protectors. These probably have names, but it's almost nicer to let them exist in their own abstractness.

For an appetizer, we ordered grilled octopus. Octopus, I recently realized (partially because me and a date came to the mutual conclusion that octopus is one of the best items on a Mediterranean-themed menu) is one of those foods I like so much, that I have an obligation to order it regardless of where I am and what I else I get.


How heartbreakingly beautiful is this picture: grilled octopus (with the delightfully chewy, crunchy, tender suckers) with an English pea and baby carrot salad, farro, and a lemon-coriander vinaigrette. The octopus was reminiscent of lemon juice, Greek blue ocean waters, sailboats, springtime and salty air. The salad, with the slightly crunchy peas and the farro, was a complementary texture to the pliability of the salad and the varied consistency of the octopus. Total success.

Andy got pheasant, with the forward-leaning justification that one should order menu items based on their general availability on menus, which in this case (pheasant), was low. It was amazing. The pheasant came with LT bacon, red flannel hash, a small cooked quail egg, pea shoots, and roasting jus. In reality I have no idea what those things mean.

Andy is such a good friend of the food blog, letting me take photos. His pheasant was lovely; my sauteed escarole is the plate in the middle. I like getting greens because they are anachronistic and were eaten during wars and famines, which reflects the triumph of ingenuity in times of trouble of eating.

I found it to be like eating a warm salad, but in this case, it worked: they were heavily doused in shallots and a vinaigrette.

So, that was plate number two for me (although Andy was helping along the way). Dinner was.. fantastic.. with one only mildly undistributed mound of pesto. The gnocchi was accompanied by spring vegetable succotash, pinenut brown butter, and the aforementioned concentrated basil pesto and was even better when, with about seven bites left, I realized that I had accidentally been eating around the pesto in the middle until I bit into a large chunk of it. My pesto in the first 16 bites didn't have a whole lot of flavor beyond the vegetables. But, being a pseudo-aesthete, I didn't want to mess with the presentation or arbitrarily alter the dish's composition. Oops. That's what you get for using words like aesthete in your head.

(I guess the mound of pesto is sort of obvious in the middle). After good food and good conversation, the waiter put the dessert menus in our faces. To me, unsolicited menu giving is as annoying as a creepy single guys talking to me in bars diving into one-sided conversation with me without waiting for me to acquiesce (an approach which always clearly works out in their favor and not mine) so I guess it's no surprise that I ordered dessert. After about a second of each demurring, which Andy cleverly termed the dessert stand-off, we ordered ice cream. Unsurprisingly, it was awesome.

We even got to choose: one scoop each of vanilla, chocolate, and cinnamon. Little did we realize upon ordering, they are perfectly tri-paired with each other. How lucky were we. And thanks, Andy.