2941

Tammy and I went to the 6th best restaurant in the city last week. And it's in excellent company: five above was a restaurant so good it didn't permit photography (the waitress said it was the chef's preference, but he seemed to think it was proprietary food art) and three above an exquisite restaurant down the street where I first discovered ox tail and pork belly. These restaurants don't kid around and they're almost all in sophisticated neighborhoods, situated in dignified urban landscape.

2941 was in a corporate office park and while I was expecting tables of reminiscently-1980s deal-making, be-suited business people with shoulder pads, it had a delightfully quiet, spacious, thoughtfully-designed dining room overlooking mature trees and a small lake. It really was ridiculously nice.

Neither one of us were exceptionally skilled at night-time photograph taking, but thankfully 2941 used the 6th best photographer in city to capture the outside of the dining room:

So we began. Tammy is the much more talented, sophisticated foodie and ordered a bottle of red wine. It was delightful and it even got its own table (see in the far left).

I was enraptured by the bread: French; small rolls with kalamata olives and sea salt; and thin slices from a loaf with chocolate and cherries.

Then things started getting serious. We got an amuse-bouche, which to me anymore is almost like winning a small lottery cash prize. Something you didn't expect but is a welcome delight. This lottery was cantaloupe soup with ginger and a bit of cantaloupe foam. I always thought foam only existed on Top Chef, not in real life.

Yet more rapture.Tammy and I are high rollers so we got foie gras. And I was happy to indulge Tammy, foie gras eater in exile, who lives in a delicacy-eschewing place like California that denies its residents quality organ meat derivative. The chef was kind enough to divide our foies gras onto two separate dishes so we could independently craft perfectly-proportioned bites of Hudson Valley foie gras, a slice of roasted peach, and a praline brioche. Here is the dignified shot:

And here's the one that makes you celebrate gavage:
Tammy ordered the roasted duck breast with bing cherries, long beans, and Vidalia onion. It was obscenely good, tender, flavorful and responsibly rich.

I had steelhead, gnocchi (we were way confused because it was more akin to a polenta/pudding/custard cake) with greens and tomatillo atop, served over a red pepper sauce. There were other foreign words involved, but I don't remember.

They were both delicious. Now, this is why I like Tammy. She took this photo and volunteered that the bathroom was "just ok." I later agreed. Granted, they had an original Salvador Dali sculpture out in the courtyard, but he sort of looked funny.

We ordered dessert and because we had been just a little unimpressed with the bathroom, the dessert compensated by sporting gold flakes. Because why wouldn't it.

We had ordered the Maker's Mark Whiskey Baba, brioche soaked in Maker's Mark bourbon and served with Tahitian vanilla cream, maple pecans, and an aspic or gelatin we couldn't place (at the bottom).

Tammy correctly observed that poor little brioche could have been soaked a bit longer. And, to the waiter, that a creation of the pastry chef's had been featured on Washingtonian's cover this year (the waiter wasn't sure). Seemed a bit incongruous.

We had worked out way through three courses and a bottle of wine when we got more amuse-bouches: a pistachio nougat on the left, something a bit too rich in the middle, and a blueberry/lemon tartlet with meringue on the right.

When we ran out of food to delight at, we delighted at the beautiful lights:
And the lights in the window's reflection:
And as an ideal photo opportunity after a remarkable meal: