Zentan

"Damn it, a chick bartender," I thought as I snagged a bar stool at Zentan at Donovan House, what was mistakenly my most unfounded concern of the evening. Little did I then know that I would subsequently be obliged, via a parking infraction, to support DC's failing schools. Or that I would soon meet the tire-changer guys from Kashmir brothers towing, events that would underscore that my evening started out alright and the unidate would naturally devolve despite my best intentions.

Unidate date nights entail research the night before on a good single-girl restaurant, highest-heels wearing, packing smart reading material and charging my iPhone. I chose Zentan, because my last unidate at an Asian fusion place was one of my favorite choices from the list.

The beautiful bar and my magazine.

Traffic was horrendous. I parked with only three quarters in my wallet (that scored me 23 minutes on the meter) and because I was late for my reservation, I forfeited my opentable.com points when I finally arrived. Ah well. I sat at the bar next to a questionably-German conference goer and a woman doing overly-academic things on her iPhone and threatening to put her headphones in. I don't know if she was worse than the young, married Russian girl who was recounting a story regaling her confusion as to why a "nice old man" asked her to have sex with him. Yikesy.

I pulled out my Time and my iPhone (avoiding all types of academic tendencies on it) while I drank my cocktail: Thai chili infused vodka, sake, and a splash of cranberry, with a bit of ginger flower. The fruit flavor was subtle to the chili's heft and while I wouldn't order it again, it was beautiful.

I'll admit I was a bit unnerved by a woman bartender. She was good: mostly knowledgable and timely, accurate, and attentive. But, I'll admit that there's something preferable about the unspoken tension, the back and forth of glances, overly-filled-up-wine-glasses, and the understanding between mixed genders that sometimes silence is sexier. Or just preferable after a long day at work and weird bar neighbors.

To her credit, however, she did what many waitresses and bartenders are loath to do: convincingly recommend items on their menu. She validated my choice to order the Korean-style steak tartare, one of the best steak tartares I have yet had (which may mean little since I've only recounted eating it here). It was flavored with a spicy paste, adorned with a poached quail egg, and ringed by wonton chips.

My only complaint with this bar service is that I would have preferred to have this item last but everything came out more or less at once. Oh well: my multiple plates and cocktails created a protective cocoon around me from my fellow bar diners.

Next were the almond-crusted shrimp dumpling lettuce wraps with a mandarin orange chili sauce. These were full of shrimp pieces and lusciously chewy dumpling and while not quite wrapable, dense and hearty. I like dumplings you can eat with chopsticks, unless they are supersized and that method becomes impossible.

The dark horse candidate for best plate was the 19-ingredient Singapore Slaw, weighing in at $16 (I got the half order, the existence of which my bartenderess apprised me). It was exquisite and I played the guess-what's-in-it game and got as far as six (told you I'm amateur): Styrofoam noodles, parsley, carrots, ginger, onions, and cucumber. Oh, with a salted plum dressing and peanuts.

It's a good place: the bar is spacious and well-lit with sophisticated decor, impressive in its mandated entry through the hip and modern hotel lobby, and features charming staff (and very serious sushi chefs at their own bar running horizontally). Admittedly, small pacing events (I'm trying to apply rigor to my critiques) were off: my two menus weren't retrieved until nearly the end of my meal, empty plates waited to be bused, and I had to ask for the dessert menu (it's very American of me that I feel guilty asking for the menu, instead of considering it my right to get one, but even my bartenderess agreed I was obliged to order something).

The dessert was fine, but nothing special. I had the poached pear with the Meyer lemon sorbet. The sorbet was fantastic, while the pear was begrudgingly tender, so my spoon continued clinking the plate.

The accompanying cocktail, however, was a delight: cucumber vodka (I think? it was a verbal explanation) with cold sake and a slice of cucumber. It was delicately, amusingly, and chillingly flavorful.

I read a bit more, soaked in the fine unidate company, and got the check. The guy bartender told me that the bartenderess picked up my second cocktail. I come from a tradition (my own tradition and friends') of flirting with bartenders and waiters at a series of fine establishments and never have I secured a free cocktail from a woman. I had broken mid-meal and told her about the top 100 project and I think she took pity on me and my finances.

Delighted with my skills despite myself, I bounded out to my car and learned, unsurprisingly, that I got another parking ticket. When I was parking, I was too frazzled to determine how to re-orient myself to get to the valet at the hotel, so gave up and focused on my imminent cocktail and ignored my dearth of quarters. To my detriment and at the expense of another $25.

Bemused but becoming less thrilled I got a free drink, I drove a block and a half and realized my music was not drowning out what sounded like an automotive malfunction. This took the form of a flat tire, of course. After 45 minutes of texting, chatting, magazine reading (in a much less glamorous way than I had been doing 50 minutes before that), and watching my cell phone charge run down, Kashmir Brothers Towing swapped out my tire for a donut. And not a fancy play on French/Vietnamese beignet.

Karma would have been a real bitch if the Kashmir sisters had come.

Cork

When a girl gets to a certain age, sometimes she gets tired of the "whole thing": at a well-reviewed, one-name restaurant, in this case, Cork, mood lighting, tight bar seating, and mediocre food got in the way of an objectively superlative dining experience. It's the culinary equivalent of the bait-and-switch of asking if Cork is hot. No, but it's got a good personality. Well, maybe.

My favorite movie that is not Pride and Prejudice is When Harry Met Sally. Harry at the beginning of the movie explains why he's getting married. If you don't have the patience to watch the poorly dubbed clip subtitled in Japanese, I don't blame you, but he discusses how one can get tired of "the whole thing."

Besides the occasional disappointing dish, Cork was fine. But really, that's not good enough: there's no room for lackluster dishes. Further, and this gets to the old woman in me, a crotchetiness that probably seems evident, I'm tired of not being able to see a damn thing. Each photo had to be carefully crafted by tea light, but oftentimes we couldn't see exactly what we're eating ourselves. This is romantic for lovers but for friends who want to celebrate the art of food plating, the lighting was prohibitive. Even Tom Sietsema writes about average diner considerations, rating restaurants on prohibitively-loud noise levels. I find sight equally valuably as hearing at restaurants.

We started with wines, which were delicious. The wine menu helpfully laid out what flavors popped out of each one as we sat at the bar waiting for our table.

In exactly 45 minutes (as promised) we took our table, a lovely small piece of real estate toward the back and near the kitchen, but significantly darker. My friends are indulgent in ordering and permitting photographs (and I'm most grateful) so recently we have been consistently ordering for a table of four instead of two gossiping girls.

We began with the meat plate, a culinary repudiation of vegetarianism. We ordered (I believe), from left to right, the saucisson sec, the Hudson Valley duck salami, and the prosciutto with cornichons and hot mustard.

Seeking to order as close to half the menu as possible, we ordered the cheese plate, featuring the Detroit Street Goat (for you, Mike), a French sheep's milk and a delightfully chewy cow's milk cheese. I really don't remember. I was too busy nibbling on the candied nuts and dipping the cheese in honey and a Cabernet reduction, as well as voicing my opinion on all manner of gossip topics, to write down the types and provenance of the delicious cheeses. Which is too bad, as this really was the peak of deliciousness.

Before we ordered the cheese/charcuterie plates, we received the requisite basket of bread. In the small cup where butter typically finds itself, we had a wipe of something. It was unclear whether this was someone else's bread and butter ensemble or if the butter-cupper wasn't paying attention, but it was a bad entree to the rest of the meal.

In any case, our next item was the brioche sandwich, prosciutto and fontina on a brioche sandwich with an orderly sunny side up egg on top. Like a dessert version of a croque madame sans copious amounts of cheese. It was sinfully good, with sweet brioche and an exudingly-yolky egg. But, it was still a bit too orderly of a sandwich, with a tamed egg that was molded and a sandwich with hospital corners for sandwich termini. It tasted delicious but its lines seemed a bit harsh and unnatural, especially because the proportions were still more heavily in favor of bread than the ham and cheese.

As a reminder, I like Parisian egg-yolk sandwiches that embrace their natural curves.

After these three dishes, things started to get more mediocre. We had the pan-roast chicken breast. It looked so delicious but both the chicken and the potatoes were dry. It's possible we each had more glasses of wine than bites of chicken.

We ordered the chick peas out of an obligation for a vegetable in our small plates entourage. The chick peas weren't sufficiently mushy and the saffron broth with tomato and mint was rather flavorless.

Around this moment, when we stopped assuming that the food was good even though we couldn't entirely see it (and, of course, stopped talking 90 miles an hour) we realized the food was lacking either in flavor, desired consistency, or general pleasurability.

Our last dinner item was French fries, which were initally exquisite straight out of the fryer. Once the fries congealed, however, they were still delicious and crispy but the interior was wet, not from potato but from grease. Even three glasses of wine in, I wasn't ready yet for extreme hangover food.

The service was tremendous: our waitress timed the delivery and retrieval of dishes perfectly, especially knowing we were engrossed in conversation. She knew we were concerned about ordering too much, so scratched our order for duck (seriously, we ordered duck despite ordering five other dishes). Instead, we ordered an apple crostada with salted caramel and ice cream. This choice was unanimous and we defeated it.

It's not often a good sign when only the wine/charcuterie/cheese/dessert are the highlights, particularly as those items are more a factor of a restaurant's good taste than unique production capabilities. Just as I no longer want to date an aspiring musician, out-of-work poet, or 30-year-old-looking-to-find-himself anymore, I don't want to have a dinner I can't see that's banking on the fact I won't notice its inadequacies. Nevertheless, one more down.

Teatro Goldoni

I learned three things last night: 1. one can find passable Italian food in DC, 2. Christine capisce Italian food in the north-Atlantic, and 3. nearly my entire selection of portable food containers comes from dining out.

I went to Olive Garden before it instituted its fancy Tuscan cooking academy. I considered going to Cascone's Italian Restaurant for prom (or had crushes on swimmers who went) and I have a brother who lives in Italy, all circumstantial facts that trend toward me understanding something about Italian. More recently and convincingly, I've spent days in the country, been kissed by a married Italian La Traviata fan in Bologna, and went to Catholic school. While my qualifications for judging may be dubious, I think good Italian food is largely subjectively (because it's ubiquitous but oftentimes wildly mediocre), but based on very unique Italian-food-eating memories. Also, empirical experience has shown that besides Acqua Al 2 (not on the top 100 list), I haven't found a restaurant in the District itself that offers a passable Italian meal I'd want to take my 7th grade Italian crush to.

Christine levied this challenge last night, too, to see if we could prove or disprove an Italian restaurant on the Washingtonian top 100 as being worthy of inclusion. Others have featured bad service and frigid waitstaff or tepid pasta, but Teatro Goldoni did something right to keep us three hours on a school night.

It started off mixed but still likable: the lighting was warm but luxurious and the tables and the bar were full of talkers gesticulating with swirling wine glasses, which makes a restaurant welcoming. I was able to be seated alone and while trying to clandestinely photograph the interior, was asked what I'd like to drink. I'm a simple-minded food critic and simply asked for an apertif, because that's what people drink when they go to restaurants.

Apparently, that's what people get to drink when they move to France for three months and re-transplant themselves into a non-French speaking environment and wonder why they make no sense. I thought I could either explain my desire for an appetite-building cocktail of the waiter's choosing or panic and ask for a Ricard [puzzled look in return]. "Do you have, you know, anisette, on the rocks with a side of water?" Fine. But bad call on my part.

Christine arrived in a breeze of glamor, like normal, of course, making all in the dining room forget Elizabeth Taylor is no longer with us. She ordered a Limoncello martini that outshined my I'll-settle-for-generic-anise-liquor as convincingly as gelato outshines Flintstones push-pops.

A key element of my amateur food critiquing that has been missing in the past.. year.. has been examining the nexus between food and love. I'm no more of a legit food critic than a particle physicist. I order food and forget what's in it. I taste ingredients that aren't even in the same family as what's actually in a dish. But I eat to savor and experience the lives of my friends, which Italian food liberally permits. Especially when my friends know Italian food. Once the breads--small, wheaty baguette slices, tomato-adorned foccacia and foot-long-and-thin breadsticks--were rolled out, the juicy girl talk got better with each plate.

Christine and I ordered seven plates between the two of us. That's right. We were involved in an anthropological/cultural/culinary geographical quest, however, to determine if DC Italian can hang with Rhode Island Italian. Christine relayed that Rhode Island has the highest concentration of Italians in the nation. I would have thought that would have been my gold-laméd, high-haired, don't-meet-regulation culotted eighth grade class at St. Charles Middle School and their seven circles of extended family, but Christine was right.

She ordered the artichoke salad, an Alice-in-Wonderland-remicient artichoke-as-mushroom laid horizontally on her plate with frisée on one end and a cold, roasted red pepper salad on the other. It was gorgeous.

I ordered the beef carpaccio (as my "only" appetizer, despite the temptation to order another). The meat was sliced impossibly slin, the argula was copious, and the parmesan was shred in adequate enough slices to hold its own in a full bite of steak, greens, and mushroom. The real clarifying ingredient was the lemon vinaigrette.

We took deep breaths, ordered full glasses of wine, and delved back into the types of truth-determining only red wine can bring. Dinner part one was the spinach cappellaci, the pre-determined pasta dish we mutually agreed on as being the best pick: spinach ravioli with a butternut squash filling, shaved and grated Parmesan, and sage butter. Christine knows sage butter. What luxury.

Next were the large plates. Christine ordered the chicken parmigiana that came with a side of spinach. I will faithfully relay that per Rhode Island standards, this dish needs a pasta accompaniment, to which I can attest. Spinach is good, but it's like having sugar-free maraschino cherries on a triple fudge chocolate sundae. The breading was robust yet balanced with the mozzarella and Christine approved of the marinara sauce.

I had the quail risotto. Risotto to me is like paella: "anyone" can make it because it comes in a box, but it takes an expert to do well. A successful risotto is magic: rich, creamy, cheesy, but with perfectly cooked rice. This succeeded and on the cusp of Springtime, this one successfully and richly featured quail and carrots, ingredients usually better suited to the dead of fall or winter. Rich and exquisite are understatements.

We were happy: the table was quiet enough for some serious girl talk yet intimate enough that the drunk New Yorker next to us was able to reiterate, at least three profanity-laden times, how huge the chicken parmigiana was. Right? Right? he kept asking. The charmers me and my friends meet.

Charmed, I'm sure.

The decor was warm and playful, as we observed before the final, debilitating round. The painted diamonds on the wall, along with the array of Venetian masks, lent a Carnevale feel to the restaurant. The women who rolled in after 10:30 in barely-visible skirts also contributed, but we were on our way out by then.

For dessert, Christine ordered the pistachio chocolate cake, exquisite in the cake execution with the pistachio tuile on top, but less successful in the pistachio ice cream (insufficiently pistachioed).

I had the tiramisu with berries. Small but dynamic, it impressed in its espresso glory but also in the unanticipated deliciousness of the cream and berries, an often-overlooked superlative combination for dessert.

To cap it off, Christine exposed me to a Rhode Island digestif: the espresso martini. "Creamy" is too rich, she noted to our waiter, who brought an aesthetically appealing but mediocre-ly flavorful drink with, nonetheless, a beautiful little coffee bean on top. It still blew my oft-ordered, bitter, keep-me-up-two-hours-later-than-normal single espresso with dessert out of the water.

Italy this is not: the spatial arrangement was very American, the music is a bit too poppy instead of Frank Sinatra-y (anachronistic and misplaced of me, yes) and the portions gigantic, but Teatro Goldoni was a restaurant with delicious food, effective and unobtrusive service, and a compellingly sympathetic environment for two girls with cocktails and Cabernet to discuss the travails of life and love over food. Phew, I got my nexus back.

Patowmack Farms

I've waited for three days for divine writing inspiration to alight upon my shoulders and give me words and phrases to describe the delight of Edenic perfection: eating in a greenhouse, munching on vegetables picked "up the driveway," and how indefatigably I was able to gush one-word superlatives to our waitress on how exquisite the food was. The words now and even at lunch at Patowmack Farms in Lovettsville, Virginia that day didn't arrive entirely coherently; but, rarely has this amateur food critic ever been able to say convincingly that sunlight played an active ingredient in the experience of food and lean on the quality of the photogenic dishes to compensate for her inability to quite capture near-culinary perfection.

Ok, that day, the bafflement might have been partly because my name was on the menu. Ok, nearly entirely. Once fellow diner Mike told me to look at the top of the menu, there was no turning back to the visible displays of delight at the breads, entrees, and even water-pouring that was to follow for my party, despite there being only one Lippmann present . I couldn't help but think that an amateur food critic made it big. For a day.

In between admiring the naturally-lit dining room--its clean lines, organic solemnity, and the waiters' reverence for its food made it like some sort of temple to the Pantheon of bounty and cornucopias--we were served warm pear bread with butter. It was simple and warm and the butter tasted like a mandorla of light. And salted cream.

Our first dish was small, candy-like-in-their-sweetness carrots, served in a jar resembling dirt, but was actually dehyrdrated, crumbled pound cake. Kerry and I, in unrestrained green-eagerness, ate the carrot tops because it just seemed like the right thing to do.

It was hard to realize the effect of semi-al fresco dining coupled with organic, just-feet-away farm grown ingredients until at a place like Patowmack Farms, which is so unapologetic, unpretentious, and honest in its menu and presentation. Oftentimes, the words green, organic, and sustainable are bandied as a sort of self-congratulatory compliment that's both gimmicky and alienating. But, from the moment we were greeted by the proprietor, Beverly, it seemed that the restaurant had bounty exuding from the surrounding fertile yard and the only solution was to share it with diners who made the 60-minute pilgrimage from DC.

Everything subsequently was superlative: Kerry ordered the butternut squash soup, suprisingly thick from the dredges of the tea cup, featuring both foam and mushroom powder. Andy ordered the Spanish ham with pickled beets. This is when my fellow diners first started laughing at my uncontrolled raptures.

Mike and I ordered appetizers that subsequently demanded we consider never eating again. Mike ordered the grilled pork belly with cheddar grits. The green leaves, with picture-perfect dew drops, mocked us both for the exhaustingly delicious brunches that lay below.

I ordered the soft cooked and fried egg with potato onion hash (featuring rich, carmelized and crisp potatoes), arugula (see above), and Virginia ham broth (it did me in and I had to implore both Saturn and Demeter for endurance to eat the next course).

As a palate cleanser (in spirit, not reality), we were offered a wheat ciabatta. The beauty of this ciabatta was that I was telling a story while it was delivered. While I'm not certain my story was particularly riveting, the waiter paused until the moment I naturally paused to explain to us what we were eating. This happened just as seamlessly each time we received a dish: each item was explained in detail at a time when interruption was welcomed and not intrusive.

Ah, Kerry and Andy. Kerry for lunch ordered the potato blitnz, boasting a mushroom puree, garlic confit, and braised greens. Andy had the pork shoulder with vibrantly orange carrots. Our food was both organic and technicolor. And both the blintzes, with their softended potatoes and veil-thin enrobement and the pork shoulder, tender yet composed enough to withstand coupling with vegetables, had perfect consistency.

Mike had the cinnamon apple French toast, with an apple puree, pistachio granola, and Virginia maple syrup. It was brioche-y and dense but carmelized on the outside, with a granola that shined in color and tempted with its non-Paleoness.

I ordered the Patowmack Hot Brown, almost certainly the most dignified soul food I've ever had. Atop a slice of toasted what bread and a bed of arugula was crisped-skin chicken adorned with rosemary, covered in pancetta (cooked mom-style, entirely crisped), and with a Spanish cheese sauce. It was like taking the best parts of a BLT, fettucine alfredo, and chicken salad and arraying them like a modern art sculpture.. on my plate.

Afterwards, our waitress proposed desserts: I had interrupted her 50 minutes earlier when we ordered appetizers and lunch that I wanted the peanut butter and chocolate. When she came back at dessert time, I observed that the menu featured four desserts and there were four of us.

So we each got dessert. And I think they may have been especially good because Mike high-fived Sarah, the pastry chef, beforehand.

Kerry ordered the boldest combination of flavors: the grapefruit shortcake, with a biscuit, grapefruit campari curd, almond cream, and glazed marcona almonds.

Andy ordered the cheese plate, which might as well have been three whole wheels as impossibly as we imagined it was to polish off. All the cheeses were domestic and were tangy bleus or meltingly-soft camemberts that made the honey and pear slices alike celebrate their luck at accompanying such flavorfulness.

Mike ordered the Grand Marnier souffle, which was photographed with stop action photography. Ok, it was photographed six times in a manner about as eagerly as I photographed the flamingoes at the zoo with my first camera.

I celebrated my love for the combination of peanut butter, banana and chocolate with short cylinders of devil's food cake, discs of peanut butter cream, heavily salted peanuts, banana ice cream, and a chocolate drizzle.

We toured the grounds, soaking in the pre-Spring vista:

The gazebo:

The chickens:

And the herbs:

And the source of all the bounty in the first place: