Black Salt

You know you have made it big with your friends when they take "amateur food critic" to mean "knowledgeable, competent entertainer and dinner administrator." Despite my advancing age, I still feel like I should be seated at the kid's table (or a fine restaurant's equivalent). The fact that I can order unlimited alcohol and dessert (oftentimes the latter is more tempting) is still astonishing to me, particularly as it's not tied to any vegetable consumption.

I'm afraid I'll never be a truly good food writer if I have little interest in the specific differences between tuna and swordfish (how do you really explain that in an intellectual fashion to apprise someone of their abstract difference?).

I've mastered dining wonderment though, particularly at a place like Black Salt on Macarthur Boulevard. I was very good at admiring how clever the restaurant was in putting its actual fish market at the front of the restaurant and how the kitchen had sliding doors to simultaneously block noise from entering the dining room but allow plates of food to reach their destination more quickly. To prove, however, that I'm not universally effusive, the service was a bit scholastic (our waitress demanded uniform table attention and answers to her questions), the acoustics made us all feel like we were hard of hearing, and my peanut butter and chocolate cake could have used more parts peanut butter to chocolate (now I'm reaching).

Black Salt is part of a series of restaurants, the Black Restaurant Group, that are featured on the top 100. Thankfully their names all hover around the letter A or B, permitting me to exacerbate the top-heavy achievements of my list conquering. Like Black Market Bistro, Black Salt's menu is creative and novel with innovative combinations (maybe I do sound like a snappier amateur food critic when I decry ubiquitous yet unoriginal dishes like beet salads with goat cheese fondue that appear universally now).

Since I eschew pretentiousness, I of course had a glass of Cotes du Rhone (served from a beaker-like carafe). I like it when there are names for otherwise quotidien processes: my wine wasn't sitting there in a glass container, it was decanting.


As it decanted, the bread was served with Black oil (I can only assume the B was capitalized), a rich olive oil served with pieces of diced olives.


Eric, a quietly loyal reader of the blog, ordered the tuna tartare, a refreshing mix of minced tuna atop avacado and served along with toasted cashews, framed in chili aioli and topped with "citrus ponzu" (which I thought were just fresh orange slices). It was an exquisite, complicated, and appetite-building dish.


I, on the other hand, ordered the cornmeal fried oysters with tartar sauce. Who would have thought I'd prefer slimy, gritty, briny oysters sliding down my throat to fried oysters, a non-appetite building dish. There's something degradingly incongruous about frying a beautiful oyster, like black lipstick on a priest's wife.


Things looks up with my appetizer, the wood grilled baby octopus with fennel sausage, cherry tomatoes, arugula and balsamic vinegar. The arugula and vinegar added bite and the octopus and sausage rounded out the dish by making it rich. With bits of fennel, the great flavor equalizer, it became a perfect yet satisfying summer dish.

Since I write this, I can complain about whatever I want and in true unsatisfying waiter form, when asking for advice about what dish I should order, I received a litany of traits of each dish, but no actual rankings. Using my imagination, I had already come to the same conclusions and what I was seeking was her take on the most unique. Anyway, I ended up with the swordfish (with fat juicy slices of grilled eggplant, English peas, olives and pine-nut anchovy butter) more out of blind guessing than anything.

The only logical termination of a three-course dinner accompanied by two baby wine beakers was dessert. I'm powerless to resist any combination of peanut butter and chocolate, so had the chocolate peanut butter crunch cake served with caramelized bananas and peanut brittle. I've admittedly had better (higher ratio of peanut butter to chocolate) but this still looked good when we all wondered why there were scallops on this plate.

We also had the banana coconut cream pie, whose deliciously dense cream was stressing its pastry frame. The Blacks are worth their salt.

The Oval Room

I mean this in the most progressive and feminist way possible, but there are some things girls love to do regardless of their age or professional status: gossip, eat good food, and dress up. My friend Christine and I reached the novel discovery, however, that if there are no compelling men to tempt us to indulge in the latter two, then we'll just arrange for it ourselves.

Last night, we donned silky dresses, high heels, and excessively remarkable jewelry to try The Oval Room's seven course tasting menu. A girl doesn't need to fear the dangers of potent roasted garlic, the perils of dark-sauce indulging, or the liberties her mouth takes with multiple glasses of wine when a good girlfriend is in tow. With our quirky and descriptive waiter, we each had a uniquely DC evening at a table that was a 30 second walk from the White House (I had to round down because the White House has restricted access on Google Maps).


The beauty of dining out with a good girlfriend is that that not only are you able to explore multiple strands of salacious conversation, you can double back and maneuver those strings of conversation in a way that makes them perpetually interesting. Girls' (ok, our) conversational agility became more obvious upon observing the clearly newly minted couple to our right whose frequent hand-holding across the table suggested that that was the most exciting thing going at the table.



















The Oval Room is fairly minimalist on the interior: simple, small abstract paintings adorn the walls and modern yet luxurious chandeliers hang from each dining room. The service is crisp and professional, but out waiter watched over us both hawkishly and fraternally to ensure we were delighted at each dish (which we were).


We started off with the pastrami-cured kampachi (Japanese yellowfin) with tomato jam, hot mustard ice cream, caraway, and pumpernickel croutons. It was clear when the waiter came over and explained the dish's punch line to us that we realized neither the menu nor the waiter were entirely conventional: it was a rendition of a pastrami sandwich with deconstructed components.


The beauty of the menu was the inclusion of normally unappetizing components paired cleverly: items like caraway, licorice, or peas and carrots rarely get a chance to shine as more than a pesky backdrop, but not here.

The second dish was Hawaiian sweet shrimp with roasted garlic butter, pistachio and lime. Christine, who doesn't like most shellfish, and me, who usually tries to dignifiedly restrict sopping up every last bit of sauce, acted a bit unconventionally ourselves and did the contrary to our proclivities.


The dish I was anticipating the most was the truffle pasta, which made us both act and view ourselves as the princesses we envisioned ourselves for the evening. I think each of us envisioned that some very smart pig was dispatched to find the truffles exclusively on our behalf, truffles that were lovingly infused into the pasta and placed in small sheaths on top of the pasta. I ate each small noodle individually to savor it for inordinately long bites.


The crispy rockfish was the first of the entree-like items. Its skin was caramelized and the small filet was set atop a Peekytoe crab chowder, pancetta, and licorice. Licorice in the form of an apertif builds the appetite and was a refreshing middle-of-the-meal respite.


The only low point was the roasted lobster with peas and carrots and a morel vinaigrette. The lobster was beautiful: claw meat and other meat (Christine, lobster connoisseur expressed reservation about eating lobster outside of the North East but then we started discussing something juicy and dropped off of serious seafood conversation). It didn't have a lot of flavor and the peas overpowered the delicate lobster.


The last dish caused us to go into raptures, surprising for the last of five dinner dishes. Its arrival caused new colors of wine to be ordered and detailed inquiries into all its components: lacquered aged beef short ribs with a fennel/dill salad and a tarragon/blood orange sauce. Despite the seven strings of gossip ongoing at the time, we took a moment to cheers each other a few times again to congratulate ourselves on our fine decision choosing a restaurant, deciding on the tasting menu, and having the means to buy this tasting menu ourselves.


Lastly, we enjoyed the strawberry shortcake popsicle, an unexpected, throwback delight (seriously, I look like a kid who normally gets half melted grape popsicles who got lucky and got a banana split). Top 100: I will defeat you.

Demystifiying Seafood

There's nothing to demystify: seafood is delicious. What I found much more illuminating at the Smithsonian's Demystifying Seafood: The Ocean and Its Bounty is that Ted Danson seems to be disappointingly old and that I have friends who are more convincing food connoisseurs than I. I never liked Ted Danson much anyway, so the latter discover is much more satisfying.

Tonight I joined friends for an evening of blini, ceviche, and escabache eating. It was delightful. Since I have a flight for which I need to depart in seven hours, I will be brief and present a pictorial account, in order of my preference, of the most satisfying demystified mollusks:

Oyster from New Orleans' Acme Oyster House:

Coriander Black Pepper Gulf Shrimp and a Watermelon-Lime Salad:

Wahoo and Watermelon Tiradito with Kaffir Lime:

Wild Texas Shrimp with House-Made Worcestershire Meunière:

Southern Flounder Supreme (I forgot to photograph it but include a less delicious but as beautiful alternative):

Blue Crab and Camembert Bisque with Saffron Popcorn:

On a totally separate note, since I soon will be feasting in pools of green salsa and blue corn tortilla chips and may not have the imminent opportunity to be historical, I present another short photo montage of how I spent eight hours of my day last Sunday at St. Katherine's Greek Festival.