Equinox

There's something clever women like about being taught something. Whether it's Jane Eyre devouring the contents of Mr. Rochester's library, the Princess Bride learning about the Dread Pirate Roberts, or a girl discovering the difference between bourbon and whiskey, a woman likes to know she's associating herself with intelligence. Which, is why on Friday night I knew I was falling for the tender culinary caresses of Equinox when gougères were wantonly put on the table almost immediately.

The night before, I spent the better part of an evening, a bottle of white wine, and my patience making gougères, a deceivingly complex gruyère cheese/choux pastry served typically during a cocktail hour or as an amuse bouche. They're airy yet leaden and saturated with butter, cheese, and more gruyère.

My endeavor started well enough, with a glass of chilled white and a "simple" one page recipe.....

....that yielded a cheese-confettied kitchen and 2-dimensional cheese blobs.

In the end I made three tiers of gougères: ones that would not agree to separate from the cookie sheet, the majority of which crisped up unsophisticatedly and crunched, and the precious eight that turned out at least the commonly-agreed upon color of gougères.

So, imagine my chagrin when I was immediately put in my place with a properly-consisted gougère at Equinox. Combine this with my realization that I was eating my final Andy-and-Kerry blog-worthy meal and a resolved solemnity overtook my regret at deflated gougères. How far we've come from the Cowboy Cafe.

We started with three exquisite cocktails, both Kerry and mine featuring subtly sophisticated accouterments: a slice of cucumber to accompany her gin cocktail and candied ginger on mine, complementing the citrus and vodka.


Those drinks tasted delicious both because of their quality and our need; our arrival at the restaurant an hour before wasn't entirely certain. Andy and Kerry, on their final stateside days, were busy with a variety of other departure preparations and suffered a minor-yet-wheel-debilitating car mishap, seconds after their voyage to the restaurant commenced. After some quick thinking, tires were replaced, carpools established, and valet parking capitalized on. Merely one hour after the threat of take-out seemed imminent, we were back on track.

The alcohol rushed to our fingertips as we used them to scan the menu and we started ordering, beginning with the risotto fritters and the gazpacho. Kerry's risotto fritters were creamy with stalwart grains that combined long enough to be fried. Andy's gazpacho tasted smooth, had a bit of vegetable chunk, and a hint of citrus (orange juice?) woven through.



















I had stuffed squash blossoms, which are fairly easy to obtain but hard to find on menus. These were stuffed with goat cheese, fried tempura style, and propped on olive tapenade; fried so delicately, their waving petals seemed to be frozen in motion. Our appetizers were a testament to the chef that despite the sweltering weather, appropriately flavored fried foods could satisfy in 100-plus degree heat.

Our pre-dinner salads and dishes were delicious and mostly remarkable, but lacked the proper fanfare to introduce the next course. Andy, who had ordered the tasting menu, had a pickled cabbage salad with a single shrimp on top and a drenched spinach salad with a citrus vinaigrette. I had a chopped salad with fresh figs, candied walnuts, roasted beets and a quail egg cooked up in the hole of a buttered piece of brioche. Kerry and I shared it but didn't realize the good stuff was in the middle of the salad until most of the frisée was gone. Andy also had a swordfish steak with tomatillo salsa, juicy and summer-complementarily tart.

Despite the seven preceding plates, we each ate all of our entrees. Kerry had the hand cut fazzoletti with poached lobster, fresh fava beans, charred farm corn, and smoked bacon. Andy had the grilled tenderloin of Pennsylvania pork with caramelized chanterelles.



















Kerry also ordered a delightful side of roasted beets and peaches, topped with a chilled, raw fennel salad on top. That's a summer salad that vaccinates against heat exhaustion.


I had soft shell crab, a food that has historically intimidated me like steak tartare did. Would it be like eating crab battered in egg shells? Like eating shrimp with the tails on? Would I have the same aggravation the remainder of the evening as I did when after a movie with stubborn popcorn hulls stuck in my teeth?

Apparently not: every part of the crab, from its spiny legs to its meaty body was rich in flavor and crunched delightfully and the tomatillo-based salad underneath cut the delicate sweetness of the crab. Ah well, better late than never.


Dessert was a bit of a disappointment, but after a few hours of rich conversation and a good bottle of red (from Virginia!) we didn't notice much. Andy had the pot de creme, a bit annoying in its trendy foam and missing a proper proportion of berries to cream. Kerry and I split the bread pudding. It was dense, as promised, but more like a very moist flourless cake than a homey, gooey bread pudding. The salted caramel ice cream was delicious, but wasn't salty or enough to match up bite-for-bite to the chocolate.

Dinner, as a whole, was tremendous and featured all the hallmarks of an Andy/Kerry dinner: good conversation, good food choices, good plate diversity, good food-observing, good plate-passing, and another good memory of dining together. The BocaSola and I will miss you.

Art and Soul

I'm starting to be skeptical of soul food, particularly when two girls with soul go to restaurants that serve it. And me and Dotti know soul: from her love of fried chicken, to my love of shrimp and grits and BBQ, and to our collective passion for a variety of undeserving objects, we got soul and some to spare. But copiously butter-drizzled cuisine soul food does not make. Particularly, when this soul food prompts not-seen-since-elementary-school visceral reactions to both butter and vegetables.

Dotti and I headed to Art and Soul on Capitol Hill last weekend, a bar and restaurant claiming southern influences to its food. It started off promising enough with homemade barbecue chips at the bar and butter rolls and some dark (not tasty) sweet bread on the table. This iteration of butter was measured, appropriate, and proportional.


Next, we had shrimp and grits, the first of the weekend and second in a row for this publication. The shrimp glistened with a butter glaze and each hominy of grit was infused with garlic, with a shallow pool of butter hovering above them. If you can have brain freeze from popsicles, can you you have catatonia from butter?


Butter's cousin, cheese, starred in the highlight of the evening, the macaroni and cheese. I consider the pasta noodle almost as important as the sauce and here both shone: tight spirals caught as much of the cheese as possible in its threads, as well as the breadcrumb crunch on top.


Dotti ordered her fried (nearly whole) chicken with greens and mashed potatoes. She cleverly got a real Southern dish. There was gravy, sort of like butter, but no visibly extraneous butter.


I opted for fancy (that was silly): rabbit stuffed with spinach (I believe), garlic/cheese biscuits, and an unappetizing mix of my least favorite combination of vegetables: fava beans (too much like the lima kind), carrots, and pearl onions. The rabbit was chewy and eating the vegetables seemed obligatory rather than pleasurable, so I re-feasted on macaroni and cheese and waited for the dessert menu.


I hate to be dismissive of Oprah's former personal chef, but it's almost a farce to serve soul food--a comfort enjoyed by families on Sundays--in the shadow of the Capitol, in a sleek, modern, deliberately-dramatically-lit restaurant.

Dessert, like a dinner triangle being rung, woke up the rest of the meal. We had a pecan pie the likes of which I've never had, with a dense, praline-like pecan filling on the bottom and a chocolate ganache-like top. We also had a multi-berry cobbler with ice cream. They both had butter but thankfully we couldn't taste it.



















Dessert turned out to be exquisite but as a whole, dinner wasn't exceptional..and afterwards I didn't much hope the South would rise again. That is, unless I knew Clifton would be its capital and butter wouldn't be used with Paula Deen-like abandon.

Trummer's on Main

It's not a bad weekend when I get shrimp and grits (twice), eat empanadas from a truck, macabre-like reap the benefits of Greek Orthodox memorials, see of the story of Severus Snape on the big screen, and am reminded that Clifton is, in fact, one of the finest small towns in America (well, at least Virginia).

The weekend started innocently enough, unsurprising when one's current work day terminates around 3 pm. After a food fest-friendly clothes swap out, I took the (gasp) green line to Nationals Stadium to experience my first Truckeroo, an event that even satisfied my ideas of populist food served right (fried food dished out on plastic plates, seating provided on barely sanded down tables, and the general promotion of delicious, unpretentious food).

It is a brilliant idea: capture all the ephemerally moving food trucks that otherwise popularly haunt the streets of DC, put them in one spot, and see how many hipsters it takes to form a trend at any one of them (a trend comprising circa 60 very hip hipsters who form lines because the people in front of them did). Clockwise from top left: the DC Empanadas truck, a $15 lobster roll, macaroni and cheese with cheddar and Cheez-Its (as awful as it looks and sounds), an Oreo milkshake (transcendental), a black beans/chicken/corn empanada, and peach popsicles.

Hipsters, in line

This was Friday, and things only got better. Saturday night was a delicious, caloric dinner at Art and Soul, which will be detailed separately. To begin a new day of anticipated food blogging Sunday (two top 100s in one weekend!), I prayed (at church) I would have the fortitude to eat two desserts for each of my subsequent meals (incidentally, there are two more top 100s next week too). Greeks are so passionate about food that we make food to celebrate the memory of the deceased at a church service, bless it, then serve it. Second breakfast was a delicious kolyva:


Anyway, back to the celebration of live peoples' food. Yesterday, my friend Meredith and her sister, Lisha, and I took multiple back country highways to arrive at Clifton, Virginia, a small town seemingly pulled from the set of some patriotic movie that TBS cycles all of July 4th weekend. It's almost too charming for words.

To better digest the charm, I began with a cocktail, The Titanic. An iceberg of champagne sorbet poked its head out of a mix of elderflower syrup, muddled grapes, and vodka, with a patina of proseccco on top.

We ordered the three-course brunch menu, conveniently costing only about $10 less than the tank of gas I bought in nearby Burke. Each of us had a biscuit, a blueberry muffin, and one of the most ingenious breakfast inventions: what appeared to be a peanut butter cream puff.

The sisters offered the strategic approach (without prompting) that is the blog's default: divide and conquer the menu. We each ordered a different appetizer: the quiche, the fried green tomato, and the oatmeal brûlée. The quiche, delicate and beautiful, had notes of scallions, maybe jalapenos, and cumin. The fried green tomato reminded me that tomatoes are in fact fruits and can be juicy, flavorful, and hearty.



















My oatmeal brûlée had I believe a cappucino foam on top and a bit of caramelized brown sugar. It was brilliant (albeit a bit too sweet) but Trummer's gets major points for making my everyday breakfast item fancy.

We fared even better for the lunch course, slowly creeping toward dessert as both Meredith and my dishes featured sweet syrups and sauces: her's was fried chicken with brioche French toast and syrup and mine was Virginia pork belly with a biscuit glazed in maple syrup and (I didn't bother to ask so could be way off but I think it was) a black bean puree. Lisha cleverly opted for shrimp and grits, adorned with pine nuts, spinach, and corn.


Even if each of our meals skidded out to the table as unmitigated disasters, I'd recommend Trummer's just for our two exquisite desserts. The first, only incredibly delicious, was homemade crushed Oreos, en-nesting two different flavors of vanilla, and covered in chocolate pearls.


The second, superlatively incredibly delicious, was a glass of devil's food cake at the bottom, obscene amounts and varieties of chocolate, and topped with more chocolate pearls. The secret--what we were scraping from the side of the glass--was what our waiter called "God syrup," a subtly salty and decadent caramel. Poured after the glass arrived, it so excited the dessert underneath that it bubbled.

The road toward 36 more restaurants: