Passage to India

I haven't eaten alone and written about it--the whole point of this semi-literary endeavor anyway--since mid-October. That night, I had champagne and tuna tartare before seeing Les Misérables at the Kennedy Center (my, how sophisticated I once was; Saturday I was talking to a 25-year-old at Murphy's over Bud Light).

Tonight, largely out of jealousy of a friend's own culinary escapades downtown, I decided I'd take myself out for dinner. The point of an amateur food critic's existence is to forge ahead in cuisines and on highways she typically doesn't frequent (and 495 north at 6pm is one of those).

I'll admit, here in the obscure third paragraph of a Bethesda restaurant write-up, that I didn't complete the top 100 by the end of 2011. This is probably evident, as I am still writing up restaurants that happened pre-30, pre-Thanksgiving, and at restaurants even my friends don't recall joining me at. I cancelled my Citronelle reservation at least twice, considered it depressing to take a posse of girls to Inn at Little Washington (it seemed a bit too feminist even for my tastes), and Minibar I think has taken me off of their last-minute cancellation list. The 12 restaurants left are either 1. too romantic, 2. unjustifiably expensive, 3. in locations like Frederick, Maryland (I'll note that's 53 miles from me), or 4. ethnic food in Bethesda.

Ethnic food in Maryland generally has been delicious: Assaggi, Indique Heights, and Nava Thai were all classy joints with interesting foods. But parking there is never conventional, I usually go the wrong way on Wisconsin coming or going, and I most of the time stick out (I've found that typically only balding men reading newspapers eat alone at Indian places, so a grinning 30-something reading a book about Paris to me screams amateur food critic).

In any case, tonight I ended up at Passage to India, number 83 on the list. My Nepalese waiter was charming, my waitress with three gold teeth was attentive, and the bus boy thanked me every time he filled up my water glass.


The decor was fantastic: carved elephant sculptures in wood, a plump chandelier that looked like it would crash on the floor in relief at any moment, and old prints of Indian landmarks. I was impressed that even the bathroom door was intricate....


...And that I could cunningly take a picture of myself in the very detailed bathroom mirror.


I began with pappadums and tamarind chutney, mint raita (yogurt sauce), and a spicy tomato sauce. And what I considered a fairly gigantic glass of red wine.


The beautiful thing about Passage to India is that it breaks down its menu by regions in India. Because it was impossibly difficult for me even to select a corner of India I wanted to sample, I ordered the Badshahi Khazana, the latter word apparently meaning "treasure." This dinner offered me only the choice of meats; at the choice of the chef, multiple appetizers and entrees would then be served to me on a silver platter. The idea of having food delivering to me on a silver platter and being thanked for that was too irresistible.

First, I had chicken tikka on the left, moist and tender and delicately yogurty. In the middle, a sort of lamb kofta, generously imbued with onion and that coupled exquisitely with a bit of cucumber and the mint raita, and finally tandoori chicken on the far right.

Then came the platter, with its own charming, bevelled ramekins. On the far left was creamy chicken with almonds, a tender lamb dish, spinach, and daal (lentils), all to be added to a small mound of cashew/raisin topped basmati rice.



















I also ordered the garlic naan, which is usually shameless in its butter-slatheredness. This naan had roasted garlic rubbed into all its bready peaks and valleys.

Thankfully, dinner ended with a delicious whimper--rice pudding with cardamom, pistachios, and almonds--my tucking my book away in my purse, and an incrementally stronger resolution to knock out the dozen restaurants left.

A Tale of Two Pizzerias

There is something so romantically suggestive about pizza: the sweet but acidic bite of the tomatoes, the way stringy mozzarella makes your lips play with it, the slow but determined pleasure derived from waiting to reach the chewy crust of a good pizza.

I'm not the only who thinks this (PG-13) way. Yesterday, upon walking by the new pizza-making-man at work and admiring the uniformity and perfection of his calzones, I complimented him on his good work; I've noticed the attention he lovingly puts into his work. He grinned, beckoned me closer, and as we admired the glistening plumpness of the formed dough, he said "listen, I know they're beautiful.. they look like breast implants." Not the most poetic elucidation, but a variation on the same theme.

The top 100 features two pizza restaurants: Two Amy's, an institution on Wisconsin, has been heralded as having the best pizza in town. Pete's New Haven Style Apizza, with three locations in Clarendon, Friendship Heights, and Columbia Heights, has also been lauded for its pies and gritty original location (we opted for the yuppie location, vice the ones in the gentrifying or mostly-under-24 years-old neighborhoods).

So which one was better? Unscientifically, Two Amy's: it was irresistible, with an admirably soupy combination of melted cheese, barely-there crust, and a thin enough layer of sauce to not overwhelm the other ingredients. The pizza we ordered at Two Amy's also has the designation of being D.O.C (Denominazione di Origine Controllata), just like proprietary French wines that meet certain standards from the region from which they hail. Most importantly, it was prettier.



















Pete's APizza featured good ingredients and clever combinations of them on pizza, but was greasier and less.. Italian, with the entire surface covered in cheese and toppings.



















Where Pete's excelled in the Amy-esque regard of proportion was with its Sorbillo, a calzone-esque "pizza turnover" stuffed with sopressata, ricotta, mozzarella, as well as with its antipasti plate, which was a smattering of miscellany including a roasted squash salad with pomegranates, potato salad, roasted beets with goat cheese, and a wheatberry salad with sweet and savory things:



















What both did well were fry things and stuff cheese in them, with Pete's more keen on presentation and Two Amy's leaning toward substantively and overwhelmingly-sized. At Pete's, we had arancini, fried risotto balls on a bed of pesto.

Pete's threw down our fried things on simple plates, fried things that belied the glories within. On the left plate, we had potato and prosciutto croquettes, warm and salty and splashed with bits of prosciutto. On the right plate, we had suppli a telefono, risotto balls as well, with a generously-stuffed center of cheese. The cheese strings and contorts and quivers like telephone wires, from which it gets its name. I couldn't focus long enough to photograph it, but caught a croquette. Ciao bella!

Kinkead's

Well, it's hopeless writing about a restaurant more than a month afterwards. Relevant details I remember from a visit to Kinkead's in October are that Dotti and I went on a federal holiday, met up ostensibly to buy our plane tickets to Paris, and instead drank wines and ate fishes. So biblical of us.

I got there a few minutes early and had one of the snootiest combos I can think of: Sancerre and oysters. With a tabletop King Triton butter cover!



















Like a considerate friend, I was working on my second appetizer before Dotti even got her entrée. Why I have friends who dine with me, I don't know. I had the tuna tartare, gussied up Hawaiian style ("poke") with mango, toasted macadamia nuts, and delicious but now mystery chips. (Separately, in the case you'd like my opinion, I preferred Zentan's Pacific twist on steak tartare. Thank you.)

Lovely Dotti's food came, a staid study of temperance and responsible dining (it was one plate). She had brioche-crusted white fish and a pretty little softserve of mashed potatoes.

She also ordered fried okra. Or I did. It's one of those things like macaroni and cheese that we trend toward ordering at places like this just to see.

Unsurprisingly, it didn't taste like Oklahoma or North Carolina fried okra. Please compare. (That's catfish, not misshapen okra, on top by the way.)


Maybe let's try this picture instead; at least these okras have their own pile and no extraneous dipping sauces.


My meal (finally) was a delicious Yucatan tuna soup with tomatillos, chiles, lime, sour cream, and tortillas. I'll admit, it was pretty fantastic with a flavorful broth and large chunks of tuna. And refreshingly un-raw.

Top 100, you may have won a battle but I'll win the war: 14 to go (technically more if you include the fact I've hit more but have been to lazy to write them up)!

Black's Bar and Kitchen

Dotti and I went to Black's Bar and Kitchen in September. Unfortunately I only know this because of where my picture files are located on my computer (the date, not the fact I went). I do remember that:

1. This was part of our Bethesda-friendly top-100 sampling, based on our assumption of there being a higher percentage of men there (perhaps true, but most were of the over-60 variety)
2. The lighting gave everything a more-romantic sheen (good ambiance for a Dotti date)
3. The food was clever, but not quite as memorable as other Black's Restaurant Group
restaurants (the paragon of course being Black Market Bistro)
4. I received yet another parking ticket (only in retrospect did I notice some sort of parking restriction on the meter, oops)


Dotti began with a Malbec and the night began.


I had a beautiful, delicate grilled shrimp and avocado salad to start, with arugula, slices of grapefruit, and a citrus vinaigrette.

Dotti, for her entrée, had chicken and waffles. The waffles were a bit dry and a request for additional syrup landed on receptive but unsympathetic ears.


I have a bit of a proclivity for brussels sprouts at restaurants.. it's like tofu: they are a canvas upon which chefs can create. I had them with bacon. For dinner, I had softshell crab. Since I'm amateur, I can say I have no idea what was going on under it.. but I'm not certain it had to be that complicated.



















In the great Where the Men Are adventure, at least I should ostensibly have a reason to forget the course of the evening. Here, I'll just chalk it up to age.

Grapeseed

Blog management has been difficult of late. Dotti and I went to Grapeseed in November. Yes, November. I wrote up the dinner that night and for some reason didn't publish it, so provide below my pre-30, top 100 blog. I've learned so much more about responsibility in my 30s.

* * * * * * * * *

In my youth (age 25), I said that at the seasoned age of 30, I'd either move into my parents' basement, learn to knit and appreciate the company of cats, or move to the south of France. In the subsequent five years, I realized that I hate cats, the south of France oftentimes is plagued by striking sanitation workers , and that my parents don't even have a basement.

But....I'm not concerned: 30 will bring, at the very least, the successful completion of the top 100 and a trip to France. To the capital, that is, whose winter lights would only serve to highlight the shiny cheese wrappers and green Bordeaux bottle-riddled trash anyway. I think it will bring something else interesting too; I don't know what, but something befitting of the successful completion of three decades of existence.

The slow dawn of 30 illuminated the beauty of fiscal responsibility this evening. Dotti and I went to Grapeseed, a top 100 in Bethesda, which we foolishly hoped would be a good locale for some National Institute of Health (NIH) doctor-ogling. When we divined that NIH could also employ overgrown, under-orthodonticated biology majors who reminded us all that's painful about middle school, we decided to focus strictly on Bethesda's culinary offerings. We began with two delicious glasses of red wine.

We split two appetizers (plus bread), which, when slowly presented, gave us the appearance of having three separate meals and we successfully tricked ourselves that we were ordering more. Call us cheap, but having more wine glasses than total plates on the table almost makes bill-paying celebratory.


After a delicious tomato-and-roasted-garlic-drenched olive oil accompaniment to bread, we began with the beef tenderloin tips with thin slices of potato (patatas bravas apparently) below and a stroke of chimichurri sauce. It was both markedly spiced and spicy, a perfect introduction to dinner and to our wines.













My choice of appetizer, which became our second course, was grated pecorino (the sole reason I ordered it) atop gnocchi and chantarelle mushrooms. If I had to order a pre-death-row meal (or turning 30 meal-of-indulgence), stinky cheese of this ilk would be included somehow. The gnocchi were perfectly imperfect (one was shaped like a heart) and simultaneously chewy and minimally crusted.


For dinner, we had the salmon atop a quinoa salad, served with grilled asparagus. It was tasty--fresh, well-textured, etc.--but it was sort of hard to follow after a magic mix of flour, cream, cheese, and mushrooms.

But from the ashes of dating despair--my last love interest tripped over his mummy linens at a Halloween party and Dotti unwittingly secured romantic confessions from a man who fits the mold for a middle school civics instructor--we made plans for the next list to conquer: a multi-region happy hour bar crawl. The tides are turning and with 30 and 2012 comes a new initiative: an anthropological examination of bars across the city entitled, Where the Men Are.

Paris

What happens when you realize that you've fallen in love.. with a city? There are, admittedly, massive amounts of discontent and frustration that follow--starting when you are no longer in that city--but a mildly rational understanding that that city will somehow determine your future. What is worse is when an amateur food critic--this one right here--realizes that she fell in love with a city that is itself a nexus between food and love. These types of thoughts lead said amateur food critic to realize that whether or not she has her own personal nexus between food and love, she'll always have Paris. And that gives her hope and a lot of pretty pictures.

So what inspired these profound tragic yet inexorably fatalistic observations? A whirlwind of esgargots, gruyère, pastries, conversations with half of Paris, vins, and forays into the Parisian night.

I am reluctantly embracing my new time zone (my watch still is on Paris time and I've as of yet refused to remove my "Plan de Paris" from my purse), but it might behoove me to show rather than describe our nine-day Parisian adventure. Events that are not documented were when poor Dotti's mouth was spat in (while yawning, a man on the metro managed to spit in it), when we attempted to determine the sexuality of two men at a nearby table (we later learned they were Americans from DC... how outrageously unsurprising), and when we spent two evenings in the weirdest bar of our collective memory: a bar full of starers, vaudeville-esque performers, joke-tellers, fight-provokers, and an appropriate venue to learn that French men don't fear very public displays of affection.

We ate, but my friends thankfully indulged my love for my old apartment on Rue de Savoie:


My love of the Parisian skyline, despite many-kilometer-fast winds and mild vertigo:













My love of exorbitantly expensive drinks (at the Hemingway Bar at the Ritz) with roses in them and heavy hors d'oeuvres that functioned as dinner on New Year's Eve. We even saw Ina Garten--the Barefoot Contessa--who lives sometimes in Paris. We were all intrigued to learn, after we read her biography the next day, that she worked for the Office of Management and Budget in DC and left for something more soul-stirring. I, of course, began uncharitably hating her more.



















I had duck--twice--first at Christian Constant's restaurant Café Constant (a meal about which I found before and after pictures to be very illustrative), and then a second time at A La Petite Chaise, a quiet neighborhood favorite and the oldest restaurant in Paris that we visited twice.



















We had fancy cocktails with American names that complemented our new Frenchy scarves and bright nails:













We even had one scandalous day where all we did is eat French onion soup for breakfast and Gerard Mulot macarons for dinner.



















Then, we went to Disneyland Paris and fell in love with being an eight-year-old obsessed with princesses again. That's Dotti in a teacup and me in front of Le Château de la Belle au Bois Dormant (Sleeping Beauty's Castle).



















That night, I had butter and garlic stuffed snails at Chez Georges, my favorite bistro with simultaneously snooty and hospitably warm service and where I learned (very indulgently) that rare is "saignant" or bloody. Très bien.



















Dotti and I also went to the Breizh Cafe, a favorite gallette/crêpe place of mine in the Marais, where raw-milk cheese and ham are lovingly folded into a crisp buckwheat savory gallette and the best crêpes come with salted butter caramel.


















Thankfully, though, Paris is a moveable feast.