Obelisk was a birthday dinner meal (meh, circa three months ago) that took some effort to schedule, cancel, and subsequently reschedule: I initially thought it was a hard reservation to make, settled on my birthday weekend, cancelled it last minute thinking I had other plans, then snuck back in an hour later than originally.
I have been eating, I'm sure you can tell, but not entirely alone. This was not an alone dinner and my companion was kind enough to indulge in joining me. It was charming--low lighting (it's not my camera) and prolific amounts of food. When we entered, though, I'll admit it was underwhelming: the whole room looked like a Days Inn free breakfast room, with bland-textiled tables and wicker-y chairs. It wasn't something out of an Audrey Hepburn-Gregory Peck romp.
We did the tasting menu with the wine pairing (good man knew there was no alternative on the day a woman turns 31, yikes), but the good stuff was front-loaded, even as the room's shadows started to meld together after more and more wine.
We started with an exquisite mix of antipasti--bread, breadsticks, and olives--and everyone's favorite Italian caloric cream-ball, house-made burrata, which is a mozzarella skin enclosing cream. Seriously.
The beautiful thing about antipasti at Obelisk is that they keep coming. Next were sides of sardines on soft, caramelized onions and applies with raisins. It was salty and sweet.. and glistened. Next were pork head cheese balls with a side of lentils. Their name probably makes it too difficult for you to think they're edible, but they were... very much so.
So, back to sardines. Sardines remind of Mediterranean evenings, so of course, I was instantly
transformed from a Dupont Circle restaurant on a chilly night to...
Athens. Cue flashback.
In my youth, I went to Greece with my friend Sonia, now an esteemed graduate of the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan. We went to a delicious restaurant in Athens called, but of course, Sardelles, Greek for... you guessed it. For the first time, we had limoncello (granted, not Greek) and Masticha, Greece's delicious, secret non-ouzo cousin. Anyway, that's neither here nor there.
Next on the tasting menu were the pasta-esque dishes. We're going to speed through this section because I don't remember the details of what we ordered and I'm not sure I'd get them again. My friend had some seafood soup (he liked it) and I had a rabbit stew. It was light on the stew but the pasta was good. I get the heebie jeebies a bit now because rabbit has little bones and I always manage to get at least one. Then I think of Thumper and it's over.
Same with the main courses. My friend got a small-boned bird (about which he was moderately but not excessively enthusiastic) and I had fish. It was tasty--I don't recall what specifically, so alas. It had a romesco sauce (a nut and red pepper sauce) and a beautiful artichoke. It was beautiful and simple and if Hemingway were a vegetable, he'd be a beautiful and simple pared down artichoke like this one.
Then there was a cheese plate. Italian-style, it's dessert. Which I love. My friend had some sort of cake... maybe? I had an apple strudel-esque pastry. It was lovely but a bit too advanced Italian for me--in my simple Italian tastes, I'd rather have big meats, big pasta, and big vegetables.
This was big regional Italian cooking. The wines were beautiful, though, and the service was kind and attentive. We just couldn't achieve the same levels of food satisfaction as we had with the first wave of dishes... creative but simple appetizers that showcased the rich flavors from quality ingredients that mark fine Italian food. But alas. It brought me one step closer to two restaurants away.
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