Woodward Table

We're back to real-time. Well, ok, not permanently--I still have birthday dinners from 2011 to write up--but we'll get there. But not this week. It's Restaurant Week in DC, which has put the fire under my seat (I'm not sure that's how that saying goes) to be efficient. Stealth. Shrewd. Nimble. Linguistically economical.

I am also returning to my old habits, like trying a new place with the inestimable Sue. She sent along the Washingtonian's 2013 Restaurant Preview a few days ago and after minimal discussion--they were all new to us--we settled on Woodward Table. For the life of me, I couldn't and can't remember the name. Westwood Table? Westward Kitchen? Westward Table? It didn't matter; we both found it. And in accumulating snow, no less.

In the Washingtonian write-up, we were both drawn to the Southern: Sue is a Georgia girl and I'm, well, a mid-westerner who likes fried things. We were drawn to sophisticated prose like "Southern-with-a-twist plates include pan-roasted lobster with grits as well as turtle bisque" and something else about fried-chicken biscuits and country-ham flatbread with bacon marmalade. We exchanged our Christmas presents--a ridiculously soft but practical winter hat from Sue (that I've worn every day since) and a sparkly Sooners t-shirt to Sue. One could (and hopefully would) say that we are women of warmth and substance.

That's to say we agreed pretty quickly it wasn't really Southern. But it was tasty. I left home--scraping snow flakes off my little windshield--and arrived a bit early because I'm not adept at driving in snow (or minimal flakes of any sort). So, I had a glass of French sparkling wine as I watched the kitchen machinations just beyond the wooden half wall. I watched the kitchen staff go between stations and chit chat before the severe dinner rush. For an amateur food critic, this is like peeking behind the Kennedy Center curtain before a night of opera. Less dramatically, it's a lovely way to spend an evening when one's book was left at home.

 

I (I'll say tackily) asked for bread since I was gauche enough to chew gum on the ride up and almost inside the restaurant. The waiter indulged by high and low-brow tastes (I specifically asked for the sparkling wine from Alsace--une région en france--and I accidentally pronounced it in my Frenchiest accent) and the potato roll oozed yeast and Parkerhouse.

 

I couldn't resist an appetizer. The waiter and I had discussed the duck soup, because my fingers were tingling with cold and I still felt uncomfortably frozen. Francophilically of me, however, I got the charcuterie plate. It wasn't the best.. or comparable to the one at Proof (a pho terrine!) or as pretty as the one at Brasserie Beck (incidentally, do you know how awesome it is to search oneself and "charcuterie" and get results?) but it was tasty and a very good foil to a cold evening.

One thing I will lament at restaurants of this caliber serving charcuterie plates, however, is their runners' and servers' reticence to indulge in a description of the extensive amount of work--and naming conventions--involved in preparing what they are serving. We had pâtés and terrines, yes, but of what? The cornichons and sweet-and-sour pickles were easy enough to decipher, but I know this isn't easy. I had a conversation just this evening at Society Fair, my neighborhood fancy foods store, about the delicate treatment of sausage during the cooking process. These aren't meats that emerge naturally: they are constructions of butchers who give thought and life to their creations.

Where did that soapbox come from? Ahem. Sue, who graciously allowed me to photograph her and her grilled New York strip steak, enjoyed it accompanied by cipollini onions and wild mushrooms.

I had the pan-roasted trout with king trumpet mushrooms, Brussels sprouts, sweet potatoes, and a cider-rosemary jus. It was an attractive-enough presentation, but the sweet potato chunks were large, the Brussels sprouts too small, and the trumpet mushrooms lacked their extravagant, tender bouquets (it was all stems). It was good, but it was good in the way that food is when when two girls are catching up. Neither one of us became silently rapturous about the plates before us. Which is fine--we had too much to discuss anyway.

Sue had the foresight to order French fries, which came paired with a rosemary-garlic aïoli. This type of food is critical in the free flow of girl gossip.

Sue is a trooper in indulging the oftentimes difficult burden of bloggership: ordering dessert. Sue took steak home to-go and I polished off all but one bite of my fish. But, as true amateur food critics, we indulged. We had a dessert straightforwardly called "Coffee and Cream," with a mocha mousse, almond chocolate crumble (a very cleverly textured crust), coffee toffee, and cappuccino cream. It was excessive but still restrained-enough, like any fancy dessert, and with coffees and espressos and last-minute gossip-divulging, was a delightful meal. And only happened two days ago.