The Boca Sola: Gom Ba Woo and Other October Culinary Adventures

I finally have a hook. A headline. A justification for why I'm writing this catch-up blog entry at all: I knocked off a restaurant from one of my lists.

I'd like to say it's the elusive Citronelle, so I can finally have completed the Washingtonian Top 100 list. (Or that I have updated my Top 100 check-off list to reflect restaurants I have actually been to). But, extensive water damage and perhaps a more desirable location in New York City has prevented this amateur food blogger from a very simple dream, completing a 1 million calorie adventure and hitting up this purported paragon of French cuisine.

Nevertheless, I can proudly say I don't need escargots and a high-brow Georgetown location to bring me back to the blog; instead, I will write to you about the glories of dining in a strip mall, drinking rice water, and dining in Annandale, which permits pumpkin patch viewing beforehand and a trip to Sears afterwards.

We headed to Gom Ba Woo, one of many Annandale establishments on the Washingtonian's Top 100 Cheap Eats. We parked and assessed our surroundings: a shoddy looking grocery store off yonder, an odd looking karaoke bar next door--with some weird looking cartoon characters smiling from the walls--and our future blog-worthy dining experience. Everyone knew we didn't belong when we went inside, but that only made our waitress welcome us more.

We started with panchan, Korean appetizers, which feed a nasty sort of dependence: after either a bite of kimchee or the pickled, spicy cucumbers, I coughed and teared up until the bit of chili stuck in my respiratory system decided to abandon its position. To help it out, I had a bit of mayonaise-soaked apples in a Waldorf-esque salad. It was great fun, having vegetables that on their own are quite unsophisticated: cabbage, cucumbers, sprouts... and then seeing them accesorized with sesame oil, chili, and vinegars. We washed it down with cold glasses of water that tasted delicately of rice.

Then we each had soups: broths with hunks of tender meat and big bones, in a ghostly liquid filled with wispy eggs, clear noodles, and unidentified chunks of a root vegetable. I'd like to call my dining partner my man friend--or better yet, my Mountain Man (what a lovely acronym for its alliteration alone)--but I think I'll stick to "he" and "him" out of respect for his urban, sophisticated sensibilities and his lack of living in, well, the mountains.

But he does laugh at jokes like this. Everyone loves a little scatological humor.

There has been much dining here in Virginia, however, that for some reason hasn't or couldn't merit inclusion in top 100 lists. As I am catching up, please forgive the flashcard-style of my food recounting, but consider these culinary highlights!

There were three types of delicious cake at former neighbor Steve's wedding--buttercreams, mollasses icings, ganache, you name it. The cake was so good, we took video.

There was fancy French food, when we finally got to Le Diplomate, to celebrate Sonia's birthday.

There was fancy triple cream with Vidalian onion jam, courtesy of my brother.

There was a wonderful special sushi roll at our new favorite sushi place, Zento (predominately because it boasts legitimately-cheap happy hour specials), a tuna roll with ginger, cilantro, jalapeno, and tuna.. and also a really photogenic masago-confettied eel roll.