I started my Restaurant Week with a restaurant from which it seemed I could get a good deal and benefit financially from a $35 menu. I did at Daikaya Izakaya, across the street to the Verizon Center and next to Graffiato.
So eager for Restaurant Week, I was parked and on their block before 5 pm for my 6 o'clock reservation, so dropped in to Graffiato for a glass of wine. After writing four postcards (an amateur food critic is a woman of letters after all), I wandered to the next store front and proudly told the hostess I had a reservation: she frigidly told me that they didn't take reservations and I must have meant upstairs (I had wandered into their "casual" ramen shop downstairs). The signage wasn't clear (particularly given the fact I'd already walked by the storefront twice and missed it), but I left and went upstairs, with a very self-satisfying eye roll.
Upstairs was much more hospitable, until the masses of Restaurant Week diners descended densely as I was finishing my meal. The hostess offered me a magazine (I should have specified my preferred language), so I flipped through a Japanese-language fashion magazine I couldn't understand but that was heavier on pictures than articles.
I started with a cocktail off the happy hour menu, which featured an image of a cartoon cat (much more endearing that it sounds but also representative of an affinity for animal drawings I don't entirely understand). It (the drink) sported shochu and homemade ginger beer, an ideal palate cleanser with bite and spice.
The first item was raw octopus, marinated in wasabi and served with wasabi leaves and diced granny smith apples. The flavor was exquiste -- delicate but spicy, in the nose rather than the mouth -- but the octopus, although in small pieces, was overly chewy. I ordered tuna poke -- a Hawaiian dish -- a la carte and while the color of the tuna was beautiful and the shredded nori (seaweed) a vision, it tasted of too much onion. I mean the green, white, and fried garlic kind.
The next dish was my favorite: grilled avocado with a pool of ponzu sauce, a daub of wasabi paste, nori salt (dried seaweed mixed with sea salt -- so essentially salt on salt), and a spritz of lemon. It was rich, smoky, warm, and acidic and I scraped off as much as I could from that helpless avocado shell.
Diners during Restaurant Week are offered a skewer of some type of meat to precede the main course and I had beef tenderloin. It had a yakitori sauce -- it wasn't syrupy but was stilll sweet -- and in addition to trying to sop off as much as I could from my plate, I also almost managed to ingest the whole stick in my enthusiasm (i.e., I gently jabbed my throat by not paying attention).
While earnest, I was also savoring at a slower rate than most diners, as my fish was brought at the same time: dining alone does that to a person's food consumption time. When food partnerless, I find it's pretty fun to ogle the plates in front of me (also perhaps the result of not having a text-full magazine).
At any rate, the main course was miso-glazed salmon, which was moist (and partly raw), the skin (mostly) crispy, and the carrot puree sweet and rich. The pickle on top was mildly briny and a bit floral -- investigating a bit, my waitress told me there is one chef in the kitchen who is the keeper of the pickle barrel, set up before the restaurant was even open.
After this many courses in (and with only one more dinner course to go), I briefly gave thought to the restaurants I passed coming to the restaurant from my car, in the event $35.14 later I still needed some actual sustenance. The rice "ball" was more than expected, however, a thick but flat pyramid of dense rice with a pulled pork filling. The waitress instructed me to use the seaweed as a sanwich and dig in: my lips kept getting stuck on the moistureless, dry paper-like vegetable, but I imagine it's normally eaten in humid, people-filled streets.
The last course was chocolate ice cream with miso-banana caramel and banana chips (which were extremely subtle except in diluted color). It was a fine, if simple, dessert, but was charmingly served in old stemware.
Overall, it was a pleasure -- hip yet seemingly traditional and with dishes owning bold flavors -- but still lacked the sedated simplicity of places like Izakaya Seki (I threw down the gauntlet without having proven to you, dear reader, that I have in fact been there). You'll see -- just maybe not this week.
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