not derby pie

We celebrated friends’ almost-due-date last night at The Federalist, a restaurant with a great-looking menu and enough empty tables to make you know, the minute you step into the restaurant, that you’ve made a bad choice. There were about two parties in each of the five-or-so rooms that make up The Federalist, giving everyone privacy but killing any chance at buzz or scene. No one was there. Not a good sign.

As I said, the menu looked great. Market-driven salads and homemade sausage, the requisite beet dish (walnuts, Stilton), lots of seafood, a variety of meat+purée pairings, and even a quail dish. I was tempted by the quail, but my very unscientific analysis suggests that restaurants generally have an easier time with apps than with mains. Think about the last time you didn’t like a restaurant meal: apps good, mains eh, right? TF didn’t seem like the kind of place to take a chance on a $30 lobster entree. I went with the greenmarket salad and the homemade duck sausage served in a consommé.

Between the six of us, we tried 11 of the dishes on the menu. None of the 11 was special, and a few were downright mediocre. TF seems to have some issues with restraint, often muddling a dish with too many disparate components when it would have been better with less on the plate. When’s the last time a tuna tartare needed avocado purée, kumquat chutney, roasted peppers, and sea beans? Never. And by the way: if you’ve got sea beans in house, and you have a market salad on your menu, and it’s winter (precluding the use of tomatoes, peaches, and most other things that make salad pop), why not add some sea beans to the otherwise sleepy mix of lettuce, celery, radishes, and cauliflower? I could make a more exciting (and less aggressively salted) salad at home for a lot less than $10.

Perhaps my biggest gripe with TF - and this is almost never the case for me - was the service. Our waiter tried multiple times to insert himself into our conversation, participated in our jokes, and lingered too long at our table. We asked for a couple recommendations at the start of the meal, and he wound up walking through the entire menu, which for god’s sake, customers never want. He put dishes in front of the wrong people, never checked that I had a spoon for my consommé (nope), and - most offensive of all - assumed that we liked our food, announced as much, and left us no window to share that, in quite a few cases, we didn’t. We ordered three desserts (white chocolate mousse/lemon curd, whoopie pies, tangerine Bavarian) and all three were duds. But because there were six of us, when we all took one bite of each, the plates were left empty. “I see that you’ve clearly enjoyed the desserts,” the waiter says. No, buddy. Six people trying a single (bad) dessert x3 = 3 empty plates and 6 grumpy people. When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me. Truly.

All this, and the meal was expensive, too. If your house-made salt cod is actually a row of fritters that taste like fish sticks, you have no business charging $12 for them.

Better service would go along way here. Your job as a server, as far as I’m concerned, is to be helpful, gracious, and unobtrusive. I’m there to hang out with my friends, not my waiter. So many DC restaurants train their waitstaff to be funny, or talkative, or even bombastic (a waiter at a certain middling Mexican restaurant in town once announced that “we started this restaurant because we wanted to shake up the DC dining scene” - dude, seriously. Shut up.). Just get us water (tap, of course), share a few recommendations when asked, put the plates in front of the right people, and ask earnestly if we enjoyed our meal. Less is more.

After yet another mediocre dinner downtown, I’m starting to lose hope that there remain some great restaurants in DC that I have yet to try. Buoy me with your suggestions: where should we go next?

AdMo residents collectively jumped for joy when, in the span of what seems like 1 week, our ‘hood became DC’s destination for decent-to-great Asian soup. As of this month, there are 2 new ramen shops in the square block between 18th and Columbia and Adams Mill and Belmont; a Pho 14 just east of there; and, if rumors stand up, a toki underground outpost opening in the old Marrakech Lounge space.

I said decent-to-great. Let’s talk about what separates these from those.

Toki has been the mayor of tame town for some time, and even with a boatload of newcomers to compete with, it still is. Better broth, better noodles, better toppings, better service. The wait is the limiting factor at toki, but once it comes to AdMo, traffic at both branches may die down.

Sakuramen is the new spot on 18th, and I wrote about it extensively in my last post. The big update coming out of Saku is the addition of tonkotsu, broth made from roasted, slow-cooked pork bones, for winter. The broth is good, and it gives much-needed body to the Saku bowl. Eggs still overcooked, IMHO, but flavorful. Apps pretty tasty.

TAAN Noodles is the spot on Columbia rd, and it provides a good counterbalance to Saku. A bit more chichi, which in this case means mood lighting, a fancy bar, and absurdly expensive drinks. People, a Sapporo will cost you $11. That’s totally absurd. With the exception of a $6 Cass, there’s nothing on this menu that’s reasonably priced. And when you’re going out for ramen - where the best bowl in the city is the cheapest, at $12 - it’s maddening to pay an average of $3 more just for a decent drink to accompany the noodles. I get that TAAN has to make a margin, but the drinks are actually a deterrent to going (especially when reasonably priced competition is 100 feet away).

The ramen at TAAN is good, not great (yet?). Their triple stock ramen is thick and cloudy and deeply savory, and the pork belly is well crisped (though the fat wasn’t fully rendered, which was a bummer). Their duck ramen is a nice twist on the original. Clearer broth, cleaner flavor, good confit.

Their biggest flop, interestingly, is the vegetarian ramen. With all the options before them (kombu dashi; miso; shoyu; etc), one wonders why on earth they opted instead to present vegetarians with a big bowl of totally-not-Asian-inspired corn chowder, which not only isn’t tasty, but also is the worst backdrop for a pile of noodles pretty much ever. I went to TAAN with two vegetarians, and one went to get second dinner afterward at a burger place nearby. For shame. When vegetarians go for ramen, they want ramen. Let them eat ramen.

We’re waiting with bated breath for Toki. Meanwhile, let’s go give Saku and TAAN our business - and the whip them into tip-top shape. They’ll need it when Toki comes to town.

If you read WaPo restaurant reviews, you know that the paper uses a four-star ranking system to evaluate restaurants. But from reading Tom Sietsema’s reviews, you might conclude that the four-star system doesn’t provide enough options: more often than any other grade, Tom awards restaurants 2 1/2 stars. If he were awarding four stars right and left, everyone would be up in arms, claiming grade inflation. DC’s dining scene is fine but it’s not great; very few local restaurants have ever been at the top of their craft (and even fewer are sending out top-notch food at any given time).

The issue with Tom’s 2.5-star habit is actually a problem of grade inflation as well, but we’ll get to that in a minute. There’s a more fundamental issue at play, which is that a four-star rating system doesn’t have a fifth option. If the reviewer wants an option squarely in the middle, he/she should institute a 5-star rating system - or drop down to a 3-star system. The whole point of a four-star rating system, one might say, is to force reviewers to pick: either a restaurant is above average, or it is below average.

To be sure, stars mean different things to different reviewers. In his tenure as the restaurant critic for the New York Times, Sam Sifton awarded 2 stars to restaurants about which he subsequently gushed. He condemned, then publicly combatted, the grade inflation that many believed had seeped into restaurant criticism. But here in DC, a 2-star restaurant is fine, sometimes good; never great. And that’s kind of the point. As a restaurant reviewer in DC, your job is evaluate restaurants with the sort of sometimes-brutal honesty that helps diners make tough choices and sends a message to restaurants that they can’t skate by on average food and service.

And that’s the other problem with the 2.5-star review. 2.5 stars from Tom Sietsema is enough to fill a restaurant (see that whole good-not-great thing; all but a small handful of DC’s excellent restaurants are very expensive), enough to believe you can coast for a while and still turn a profit. 2 stars doesn’t have that effect. I’d like to believe that if Tom stuck to the four options a 4-star system allows, he’d not award 3 stars unless the restaurant really deserved them - which means we’d have loads of 2-star restaurants, and only a few that truly put out great food. This would show the DC restaurant scene as it really is; better yet, it would encourage restaurants to strive for excellence.

Paul Qui - he of Top Chef fame - is taking over Austin, and maybe the world. With his two Siamese-twin restaurants Uchi and Uchiko absolutely killing it, he’s spreading his wings with THREE new outposts on the easy side, appropriately dubbed East Side King. Judging by these tare-drenched “savage buns,” that’s three more aces in the hole.

humansofnewyork:

This man was from Israel and had a very thick accent, so he was a little difficult to understand. He was standing alone when I found him, but he kept telling me he wanted to take a picture with “his bike.” 

I couldn’t see a bike anywhere, so I kept asking him to repeat himself. “My bike,” he said, “my bike.” 

Just when I was about to give up, his bike walked up.

(Source: humansofnewyork)

Four Eyes and Fridays

After 29 years of 20/20, my eyes decided it was time for a new accessory.

Wearing them is still pretty uncomfortable - on my eyes, but also on my ears and my bridge - but I’m sure that’ll get better with time. It hurts to look at a computer screen and to read much of anything, which I suppose is my body’s way of telling me it’s time to slow down.

So I’m listening. I’m taking the day off of work, going to my parents’ house, and spending the day cooking with my mom. We’re making a big dinner tonight with the rest of the family to celebrate her 60th birthday; there’ll be whole roasted fish with Veracruz sauce, grilled eggplant with lemon and soy, a rosewater and pistachio semolina cake, and much, much more. We’re even going to steal away midday and take my Grandma to lunch. I think it’s just what the doctor ordered.

Tried Sakuramen today. In case you’ve no clue what I’m talking about: Sakuramen is the new ramen place in AdMo, my neighborhood. Needless to say, I was thrilled by its arrival. AdMo has been a near-wasteland for years, but between Mintwood Place and now Saku, the hellish construction seems to be playing off.

While Toki is basically a world away on H street NE, I’ve made the trek several times and - spoiler alert - will probably continue to head over there when I want a killer bowl of ramen. Indulge me in a comparison:

Toki bases all its soups on Tonkotsu, that heady, cloudy broth made from long-simmered pork bones. Sakuramen won’t be doing that till December. For now, they’re using chicken bones for either shoyu- (soy) or miso-based broth. Clearer, lighter, and - IMHO - not as good. I’ll be eager to taste their tonkotsu when winter rolls around.

For those of you in the unfortunate position to avoid butter in your pumpkin pies, here’s the recipe that I used. The pumpkin pie connoisseur in my house said she wouldn’t change a thing.

1 15-oz. can pureed pumpkin

2/3 cup brown sugar

1 tablespoon cornstarch

1 cup almond milk

3 eggs

1-1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon cloves

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

1/4 teaspon ground ginger

1 teaspoon vanilla

Cooked at 350 for 50 minutes.

Learned how to make legit sushi rolls tonight. This one’s tuna-avocado with scallion. Happy birthday Lilah!

Third attempt at caramelizing white chocolate. Y’all, this stuff is like crack.