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Rasika, with 2014 James Beard Award Winning Chef Vikram Sunderam, and Rasika West End, Modern Indian in Penn Quarter and West End


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4 hours ago, MarkS said:

We ate at Rasika West on Sat August 17 before a Kennedy Center Show.  Despite options above we were extremely happy with solid food, great service.  The meal was well paced and the dishes we ordered were great.  We stayed mostly with fish dishes and were very pleased.  They recognized our 34th anniversary with champagne and desert on the house, great.

And by the way, Squeeze at the Kennedy Center, phenomenal.

Funny, I went to a Michelin one-star restaurant tonight after seeing a play at the Kennedy Center.

No, Marcel's doesn't "actually" have one star, but it deserves about ten stars as an extended make-up call for Michelin's blundering mishaps.

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for what it's worth, i found my first meal at rasika (dinner in august 2015) to be a little disappointing on the whole as well, with some ho-hum dishes and some things I thought were not good. nonetheless, we went back for lunch on this trip. it was probably a better meal in some ways though again i came away unconvinced by its reputation. i'll have that second report later in the week probably but if anyone is interested in that 2015 report it is here.

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here is my review of our restaurant week lunch at rasika, almost exactly four years after my somewhat disappointing dinner there in 2015. the major takeaway:

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Things started out very well in the first course with three hits out of the four. Their signature palak chaat—which I’d enjoyed in 2015—is still very good. The chicken tikka pieces seemed a little too large but they were marinated and grilled well. The tawa sea bass—a very large portion—was nicely done with the pressed rice crust but it was the accompanying lemon pickle and spiced potato mash that I liked the most. That leaves the lamb goli kabab—it wasn’t bad but it was basically like eating unremarkable meatballs coated with a slightly spicy tomato sauce. This was mostly mine and I am still kicking myself for not getting the calamari balchao. Still, we were very happy at this point.

Things got more mediocre with the entrees. This is both because there was too much of a sameness between the three curries—and a sameness neither signaled on the menu nor pointed out by our server—and because all the dishes were prepared in a rather uninspired manner. Both the alleged Goan fish curry and the murgh mirch korma were dominated by tomato. There was not much sign of coconut or Goan flavours in the former and no sign whatsoever of the billed Sichuan pepper in the latter; indeed, there was nothing korma’ish about the korma or anything really to recommend it over average home-made chicken curry. The tandoori salmon was fine but three large chunks of fish with green chutney is an odd main course (and it was hard to tell why this was a main course and the hariyali tikka an appetizer). Unexpectedly then, the butter chicken that the older brat got, despite our trying to gently guide him in a more adventurous direction, turned out to be the best dish in this course.

Desserts were an improvement on the main courses but not uniformly so. In the plus column were the mango cardamom panna cotta and the coconut jaggery rice pudding. In the blah column was the rose plum sorbet—it would have been very good as just plum sorbet but the rose added on—presumably to make it more “Indian”—made it too cloying. And speaking of cloying, the gulab jamun cheesecake looked and tasted like a bad idea—though I suspect whoever came up with it thinks it is a very good idea.

If you’ve been counting you’ll note that we liked 6/12 dishes a lot. It is true that there was only dish that we thought was bad (the cheesecake) but there was too much that seemed by the numbers. That doesn’t seem like a great hit rate for a restaurant vying to be the best in its genre in the US. Now, of course, this was at lunch and it was during restaurant week but it was about the same hit rate as I’d experienced in 2015 at dinner. Perhaps I’ve gotten unlucky twice but it seems to me that Rasika is quite a way behind its peers in London—our weekday prix fixe lunches at the Cinnamon Club, in particular, were so much better in both conception and execution.

Service was friendly and present—they are well staffed—but the courses were very unevenly timed. The first course came out right away but then it took a long time for the mains to arrive and even longer after that for the desserts to show up. Perhaps the kitchen was taken by surprise by the Restaurant Week rush. That rush—if it is indeed unusual for weekday lunch—might have been because the Restaurant Week menu was, despite my reservations above, a very good deal. $22/head for a hefty meal at a top restaurant is by any measure a very good price. And even if we didn’t think the meal lived up to Rasika’s lofty reputation it was a very good meal for $22/head. And who knows, perhaps if we’d made a few different choices we’d have been more impressed.

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the rest of the write-up with pictures is on the blog.

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21 hours ago, mongo jones said:

Desserts were an improvement on the main courses but not uniformly so. In the plus column were the mango cardamom panna cotta and the coconut jaggery rice pudding. In the blah column was the rose plum sorbet—it would have been very good as just plum sorbet but the rose added on—presumably to make it more “Indian”—made it too cloying. And speaking of cloying, the gulab jamun cheesecake looked and tasted like a bad idea—though I suspect whoever came up with it thinks it is a very good idea.

I've had many excellent RW lunches at Rasika West End over the years, but yeah...that cheesecake was one of the worst things I've ever had there. 

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Rasika West End is a solid choice for a business lunch, but I probably wouldn't go out of my way for it. They also offer smaller dishes, such as a single grilled filet of salmon without a lot of embellishments (but perfectly cooked). So if you're someone who doesn't want a big lunch, this may be a good choice.

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I popped into the Penn Quarter location (without a reservation) at 5pm on Friday hoping to grab seats at the bar, but we were able to score a table so long as we vacated in 90 mins or so.

The food and service were as good as ever but what really struck me were the prices.  The prices here seemed to pre-pandemic, "normal" prices for food and drink.  In fact, they seemed a lot lower than many run of the mill places.

As a point of comparison, two of us had the palak chaat, two entrees, two sides (small portions) and a couple orders of naan, and a bottle of wine and the bill before tax and tip was $105 each.  I went to Tail Up Goat for the first time a couple weeks ago and it was $105 per person just for the food! (And the drink prices were absurd:  the cheapest GLASS of wine was $17 and most were in the $20s).  At Rasika, we also took home enough food for probably 3 more meals, and at TUG, we didn't have any leftovers.  And the food at TUG was fine, but nothing that I'd run back for (the menu is very small, the portions are small, and only one dish out of four really moved me), but Rasika on the other hand, could have me eating there for a week straight and never get bored or run out of options.

 

tl;dr - If you arrive early you can score bar seats or maybe a table without a reservation.  It's a great bargain for top quality food and service.

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Restaurant Week lunch at RWE is now up to $35.

Sadly, not worth it any more. Used to be my favorite RW option. 

Had excellent RW meals at Chef Geoff's West End and Pisco y Nazca, both at $25, on the other hand. 

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2 hours ago, mtureck said:

Restaurant Week lunch at RWE is now up to $35.

Sadly, not worth it any more. Used to be my favorite RW option.

If anyone is able to add up the à la carte prices here, and reach $50, let us know. I can’t believe Restaurant Week still exists. Then again, I can’t believe over 74 million people … oh, never mind. 🙂

IMG_1558.pngIMG_1559.jpeg

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