My mother flew in from Iowa yesterday, arriving at National at 11 and needing to be at Dulles by 3 PM. After careful triangulation on the metro system we determined that two--and only two--restaurants would both let us to have a lunch worthy of her exceedingly paltry expense account and allow her to catch the 5A out to Dulles: Cafe Atlantico, off of Navy-Archives, then catching the bus at L'Enfant, or Pho-75 in Virginia, catching the bus at the Rosslyn metro.
Pho-75, however, is a half a mile from the metro. We checked the weather forecast Monday night. Cafe Atlantico, then.
And a fine, fine lunch it was. My mother caught the blue line by accident, so I sipped a mint-limeade at the bar while waiting. The bar was empty save for Jose Andres himself, flipping through a magazine and looking unusually calm. I tried desperately to think of something to say to one of my culinary heros that wouldn't make me sound like a nerd at prom--but, er, I _was_ a nerd at prom, and old shyness dies hard. I silently drank and thought quiet admiring thoughts instead.
My mother finally stumbled in. She's been a fan of Cafe Atlantico since well before I moved here seven years ago, and she's not shy at all. She also, fortunately, didn't recognize Andres, so we just sat at a table under the window and I didn't whisper anything until he'd left. We split the soup, the ceviche, and an order of the day's special, soft-shell crab.
The soup was, as usual, brilliant, sweet potato with crunchy things and a dollop of crema. Whenever the weather decides to cool, I want an Atlantico-Corduroy soup cook-off. Winner gets to shout: No--
well, you know, at the loser.
Ceviche was tuna chunks under a lump of fat, soft avocado, and it was very good, though it was the soup we went dueling over for the last scrape. Soft-shell was also very nice, I think--by the time you split a soft-shell in two, though, hunks of meat have gone squirting in every direction and it's a little hard to find one with just the right crunch left. I wasn't such a fan of its warm tomato, olive, and something else base, which overpowered the faintly sweet crab--but if you pulled it out, the base was tasty when piled onto the surrounding chips.
My mother swore she was too full for dessert and I was leery of falling asleep at my desk, so we passed, though not until I'd detailed the past wonders of Mr. Klc's baba in a futile attempt to change both our minds. Instead, we metro'd down to L'Enfant plaza and bought a pint of plums from the Tuesday farmers' market to eat while waiting for the bus. They were good, but I fell asleep anyway.
Edited by babka, 27 July 2005 - 04:10 PM.
And as a finale, their molten chocolate cake, which was good, though pretty typical for that dessert.
