Joshua Grinnell

The restaurant guide has a section for Courthouse which omits Ray's and Guajillo to Rosslyn, which is just wacky, but the good places are included there. Honestly, the only places to avoid like the plague would be Attila's (the food is all right, they just happen to be a little surly), Summers, and Larry's Cookies. I haven't eaten at the Italian place across from Sawatdee or at Ragtime, but I haven't heard raves about them.

We had our attendants' dinner there a month ago and the menu has not changed- definitely still a damn good meal.

Milady and I prefer Kanpai to Cafe Asia up the street, but I'd be interested to know if any sushi snobs have an opinion on the place. The avocado rolls come with chunks of avocado instead of creamed mess, for one, but that's not really a snob argument. I just like avocado.

Pentagon City Costco had a large tray of fresh figs for about 7 dollars yesterday. Currently eating them with ricotta. Muhahahahahha. We'll probably never even get around to trying the bacon-wrapped fig recipe.

If you're missing Lazy Sundae, you can duck into Kabob Bazaar for their khulfi (sp?) which is an ice cream melange of orange, pistachio, and saffron flavors. Very satisfying. I really can't complain that Arlington is getting into a kabob arms race with Ravi, Moby's, that mildly terrifying Pakistani place across from Whole Foods, and Kabob Bazaar duking it out for grilled meat accolades.

After reading the Bittman article (lovey is a huge Mark Bittman fan) we made the cuisinart burgers this weekend. A couple of points: The cuisinart worked fine. Really. If you have a meat grinder, I'm assuming that you're recreating more or less what a butcher would do for you. The cuisinart gave us something different from those striated hamburger strings (I'm assuming that's what a meat grinder will turn out. If anyone wants to let me borrow one, I will totally make it worth your while.) What the cuisinart gives you are these handy little chunks that give the finished product an entirely novel texture and flavor. We used fatty sirloin, but I doubt it came from anywhere neck-like. The problem with these lovely steak chunks is that they don't hold together very well. We certainly lost some down into the grill. My solution, because we WILL TRY AGAIN WE WILL REBUILD!!!, would be to add a very tiny amount of breading (perhaps a couple of ground up ritz crackers for the whole batch), add another pre-ground meat (wonderful ground lamb at the dupont market), or make them ahead of time and leave them in the fridge overnight since today's leftovers held together much better. So give the cuisinart a try. We topped these with applewood-smoked mozerella and I was furious that we wasted good cheese on a burger that didn't need it.

Galaxy Hut in Clarendon should be opening up their patio soon; I love their karaoke and their bar food is actually quite good, but their patio seating (an enclosed alley, roughly 15'x7') will transport you away on a Gallic reverie, if your experiences of France were tight spaces and being up to your ankles in cigarette butts. However, if you want to eat outside for brunch while being in the shade and aren't interested in seeing or being seen it works quite nicely. Again, despite my mocking the patio, brunch is also quite good.

I know I'm really enjoying my food when I give up on the fork and move towards eating everything with my fingers, as sucking the flavors of everything out of a fork is so unsatisfying. We had the jamon, the roasted olives, hangar steak, a hot dog, and the bacon-wrapped figs. Milady and I have renamed the bacon-wrapped figs with mascarpone "Satan's Fig Newtons" and will likely drag an old friend out from DC next week just to try them again. The Guinness cupcake wasn't terribly special, though I may have been rendered insensate by that point. I couldn't really taste any stout- it came out as a plain chocolate cupcale with really good icing. I'm sure we'll work our way down the dessert list soon, but after eating something "simple" done amazingly well (the hot dog) I was hoping for something a little more upgraded. Also, I was unable to come up with any way to describe how good the hot dog was without descending into a vat of scathing innuendo and freudian slips.

I don't have a name for this: Three eggs Wee dash of milk Cooked, sauce-gripping pasta (rotini, macaroni) Small pile of assorted grated cheese Scramble the eggs together with the pasta and cheese until the eggs set inside the pasta, delicately plate it, then stripe the top of it with rooster sauce. I can generally only eat this if my body has just finished fighting something off, like the flu or a mountain lion.

My job has moved from Georgetown to Reston, so you can perhaps imagine how mad I am about my decreased lunch options. I hate chains, I hate having to drive everywhere, I hate knowing that every office within 10 miles is going to empty at noon and try to cram into the same three parking lots where the Lords of Reston Planning deigned to put a cluster of something that, for once, is not an office building, parking lot, or toll booth. Now that's out of the way. I was so happy to find Reston Kabob through DR.com. Putting the yoghurt sauce in squeeze bottles was an excellent idea, I never really get enough at Moby's. Had the chicken this time- next time I think I'll try the buffet and report back. Now, other than Cafesano, where the hell else can I eat in Reston without getting the urge to punch someone in the throat?

Alberto's for slices of pizza eaten on the grass at Dupont Circle, then a walk up the Ave. to Larry's for Chocolate Whiskey ice cream is a warm night standby.

I recommend the pan-fried noodle dishes, though they fail the second most important thing about delivery food after taste: they don't reheat well the next day, since the noodles aren't crispy anymore. They're still very, very good. The singapore noodles, however, appear to be lo mein dunked in old bay. Might work for you, not so much for me.

I just had to scrape a thin veneer of chocolate off of my mouse buton prior to writing this, so here's a fresh opinion indeed. You owe it to your tongue to stop by and get a mint tea truffle. Tastes just like mint tea, if it was stripped of any this-is-what-I-drink-when-I-have-a-cold connotation and replaced with lots of sex outdoors in an alpine meadow. It's pretty good.

My mom claims that in her part of upstate new york, one puts a quartered pickle in with the bun and the hot dog on top of that. The difference in textures as you bite down is... enlightening. Also, soggy.

We're... well, we're going to the Lebanese Butcher in Falls Church. If you want a nice, quiet, and delicious Valentine's Dinner under a painting of the Kaaba done on black velvet, it can't be beat. Especially if they're working on a lamb carcass next door and need to rev up the bandsaw. We went to RTS last year for v-day and it was the first time I ever understood Mr. Landrum's epic rant about the sort of folks he'd rather not have in his restaurant. Not us, mind you, we were just there for the steak and not because it's some sort of pissing contest involving multiple personal assistants with speed dial to get a reservation

If you order any of the sandwiches (mmmmm buffalo) that come on frybread, ask politely for a warm one. It's likely that you'll be there when it's swarming and turnover will be high, rendering that unnecessary. My parents told me stories of driving along lonely desert roads in the Southwest and getting frybread from roadside stands- I love the stuff. Milady and I have a workable recipe for it that we use to make huge-ass tacos.

Made a special trip out to the L street spot, as the lady and I were playing hooky from work. The chicken tikka sandwich was fantastic and I would eat anything that the mango sauce is on, but for one thing: The lamb was so painfully dry and riven with gristle that it was a horrible mistake to put it in a sandwich, as that wonderful naan hid the unmarinated-goat-like nuggets of jawbreaking mutton that caused my normally demure dining companion to spit her mouthful into her hand. Even she, considerably grumpy after the lamb, admitted that the chicken was pretty good.

It's technically a tibetan restaurant, but Mt. Everest on 18th St. (it's close to the Reef, if I remember correctly) does the Indian/Chinese mix. The strange thing was that most of the dishes there didn't combine the cuisine as much as there was a curry listed on the opposite page of fried rice. I recall being a little mad that they hadn't embraced the full glory of mixing the two styles together, but it was two years ago and perhaps I wasn't looking for the right thing.

According to our waiter the callette cuts tend to go extremely fast, so it would behoove one to be there right after work. The picahna was very, very good. The flavor is deep enough that it tastes roasted. It comes with a "piranha" sauce which was fairly spicy, roughly on the order of persian dill sauce; the steak didn't need it, but it went very well with the fried chicken. I didn't enjoy the fried chicken as much as I could have; I normally like a lot more kick in the coating. I do appreciate how well it was cooked, however. There were no bald spots and it was cooked slowly and thoroughly, coming out juicy and not greasy at all. The steak tartare-filled deviled eggs... my fiance said that she and I could eat those every night for dinner for the rest of our lives. You receive a small pile of capers, onions, and pickles to cram into the tartare. She also loved her Dark and Stormy, which should be rechristened a Drang and Sturmy given the amount of rum in it. Or perhaps she's just a lightweight. Or given to wagnerian pronouncements about her steak.

In this case, it really is a matter of taste. Not taste in the "these pretzels aren't classy enough" sense, though lord I would love to start a flame war in the pretzel baking discussion, but the fact that the lye-boiling method actually creates a different pretzel from what you can get with a baking soda bath alone. The baking soda bath creates the "burn" (bases can burn, right?) that gets you the color you find on Auntie Anne's or lancaster-style pretzels, with the taste also depending on what you've done to the dough, etc. Laugenbretzeln, the really dark brown german pretzels, need the lye. You can try to recreate the color with the egg wash, but these will lack the weird tannic taste you get from crust on lye-boiled pretzels. That taste in turn cries out for butter and mustard, leading you down deeper paths to pretzel debauchery... It's probably a hike and it's never guaranteed that they'll be in stock, but give the pretzels at the Heidelburg Bakery a try to taste what drives people to contemplate storing hazardous chemicals in their kitchens.

As our Christmas presents to ourselves, milady and I are going to RTS tonight and RTC tomorrow night. It was only when I explained this to my coworkers at the office Christmas party that I realized that this might be considered a perverse attachment to Mr. Landrum. I feel that I should point out that he is on neither of our "laminated lists" and this is really all about the steaks and cashews, but who would believe me?

I once tried to recreate the really dark-brown crusted german pretzels using the baking soda wash and damn was I disappointed. I have heard that the secret really is a lye bath (which can also make for good bagels) and have found several recipes that define the quantities needed. Here's one (in German, sorry). Now, where does one obtain lye for cooking? I've found it in chemical supply stores online, but only in quantities that border on criminal enterprise/survivalist. Anyone know of a local source? If you're wondering what final product I'm aiming for, the Heidelberg Bakery on Lee Hwy will have them if you get there early enough in the morning. They're normally sold out by noon.

When this comes up, I always feel too young/inexperienced to comment on it. I haven't been to Eve or Citronelle yet, so I really have no basis of comparison. We had our first anniversary dinner there a year ago and if it wasn't for the personalized menu we have in the keepsake trunk I wouldn't be able to remember much about the food we had. The scotch, on the other hand, was very memorable. That has nothing to do with my memory loss, of course. We felt special, it's certainly a special place, but I can describe steak at Ray's to a friend and MAKE them want it. I can't do that with the Inn. The best I can manage is that their red pepper soup tasted just like trader joe's red pepper soup, but what the hell good is that if you haven't strained the TJ's through your laptop to equalize the price?

I've only been once, so this might have just been an aberration, but I think the seating system might depend on the relative popularity of the show. I came for an obscure act that barely filled half the seats, in which case someone at the front door checked the tickets and then you could sit anywhere you wanted. I got there late, too. Food-wise, get dinner somewhere else (there are so many options down Mt. Vernon that it would be sick and twisted to list them all) and split a dessert at the Birchmere. Unless you're there to rock, in which case you should split a bottle of tequila with a stranger and bite the head off of something alive.

I am so excited that people take their burgers seriously here. I've been pondering over the "expansion is bad" thread and I'd like to address an angle of it- what if every individual Five Guys was able to achieve the perfect franchise dream and have the food be the exact burgers that I remember getting from the roadside shack-ish place on Columbia Pike 10 years ago? I would still be a little let down that the "pilgrimage" aspect had been removed. Before I left to study abroad in England, my parents took me to Five Guys because I sure as hell wasn't going to have an ol' blighty mad hamburger and I wanted my favorite to be burned into my tongue so that it would carry all the way across the ocean and back. I had a compass that always pointed in the direction of Five Guys so that no matter where in the world I was I knew which direction to drool fondly in. Now there's a Five Guys that's a five minute walk from my apartment and I still haven't been there. I think it's been open for months now. I have five guys gift certificates that my parents gave me (because now there's one in Fredericksburg, too) and I haven't used them. Perhaps this is a gourmet thing and not a foodie thing- a gourmet wants the nigh unattainable, the grape leaves rolled on the thighs of Athena herself, while the foodie knows that with the right hot sauce you can make Kraft products taste good. I'm really not sure. I still haven't had In-N-Out, but I recognize what's going on in the minds of its partisans: they're very good burgers, but they're also VERY FAR away. Your burger compass points to the west coast. That's where your golden city lies. This is why my jury is still out on Elevation vs. Five Guys. If I try to remove that feeling of Elevation as a Special Treat because there's only one and it requires actually getting in a car and heading in a direction that I have no other reason to go in... Elevation and Five Guys burgers appeal to me about the same. Elevation has better fries, though I would sing the song that ends the world if they would stuff a sack full of them like Five Guys does. If Five Guys went back to two or three locations, would we who take their burgers seriously be happier?