The Hersch

A few months back (maybe even last year) I picked up some fresh porcini at WFM in Tenleytown. The cashier didn't know what they were, so I told her. When she couldn't find "porcini" on her codes list she shrugged and put them in the bag for nothing. I suppose I could have said "I think they're $39.95 a pound", but I kept silent. Was that wrong? Unfortunately I'd only gotten eight or ten of them.

Lemon or lime pickle...a really good one is among my favorite foods. Masala dosa. Rogan josh.

I was going to chime in with the Benbow, but you beat me to it. My all-time favorite neighborhood bar in the entire world. Speaking of one-armed men, there was a one-legged old black man named Gene who used to hang out there (this was in the early 70s), a very picturesque fellow who always claimed that he had just gotten out of jail, and that "at midnight I gon' shit on the bar". He would frequently break out into song, his standard being "Bessie, Bessie, Bessie, take them big funky legs offa me!" He was sometimes to be found at Food for Thought in the same era. Remember the phone booth at the Benbow? It must have been one of the last of its kind. Ellen herself, bless her, usually spent the entire day and evening behind the bar, getting further and further hammered. The Dupont Circle neighborhood was never quite a neighborhood any more when the Benbow closed. I think I'm going to cry.

Todd Kliman is an excellent food writer, and I certainly wish him well. But he isn't being given control over the whole magazine. It will still be the Washingtonian, and I wonder how much better it's possible for the dining part to be if it's still stuck inside that publication's priorities.

You must be talking about New Morning Farm, which is at the Sheridan School at 36th St. and Alton Place NW on Saturday mornings and Tuesday evenings. They're also at the market at Dupont Circle on Sundays. They seem to bring more stuff to the Sheridan School location than Dupont. 36th and Alton is just a block from Reno Road, and Alton comes just before Albemarle as you go out Reno. They have many wonderful things.

Had dinner with two friends in the main dining room at Palena last night. The food was fabulous as always. One of my friends had something or other which came with a bavarois of avocado. My friend imagines he doesn't like avocado, and is almost tempted to ask them to leave that item off the plate. The plate comes, he tastes, he swoons, he is changed forever. The gnocchi last night were sauced with sweet corn; a beautiful dish. The papardelle, which I unfortunately didn't order for myself but tasted off my friend's plate, were astonishing, with a brilliantly green basil sauce that tasted as vivid as it looked. How do you keep basil that green when you pulverize it? I should have thought it would blacken. The cod I had as a 3rd course was so luscious, it changed my mind about cod, which I usually find a kind of boring fish (except for salt cod, which I've loved since a sojourn in Portugal). Upthread somewhere there were some comments on possibly bad or slow service in the Palena main room. Well, the courses have always come out of the kitchen at Palena at a rather...deliberate pace, but that's not a service issue. I have never had anything less than good service there, and last night I and my friends felt very well taken care of indeed. Thanks, Roger.

But I loved the parody, by the person supposedly offended by the "clown who speaks Chinese" remark.

What are chiceri beans? I googled on "chiceri beans" and go no hits (this was after I had typed it "chicheri beans" and gotten a lot of hits about Alejandro Chicheri of the World Food Program and food aid for Haiti...rice, beans, etc. ).

Perhaps they've upgraded their matzoh ball soup since I had it, which was probably three years ago. When the waitress put the bowl of rather gloppy-looking chicken-noodle soup in front of me, I thought she'd gotten the order wrong. I said "I ordered matzoh ball soup", to which she replied "this is how we make it here". Looking down into the bowl, I saw that they had taken one matzoh ball and added it to a bowl of, as I say, gloppy chicken-noodle soup, which turned out to taste pretty much like Campbell's. I don't recall its being lemony at all, just horrid. I'm glad your experience has been better. But they do have pickles on the table.

I used to live next door to Conconi on P St. in the early 90s. He always struck me as something of a creep. This seems to be becoming a Goldoni thread. I remember the original Goldoni; it was excellent the one time I ate there. What was the restaurant that had been in that same building before Goldoni? I ate there once too. I ate at the current Teatro during Restaurant Week about three years ago, and it was pretty appalling. They stuck a page of crappy choices at the back of the regular menu, and then treated you like riffraff for ordering from it (including acting all surprised that we wanted to order a bottle of wine). The food was lousy, too.

Gee, I didn't know Gabriel was gone. When I had my uneven dinner at 21P the other night, the Gabriel sign was still there (I think). Urbana is among the awfullest ideas for a restaurant name since...oh, I don't know...BeDuCi? 2941? How the heck are they going to add more than 30 rooms and 4,000 square feet of meeting space to that building? Add a couple of storeys? That would probably put it over the height limit. Build out into the street? There's probably some pesky rule against that too.

I'd stick with pineapple. Or cockroaches.

I'm not entirely convinced that this is the correct date. My family moved to Arlington in the summer of 1963, and I seem to remember that Tom Sarris' Orleans House was already well-established by then. I could be misremembering; I was quite young. Does anyone remember the other Tom Sarris establishment, up Wilson Blvd? I think it was called Tom Sarris' Chuckwagon, or something very similar. It was either in the shape of a covered wagon, or had a big covered wagon out front; I think it was the former, and it was really silly looking. I'm not sure that place made it out of the 1960s. It's been gone a long time.

Some friends and I tried 21P for the first time Sunday evening. We had a reservation, but obviously didn't need one. The restaurant never got to be half-full. The food was kind of uneven, but at the fairly low prices they charge, I was generally favorably impressed. I started with a chilled cucumber soup with crabmeat. The crabmeat was an addition that didn't add much, but the cucumber soup itself was wonderful--tangy, cucumbery, refreshing, delicious. Next came the truffled potato spring rolls, which weren't served up-ended, and the creme fraiche was served separately in a little ramekin, with "American caviar" (clearly lumpfish roe) dolloped on top. I really liked the spring rolls, which were fried perfectly; the crisp skin and the totally soft, smooth potato goop played against each other very well. I thought the creme fraiche accompaniment was ill-considered at best, and the lumpfish roe merely a distraction. Something like crisp pickled carrots would have worked much better. The creme fraiche was too much additional richness and too much additional softness. For a main course I had the green chile pork stew with blue-corn tamales. The pork stew was not terribly sophisticated, but then it was a pork stew, and it was delicious. The tamales were perhaps as bad as anything I've ever been served in a restaurant, so dense and tough I had to cut them with a knife for the two bites I actually took. They reminded me of tootsie rolls. Just utterly horrible. To finish, I had a cup of espresso. I wonder how it's possible to coax such a dismal fluid out of an espresso machine (I assume it came out of an espresso machine). The coffee was as dreadful as the tamales had been; the brown ditch-water was an almost infuriating end to a meal that had been on the whole rather good. My friends were generally pleased by the food also. The complaint of one that his seafood gumbo had okra in it was not really to be taken seriously; the complaint of the other that the carrots in his plate of asparagus and carrots had no discernible flavor was, on the other hand, confirmed by the carrot and asparagus accompaniment to my pork stew: the carrots seemed to have been put through a de-carrotting process. Our server, though apparently new, was competent, personable, and very, very good-looking. Very.

Pizza by the slice, Pizza very nice, C'mon and get your Mario's pizza! For the best piece o' pizza for miles around, It's Mario's Pizza House, in Arlington town! I assume Mario's is still selling pizza by the slice in Arlington "town". It was never "very nice", though.

I don't mean this as a ringing endorsement; far from it, in fact. But the Celebrity Delly at Loehmann's Plaza puts a bowl of pickles on the table, as did Krupin's, and I imagine whatever Krupin's is called now still does. Do not order the matzoh ball soup at Celebrity Delly. Trust me.

Hmm, and I had been thinking of suggesting that Kozy Korner probably belonged on the Oldest Restaurants list, and now it's gone. It was there forever. Does anyone know when it opened? (And when it closed, for that matter.) I think I ate there once, and it was pretty much what you'd expect. Kind of like that place over on Connecticut that was next to Mr. Egans, the name of which escapes me, or like the Trio.

A chatter posted an enthusiastic plug for a Korean restaurant in Tenleytown called Kuma, which is presumably very new. I can't find anything about it on the Web, although I haven't tried very hard. Does anyone know anything about this? Where in Tenleytown? Anyone eaten there?

What about the Trio, at 17th and Q? I haven't been able to find its original opening date, but I have found out that it has been operated by its current owner since 1950. It was supposedly operating in the same location under the same name when he bought it, though. Anyone have more info?