cajcaj

Thank you rbh and jca76! So far Komi is the front runner and I'll be sure to note my restrictions when/if calling for a reservation. 

Haven't been to Komi in years and would appreciate some updated info. How do the dietary restrictions/substitutions work? Something discussed while making a reservation or upon arrivalat the restaurant? Considering going for my birthday, but am also pregnant and staying away from raw/undercooked proteins, etc. Also, is there only one seating and time available per night?

Thanks!

Just had an enjoyable dinner here tonight. A disclaimer of sorts - I grew up in Hong Kong, but don't consider myself an expert on the food. Of our 3 appetizers, the dan dan noodles, cheung fun and kowloon buns - the last were definitely our favorite. I should have heeded the above review and not bothered with the cheung fun - these are one of my all time fave dim sum dishes, so it had a lot of living up to do. I found them kind of bland and the noodle was too thick. The dan dan wasn't sauce-y or nutty enough and strayed too far from the authentic - give me a bowl from A&Js over this version any day. For our entree, we got the BBQ plate and thought it was very good - the pork belly had tooth-shatteringly crispy skin and the char siu had good flavor and char (ha, ha). The soy chicken was also very moist and flavorful. 

10 hours ago, Lori Gardner said:

 I was there this past week (was going to start writing it up tomorrow) and the food was quite good.  At $95 I thought the meal was well worth it.    

We were there this past Friday night, and I totally agree, Lori. I'm very surprised they didn't give the new pricing more of a chance - but as others have said, their initial mistakes with the concept must have been too great to overcome. I was surprised at how few tables there were, maybe only 7 or so? There were only 2 other tables occupied when we were there, but we also had a 5:30 reservation,so I thought it was early. 

4 minutes ago, DonRocks said:

By the end of the meal, I thought Karen wanted to leave me for Michel! 

Complete charmer for sure! I was quite giddy.

What a terrible loss. I remember my one dinner at Citronelle very fondly. I was dining in Central once, when chef walked in. As he passed our table, he sorta pinched my side and told me I needed to eat more - I was totally charmed. 

Thank you. I've looked at Bistro Bethem's site but haven't yet looked at Kybecca.

Any suggestions for dinner on Saturday night in Fredricksburg? If it has a dedicated thread, I've missed it.

Likely a 20% service fee for the large group.

The ferry is a fun idea! Unfortunately, I think that will be too much to schedule/worry about the night before and with the rehearsal at the venue that afternoon. 

Update - Landini Brothers is a $67/person minimum (exclusive of taxes and fees) on Fridays and Saturdays.

Thank you both so much! We had dinner at Theismann's to check it out and while the food was better than I expected, I was disappointed that the space wasn't more private.

I'm saving myself the added headache of planning a day after brunch! How many people will you have?

I've now contacted Chart House and Landini Brothers - thanks for those recs!

Blackwall Hitch recommended the Crow's Nest area which is not quite big enough for our group and also not private and therefore incredibly loud. Mason Social never responded to my request but I suspect they are too small anyway. Virtue and Union Street don't have a good in between size for us and would require buyouts of areas capable of accommodating 100+ people. Overwood looks to be similarly priced to options I'm considering that have more exciting food options, and I'm not sure about the atmosphere at Lighthorse, having never been - their site makes it sound like it is a very bar/DJ type place at night.

On 4/26/2016 at 9:31 AM, Bart said:

Have you looked at the upstairs at Columbia Firehouse?  

I did, thanks! Their food and beverage minimum is $5k for a Friday night - more than we're looking to spend.

Hi all,

Reaching out for some ideas after I've done some fairly extensive research. My best guess so far is that we'll have at least 50 people for a Friday night wedding rehearsal dinner. Mostly I've run into the issue of a restaurant's space not being large enough and another issue of the cost just being too expensive.

2 places that I'm considering are Carluccio's and Theismann's. I'm a bit wary of Carluccio's since they are new-ish and I'm not sure they have had much experience with private events. Though we have eaten there before and enjoyed our meals there. We are going to try Theismann's for the first time sometime this week. I'm leaning towards them because private events are something they seem more than comfortable with, to the point that they have a rehearsal dinner section on their website. It is also incredibly close to both hotels I have room blocks at.

Any thoughts would be appreciated - thanks!

Shouldn't shareable dishes be bigger than a typical dish? Where did this all come from?!? 

Where did this come from is exactly what I was thinking, Jonathan - that's what puzzled me more than anything. It's like they're almost creating some new category of dining - entree prices, shareable concept, but with portions too tiny for that.

After dinner here last night, I walked away feeling that this place is really quite expensive for what you get. I feel like there'd been a decent amount of hype surrounding the restaurant and I'd read some articles about it, so it's not as if I walked into the place having heard nothing about it. Yet, I had no clue it was a share plates type of place. Yes, that is typical for many places nowadays, but I guess nothing I'd read or heard had make me think this was anything but a more traditional appetizer/entree place.

As Sietsema noted in his review, there's no separation on the menu between apps and entrees, but our waiter did tell us the plates were meant to be shared and they were listed in order of size. He recommended we order 5-6 dishes between the 2 of us and noted that even the largest dish ($28) was still smaller than a traditional entree. He also mentioned something about thinking of it as making your own tasting menu.

We weren't super hungry, and so decided to cut his recommendation in half. We ordered the roasted beets ($14), chicken liver and foie gras parfait ($20) and the ranchers cut ($28). We also got the ice cream sandwich cookie ($9) for dessert which ended up being my favorite thing of the night. Their current online menu matches what we saw (but will likely change soon).

I completely agree with Lori's descriptions above of the portions being small and "teeny". In the beet dish there were 4 chunks of beets that were each about the size of half a golf ball. The parfait came in the form of a bar that was maybe a little bigger than a Twix. It came with a slice of brioche that was cut in half. The beef was I'd guess about 4 oz (maybe?) the dish included a small sunchoke and a charred endive that was about half an inch wide and 5 inches long. No real complaints about the dessert, as mentioned above I could eat that thing every day and be happy. The complimentary (ciabetta?) bread they brought out was excellent and had just the right amount of char on it. It was served with a delicious sorghum butter.

Drinks included one (tiny) cocktail, a beer (Right Proper Haxan at $8 for a mere 12 oz pour) and a $5 nonalcoholic thyme lemonade. The bill came with 4 really good cookies a little bigger than a quarter - 2 ginger sorghum and 2 pecan sandies which was a really nice touch. Our total bill before tip was about $105, which might not sound so expensive but honestly for the amount of food we got it was a lot more than I would have expected to pay.

Luckily we made up for it in the bang for the buck category with dinner at Peter Chang's (Arlington) tonight. 

Not sure how long they've been open (and if its really been since Nov, I'm not sure why they're not more together) but they do need to get a bit more organized. We were there on Monday around 12:30 - I asked the gentleman manning the register if there was a menu and he said no, no menu. We saw people eating egg sandwiches though, so we just asked for 2 of those - we asked for it on a bread that we saw in the display and he began to tell us they couldn't do that, but then the lady cooking (later heard she's the GM and chef) said "If that's what they want, that's fine". Later as we were eating, we saw someone write up the sandwich and a soup on a chalkboard and hang it on the wall of the kitchen. It was a very confusing process.. That said, our egg, bacon, arugala and red pepper sandwiches on asiago bread were good.

Clarendon branch to close, per Eater

Funnily enough, I heard this news from an employee at Sprint across the street last week while upgrading my phone. I meant to post about it even though it was just a rumor, but I forgot!

For what it's worth, we're not shocked - we had some extremely slow service and messed up orders at this location.

We had reservations here tonight at 7:30, and got here purposefully early, around 6 to have some happy hour drinks at the bar.  We checked in with the hostess to let her know this, and she was very nice, telling us to stop back whenever we were ready.  Service at the bar was very friendly and prompt at first, and then veered towards "do you think they're ignoring us because happy hour is 10 mins away from being over??".  Right around our 7:30 reservation time, we checked in and were led to a seat on the patio at our request.  It took awhile for us to get menus and then it was at least another 15/20 mins before we were checked in on again and our order was taken.  Our waiter asked if we wanted another round of drinks, but we had our drinks that we'd brought from the bar that were still almost half full, so we declined.

We placed an order of a half charcuterie plate and steak tartare, noting that's it was what we'd like to start with (and the implication that we'd be ordering more).  The food was great - the half charcuterie plate was delicious and a great value at $16.  The steak tartare was accompanied with gaufrette potatoes which were great.  Even though it was a lot of food, we were planning on getting a full order of mussels to share.

We changed our minds however when it became apparent that our waiter was not coming back around anytime soon.  An hour and a half passed since we were seated, and our waiter had never checked in since we placed our order of starters.  We realized how not-super-hungry we were and how much we didn't want to hang around being ignored.  We eventually got our bill and paid - on the way out I registered our complaints with the hostess and was met with an apology that didn't really make sense - she said that today was "special" because they got slammed with people coming in all at once (patio was never totally full when we saw it) and that 3 servers had gone home earlier because they were bored (!!).  We had already paid at that point, so weren't looking for any sort of comp - we would have preferred a sincere apology without the bs excuses.

yes, even Sandusky, at a place called Crush (remember this if anyone ever goes to Cedar Point).

I've been to Crush once and thought the food was pretty good (especially relative to the other available options) but also highly priced for what you got. I haven't yet tried it for myself, but have heard good things about Brick Oven Bistro. Never thought the Sandusky food "scene" would come up on this board.. but actually, considering the breadth and depth of knowledge and input on this board - I guess I'm not surprised.

Sushi - They've now gone from Sushi-Ko (which was excellent), to Genji (which was flat-out awful), and now to Kaz (which should be excellent again - Kaz really "gets" how to make Sushi rice, even in bulk). Nothing could be worse than Genji - it was as bad as any sushi I've ever had anywhere, especially on their "brown rice" which took things from awful to almost inedible. I'm very excited at the prospect of decent sushi here again, and I'd also like to put in a plug for the sushi platters at Super H which (from my limited experience) are well-made and an exceptional value.

I read the above posts with great interest, until i realized they were from 5/2012. Is their sushi service now back to Genji? I think at least at Clarendon it might be.

I haven't yet read the full article, but the topic reminds me of a very interesting book I read a few years ago - as I recall it really described the science behind what makes us crave certain foods and how their compositions are read as delicious/irresistible by us. http://www.amazon.com/End-Overeating-Insatiable-American-Appetite/dp/B004NSVE32/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1361566559&sr=1-1#_

Momiento! Are you talking about Maple in Columbia Heights, or Maple Ave. Restaurant in Vienna? If the former, this is the single luckiest guess in history!

---

So once again, we're out of dishes, and the team is essentially batting 1.000

Whoops, I did mean Maple Ave!

For Don's (I can't seem to quote when on my phone): Maple? I haven't even been there but I've read a lot about it and the Asian elements along with your mention that he's known for lots of ingredients tipped me off. I also checked (did not google to find) the menu (this is w/in the rules, right?) And it seems to fit...

I'm gonna guess Masa 14 because I know they have okra there and the Asian style buffalo wing is something I could see them doing. BUT the tabletop and dishware is wrong I think. Which amounts to - I still don't really know.

I thought the Source would be too quick of a repeat after my posting. The style of the garnish just reminded me of some dishes we had on Saturday. Is that *all* lemongrass though? Some of it definitely looks more glossy and pliable than lemongrass, closer to scallion.