soapy

I continue to enjoy Addis Ababa and it was nice to know that you could go out eat there and feed 6 people 80 bucks. (and yes most of us just orderd water but on person ordered a soda, and annother a beer) the Addis Ababa specials are great for feeding a crowd, you get a huge platter with 4 different entrees on it and a a four person plate will feed 5 or more. I suspect that the Injera helps to fill you up a lot.

I can confirm that the Silver Spring Moorenko's is stil open. Last night I had Creme Fraiche and Peach Melba Ice cream yum! I lament the fact that they never have salted caramel whenever I'm there. The scooper told me that they always run out of it super fast so I auggested they put a special sign up when they have in stock so I can see when I'm driving past georgia avenue.

I was looking at the menu on Tosca's website and reading your post and wondering if the pasta dishes are "primi" as listed. The starter ravioli you refer to are $23, while the veal ravioli are $24. Did you have a half-portion of the former, or are these really primo-sized portions? I am always left confused by the menus in upscale Italian restaurants in the US, and wish they would organize them as menus are laid out in Italy.

We ordered off the pre-theatre menu and I think the appetizer ravoli was a half portion.

While I don't agree with this kind of practice, I don't think Joe's is alone in practicing it. In some ethopian resteraunts, servers may not serve their kitfo raw to non-ethopians for example, at least unless you swear up and down that you like raw.

I took my mother in law and a dear friend of ours to Joe's and our friend must of thanked us about half a dozen times for picking it out. We had sesame noodles, moo shu pork and scallion pancakes. Neither of them are spice lovers the way I am so I couldn't get my favorite mouth burning dishes. However everything was well prepared and tasted delicious.

My husband I went to Roscoes on June 30th. Despite it being a Tuesday night the front room was full and there were plenty of the Takoma Park denizens that help to keep it an eccentric, including a guy eating solo who practiced his ukulele mid-dinner (at least it quieted the crying babies) There were definitely a lot of families eating together.

Roscoes has yet to acquire a liquor license so my husband opted to get water while I tried their lime cooler. The lime cooler was exceedingly tart but refreshing. I think Id stick to water in the future however.

Despite it being a busy place we were seated quickly and the service staff were plentiful and polite. To start we shared the arugula salad with blue cheese, walnuts, golden raisins and walnut vinaigrette. This salad was perfectly composed with bitterness of the arugula balanced by the tangy cheese and sweet raisins and delightful crunch of the walnuts. The salad was dressed flawlessly, accenting the salad without overwhelming it.

We ate the Roscoes pizza which had mushrooms, spinach and tomatoes. I thought that the crust should have been slightly crispier and the spinach was overly wilted and dry, it would have been better if they had added it after the pizza had cooked. I noticed that the tables had red pepper flakes but no parmesan cheese, which led me to vainly hope that they served the pizza with hand grated cheese. Alas, when I asked for extra cheese (the pizza tasted a little under seasoned) they came out with your usual pizza joint parmesan shaker.

For desert we had tiramisu and I have no complaints about it, not too sweet, balancing the flavors of the mascarpone, espresso and cocoa.

By sharing the salad, pizza and desert our tab was just under 30 dollars which is a pretty inexpensive night out by my standards. I think that while this restaurant has some room for improvement, its still worth a second look.

Baked & Wired

Cowgirl Creamery

Baked and Wired makes excellent, abliet expensive cupcakes. I love Cowgirl Creamery and wish I ccould afford to go there more often, they are usually super friendly and helpful and give away oodles of free samples.

My husband and I went to Tosca to celebrate our first wedding aniversary. Tosca's service was full of nice touches. We had a mini aranci as an amouse-bouche, and when they brought out desert, it included little chocolate ribbons that said "happy anniversary." Very sweet of them.

For Dinner I double ravolis, a starter of ricotta ravoli with swiss chard which is was light and delicious with the parmesan adding a wonderful deeper note of flavor. Dinner was Veal ravoli, also delicious. My husband had asparagus soup with scallops and roasted swordfish and enjoyed them both. The one downer was desert, I wasn't crazy about the gorgonzola ice cream with chesnut pudding or the green apple sorbet.

My husband and I are celebrating our first year anniversary we wanted to eat somewhere nice before going out to see a show at the National Theatre. I am debating between Tosca and Rasika but I'll take any other resteraunts that have a pre-dinner theatre menu and are close to downtown.

I've never been to Siri's Chef Secret but I've heard it's pretty good.

http://www.sirichef.com/

Well I returned to Ray's and once again, perfect burger. I tried with blackened with bacon and blue chese, oh my lords was that perfect. I took my ssiter and kept explaiming how this was the best burger ever. She took one bite of my burger said "well I understand that now"

One thing kind of bothered me. I ordered a Diet coke. When I got it, it was flat and it tasted funny. I complained to the waiter that maybe their soda fountain was off and he said "no I poured it from a bottle, it must taste funny to you becuase we use Coke Zero, not diet coke." He replaced my diet coke with a regular which also tasted a bit odd, but I wasn't going to make annother fus about it on a busy Saturday night. I come to find out when I get the bill that it was in fact Diet Rite.

I'm just a little put off about the waiter lying to me. Or maybe he was teling the truth but the computer system was off? The whole situation has been bugging me.

I was just there for my husband's birthday. I should mention that my father in law works at the resteraunt and we received some really nice service becasue of that. Here is my review:

When you sit down, there complimentary kumquats on the table. I wasn't sure if that was that was in lieu of bread but then out came a server carrying a little cast iron pan, which he flipped over and out came hot rolls that were buttery soft and lightly dusted with sea salt.

My family ordered the following dishes: the ribs (already described by rocks upthread) hoe cake with blue cheese, grapes and arugla, two salads. My sister in law asked for fried green tomatoes as her appetizer and they kindly provided them, even tough they were not on the menu. The hoe cakes were like little savory flat pancakes. The blackberry ale vinaigrette, watermelon pickles, goat cheese salad was excellent, the sweetness of the blackberry vinagrette took away some of the bittneness of argula. The watermelon pickles were very mildy sour and kind of tangy and the goat cheese was of a good quality, all together it was a great flavor combination.

For dinner we ate the country pork chop with fried onions, the Rockfish, Salmon in a lemon caper sauce, and braised short ribs with a hominy/sweet potato hash, as well as extra sides of buttermilk mashed potatoes and creamed spinach. I think this resteraunt needs to work on its side dishes. The main dishes tasted fine, the side dishes had some weird exection issues. The spinach wasn't quite creamy enough and the potatoes were very tangy, almost citrusy. The hominy/sweet potato has was well liked by my family but I felt like it didn't taste very good together.

For desert we had the Pomegranate Apple crisp, baby cakes and sweet potato pudding. Rocks has already spoken well of the pudding, it was delicious and my other favorite was the baby cakes which were similar to cup cakes but a bit hardier. My favorit was the pecan with cream cheese frosting but they were all delicious.

Anyway the place was very busy tonight, which was a good sign for a tuesday night. Their breakfast menu and lunch menu have some intruiging items I'd like to sample. I recomend it if you are interested in upscale soul food.

I believe so. And they are worth the $$. I love getting the mixed container for $10.

Last night I made a mushroom and cream sauce over fresh smith's meadow herbed pasta. I want to get my hands on the mushroom mix too.

Pork metballs with chipolte tomato sauce

Roasted broccoli and potatoes

Salad of botson bib lettuce and homemade blue cheese dressing (excellent way to use up subpar blue chees)

leftover chocolate pie for desert.

Winter brings some new vendors. Takoma now has a vendor selling milk, butter and goat's milk, plus flavored milk including strawbery, orange ceam, vanilla, root beer and of course chocolate. Thee richest chocolate milk I've ever had in fact. They also have a mushroom vendor, who sells very expensive but rather delicious selection of chantrelles, shitakes, royal trumpet and a few others. Also there is a vendor for bison meet (I haven't tried it) and boston bib lettuce, freshly picked with the roots still attached.

I went here too many times when I worked in Arlington and agree with Sthitch. The sushi was never fresh and at times pretty bad. No offense to your coworker, soapy, but it sounds like they might not have ever had good sushi before. I think if you took them to Sushi Ko or Kaz it would be a real eye opening experience for them.

Well part of the reason she might have liked it so much was becuase it was a hop skip and a jump away from her apartment and she hated to cook and loved to eat sushi.

Was the yum yum sauce the mayo based sauce? I think they used that as salad dressing as well as as a dipping sauce for the steak.

I went Matasuke last night for dinner with a group of friends, specifically to try their hibachi. I found the experience to be kind of meh. My whole group ordered hibachi, everyone's dish was in the 23-25 dollar range and came with soup, salad and shrimp appetizer but the fried rice was an extra 2.50. To me this felt pretty expensive for the quality of food served to us. The miso soup was heavily salty. The salad greens were wilted and limp and drowning in dressing. The brighter side the fried rice was pretty decent, as was the vegetables. The steak was cooked to perfection but my chicken was a bit on the tough side. I suppose part of the 22+ entrees goes towards the hibachi chef who was sufficiently entertaining (he did a neat trick where he flipped an egg up in the air and caught it on a the side edge of his spatula) All in all I felt that the whole thing was kind of overpriced. The service wasn't very good and they were trying to rush us all night long. I had not had hibachi in 8 years so I probably won't go back for it for another 8 or so.

A coworker of mine swears by their sushi though so it might be worth others to check out that.

Address: 320 23rd St S, Arlington, VA

Dino is casual. Jeans are fine, but plenty of folks get a little dressy as well.

No good parking solutions, especially on a Saturday night. Unless you get lucky with a meter on Conn Ave, expect to spend 10-15 minutes driving around the neighborhoods looking for a spot. Along with everyone else.

Metro is good alternative, Dinos is about 150 feet from the cleveland park metro.

I took my extended family to Dino's to celebrate my mother in law's birthday. This continues to be one of my favorite places to eat in DC, every time I go back I wish my pocket book and stomach would allow for more trips! My favorite thing from wednesday night was the pear salad, you could probably serve the wine poached pear filled with marscapone as desert! And since I'm not a fan of olives, I thought the pork and duck sausages at the bar were far better bar snack.

I've always wanted to try Joe's. For my innagural trip my husband and I got the Spinach and Pork noodles, Spicy Tasty Tofu and the scallion panake. The scallion pancake was excellent. I liked the flavor of the spicy tasty tofu but I kind of prefer unfried tofu. Is the pressed tofu dish fried too, or is it sauted? I thought the spinach and pork dish was tasty but would be even better with homemade noodles.

Becuase I am a total ignoramus when it comes to Chinese food, is the spicy and tasty tofu = mapo tofu? Or is that annother dish. Also what about dandan noodles, I didn't see those on the menu, are those the sesame noodles?

There's a little Don Rockwell in all of us.

Actually it's a group of 15 shadowy figures who meet in secret in a parking garage somewhere in the SE and decide the fate of every new eatery in town.

From the Mailing list:

Hey Folks,

Did you think this day would never come? There are times we thought the same. Its been almost two years in the making and now it is finally ready. Well, almost.

There's still the parking issue with the county left to resolve. But we've got food coming in and we're going to cook it.

We're hoping you can join us this Saturday when we open The General Store. Its that old blue building at the intersection of Forest Glen & Capital View. We're going to open the doors at 1:30 pm and stay open until 10pm. There's no alcohol yet, but we've got a fascinating selection of sodas.

Here's the cosmic joke...that parking issue?...well, until its resolved we can only serve carry-out. Give us a couple of weeks to walk the paperwork through the zoning department of the county, and you'll be able to really enjoy the dining room that took us two years to build.

See You Soon,

Chef & Robin

Obama seems pretty omnivorous, so maybe we will see him all sorts of resteraunts.

I could definetly see him liking the late and lammented Colorado Kitchen especially for brunch.

I have finally had a Ray's Burger and I feel like dancing on the tables and shouting from the rooftops becuase wow is that not the the perfect burger. I had it diablo style with swiss cheeese, onions, mushrooms and garlic. Probably too many topings because i could barely pick it up and bring it to my mouth but each component tasted delicious. My husband had a blackened burger with cheddar cheese and raw onions, which tasted pretty good too. Next time I'm going for blue cheese and bacon. Mmm.

Instead of spinach and mashed potatoes they served us little potato puffs. They were delicious, a far more refined tater tot. I wish we had been given a few more but then again I couldn't finish my burger so I don't know why I wanted to eat more. Although I was pretty close to full I still shared a slice of key lime pie with my husband, it was tangy, creamy and served with realy whipped cream. They also served us little demitass cups of the best hot chocolate I've had outside of Angelina's in Paris.

Husband and I had plans to see a movie at AFI after dinner, sadly we missed our movie but our dinner was so darn good we didn't really care.

I always order coleslaw and fries becuase I feel weird just ordering the chicken, I am a fan of eating side dishes, I guess.

I've never had Peruvian Chicken anywhere other than Chicken on The Run, which is a pretty decent sort of place, the chicken is good but not as amazing as EPR, but they have better side dishes, IMO their yuca and plantians are more than an afterthought.\

I can affirm that you need to eat the chicken hot off the rotisserie, it's not as as good later.

I went to there today and it was packed! The new location is bigger and more airy and nice. I think they raised the prices since I'd been there last (but then I haven't been over there in over a year) it was 14.85 for a whole chicken, 7.75 for a half and 5.80 for a quarter. The chicken was still delicious as I remembered, flavorful, crispy and addictive and fries and coleslaw where decent but not earthshattering.