Gadarene

Fad or not, it's really really tasty when done well, so there's no reason why it shouldn't be part of the D.C. food scene firmament.

I'm going to be living in Bologna for three months starting in October, so I'm taking notes on all of the above posts.  Thanks, everyone.  :-)

2 hours ago, eatruneat said:

I think this is the thread you are looking for.

Dammit all!  I thought I remembered reading about it here, but I used the Americanized spelling when I searched. 

I looked for a thread on this restaurant and didn't find one, but it's more than deserving.  Nestled in the heart of 18th Street in one of those Adams Morgan spaces that seems to see restaurants come and go with the seasons, Ban Tre is an unassuming one-room lunch and dinner joint with a surprisingly extensive menu and lots of care taken in its flavors and ingredients.  I've only had a few things there so far, but they've all been quite good -- the standout, probably, is their lemongrass caramelized pork chops, which were just as crispy-juicy-hint-of-fish-saucy as I was hoping.

Perhaps not a destination restaurant, but certainly one that is worth your time and patronage.

2 hours ago, Ericandblueboy said:

Had dinner for the 3rd time and the love for this place continues to elude me.  The salt cod has improved, a hint of smoke and a hint of fish, all blended together quite smoothly.  The radishes (bagna cauda, smoked trout roe, parsley) made no sense to me at all. The bagna cauda was tossed like a salad dressing and the trout roe didn't feel integrated.  The pici was firm, very firm indeed and salty.  I ended up getting a falafel at Amsterdam afterwards.

Should have tried the carrot cake.  :-)

Bill is also a national treasure.

Chantal is a national treasure.

2 hours ago, saf said:

But they will be re-opening (soon) as "The Good Silver." No more BBQ, but I like what I have heard of the plans. I miss KBC though.

Me too.

I still miss Commonwealth.

Found it!  And the menu (which says that "Hawaiian style" = no rice, for what it's worth).  Anyway, this was holy crap good.

---

Poké Papa (mdjordy)

If I remember when I'm at my computer, I'll need to post a picture of the poke I had a few years ago at Poke-Poke in Venice Beach.  Sublimely simple and absolutely amazing; it blows that $14 saucy gloppy ricefest from Abunai I had yesterday out of the water.

A good poke requires as much skill as a good Bloody Mary.  Which is to say, significant.

And a good poke doesn't need to have any rice at all...shouldn't, even.  Just good cuts of fish and some artful combination of, e.g., soy, sesame oil, green onion, white onion, sesame seeds, chile pepper, seaweed, and masago.  Mmmmmm.

Asking its appeal vis-a-vis ceviche and sashimi is like asking the appeal of hamburgers vis-a-vis steak, brisket, and beef ribs.  They're their own distinct things.

3 hours ago, DaveO said:

If you haven't seen this a thoughtful perspective on dining on at Mirabelle by Mark Furstenberg.  He and Frank Ruta are friends and you might recall that after Palena closed Ruta cooked for a short while at BreadFurst

Quite an interesting essay, indeed.

The spicy salmon poke at Abunai is okay and fairly generous with the fish (if over-sauced with an excessive amount of rice), but at $13.95 it's not remotely worth the money.

How I long for an Uwajimaya 'round these parts.

The spider steak here is really, really cool and delicious (and reasonably priced!).

Once I get my sciatica under control and can comfortably work in my office again, I selflessly volunteer to go by Mirabelle for lunch one day and have what is sure to be an extremely tasty meal for myself, to put my money where my mouth is.

Not ordering the ham sandwich, though. 

I should also hasten to add that the D.C. dining scene today is light years better than what it was when I moved here in 2001, or even in 2011.  I love the fact that there are interesting, unique, and chef-driven places out there that aspire to thoughtfulness and deliciousness without being self-consciously "fine dining," like Himitsu, Tail Up, Thip Khao, Little Serow, Etto, Tiger Fork, EatBar, and so forth.  If the prices at these places are a little higher than they would be elsewhere, well, then I chalk it up to a feature of the area and don't let it diminish my enjoyment too much.  I just selfishly wish that there were way more of those kinds of places (and that more of them were within easy walking distance of Mt. Pleasant, dammit! Purple Patch and Beau Thai, I'm looking at you -- why can't you aspire to more?), because I know there can be, because I've seen it elsewhere again and again and again.  I want more under the radar hole-in-the-walls with surprisingly awesome food for cheap, too, for the same reason.  And while I'm at it, I want a pony.

I'd much rather dine in DC now than ten years ago.  That doesn't mean I can't begrudge the amount of culinary real estate in this town given over to making money for investors/property managers/corporate headquarters (and/or attracting as broad a well-heeled clientele as possible by aspiring to widely acceptable genericness in its category -- see Kushi taking all the interesting stuff off its menu after a month -- and/or churning out lazily slapped together "on trend" food and calling it a day) as its first, second, third, and fourth priority.  (And, to bring it back to the topic again, I'm not painting Mirabelle with that brush, because I haven't been there and because I know that Chef Ruta is not going to allow anyone to lazily slap together anything in his kitchen.)

I just realized this week that Dino's Grotto is on Uber Eats!

(This post is not an endorsement of Uber Eats.  It's an expression of joy and wonder that the world we live in permits me to push a button and have a Dino burger delivered to my door.  Of course, i can't easily munch on delicious pickled carrots and sip a Dino-approved glass of wine while waiting for it, but such is the price of laziness.)

I do think it's important to note that there's a fundamental distinction between the lack of affordable fine dining and the lack of affordable good dining.  To my mind, D.C. suffers from both, because it's beset by chains and blandness and general lack of value for money at all price points, not simply the very top.

This is significant because, while one should expect to pay high prices for more refined food, luxury ingredients, whisper-soft service, and elegant ambience (which appears to be the thrust of Fintastic's point above), it's simply not true in many, many places that one should expect to pay high prices for delicious or interesting or even exciting food that does not have, or need, the level of refinement necessary to qualify as "fine" dining.  Many of the best meals of my life have been dirt-cheap, especially relative to the quality of the food.  (That yakitori place in Tokyo with random skewers of amazing chicken parts for $1.50 each...man.)

So it is a bit of a strawman, I think, or at least an incomplete argument, to focus on the consequences of DC's unique milieu on the kind of food you expect to pay a lot of money for regardless -- I'm never going to rail against the steep markup at Ruth's Chris or The Prime Rib, for example, because those places are what they are -- because the larger issue isn't "hey, this restaurant opened up catering to the expense account crowd, and I'm mad that it means a legendary chef's prices are higher than they might be," it's more (as someone observed earlier) "hey, i wish there was a more vibrant and affordable restaurant scene at all price points, but that's hard to do in this city because so much of the current development is centered around 'new builds,' which are biased towards the profit margins of the investors and property managers over all else."

Fine dining will always be expensive; it comes with the territory.  Good dining doesn't have to be -- and, in many many many cities in the world, it usually isn't.

57 minutes ago, Finatic said:

Everyone wants a Bentley for the price of a Hyundai.  The world does not work that way. Fine dining demands the best ingredients and more labor. There are dozens, if not more, restaurants in our area producing phenomenal food, albeit not cheaply. You get what you pay for. We all have different tolerances for price points of food. I paid $1200 for dinner for two at the French Laundry years ago. It was horrible. I also paid $600 for dinner for two at Le Bernardin. I would go back in a heartbeat!

Apparently you didn't get what you paid for at French Laundry.  :-)

55 minutes ago, Pool Boy said:

Well those are good points. One of the things I hate to see happen is when a place gets redeveloped in to a modern mixed use thing and then the chains come in. Boring! And with the rents being so sky high, it gets harder and harder for restaurants to make it in this metro area.

However, if you extend your definition of this metro area to include points a bit south, east, west and north (like Baltimore), there are plenty of options with good food that is a better value and may even be closer to where you live potentially. Grace Garden in Odenton is a good example. So is Curry Leaf in Laurel, MD. Ren's Ramen in Wheaton. Many, many options for Peruvian Chicken based on your own preferences. But I do, indeed, hear you about having a really good overall experience that delivers the goods on good, interesting food, with a nice atmosphere and service and maybe a decent wine list/beer program/cocktail program is, in general, a bit harder to find in even the expanded idea of this metro area.  I like a lot of interesting places in Baltimore, too (Peter's Inn comes to mind, as does Fork & Wrench, and plenty of other options, too).

The adventure continues.

Would that I had a car!  And the time and inclination to fight through traffic for an interesting meal.

But yes, I don't think our perspectives are nearly as far apart as it seems.

And apologies for hijacking the topic!  Let's let Jonathan's beautiful post about Chef Ruta's food guide the thread back on track.

You and I seem to have very similar tastes.  Wonderful review.

Must-try places in Berlin:

Industry Standard (food)

Lode & Stijn (food)

Pauly Bar (cocktails, food)

Rutz Wine Bar (wine, food)

Twinpigs (drinks, bar food)

10 minutes ago, Pool Boy said:

That is your opinion and you are certainly welcome to believe it and state it as such. No worries whatsoever. Food and the dining experience is such a subjective thing. Some people love one thing, others another. I was talking to a coworker the other day. She and her husband had been to Komi in the past few months. They left and her husband said to her that 'I'd have been just as happy eating a bunch of Chick-fil-a.' So....see what I mean?

From my experience with Ruta and his food as compared to many, many, many other places I have dined over the past 15-16 years, well, his stuff is top notch and the experiences I have had at Palena and Grill Room have been quite, quite good. For you maybe....not so much? No big deal. I have my own issues with some places like we all do (like Rose's Luxury - I am sure the food is wonderful there, and the service as well, and now I hear you can book a rooftop table if you all do a tasting menu - but I will probably never go there (because 1) I don't have 6 other people I want to go experience a tasting menu there with so I can get a reservation and 2) I cannot otherwise get a reservation - my loss I am sure), and we all deal.

Well, you know that is impossible. It's kind of like the analogy to software development - you can make software potentially good, fast and/or cheap. Out of those three things, you can only pick two - good and cheap (not fast), cheap and fast (but not good), or fast and good, but not cheap. I am sure there is some trinity or similar that applies to dining out.

That all being said, you can get some awfully good food out there, you just need to pick some things that you are unwilling to sacrifice on and deal with the rest. Hot Doug's in Chicago (gone, dang it) was a place where you got really excellent hot dogs and sausages, for pretty darn good prices for pretty cheap, but you often had to wait an hour or two in line to get it (we waited 45 minutes - an anomaly for me - I utterly hate waiting).

It's not impossible, actually, if "transcendent" and "cut-rate" and "highest possible" are toned down for hyperbole.  There are half a dozen cities I've been where it seemed, to me, with my upper-middle-class privilege of having a well-paying DC job (which will soon no longer be the case), that cheap/affordable/reasonable, delicious, and even innovative food was virtually everywhere (Portland, Austin, Berlin, Madrid, Tokyo-though-admittedly-because-the-dollar-was-strong, even New York, honestly, if one stays in the midrange independent places and does due diligence, almost anywhere with a vibrant street-food scene and a food-loving culture, a bunch of random smaller places in southern and central Europe) in a way that it is certainly not remotely here in the district.  

It's not unattainable.  It's just unattainable here, in the land of the expense account and the restaurant groups and the property manager preference for chain places or super high-end places or both.

It doesn't have to be the way it is here.  Not to say there aren't great things here, but I totally disagree with any notion that the things I describe aren't far more attainable in a number of other places.

But the rest of your post is certainly quite well-taken.

All are certainly fair points.  And every time I've eaten Chef Ruta's food, I've quite enjoyed it, in an absolute sense if not relative to value.

So here's a reframing that I hope is less overtly combative: I wish that we had many many more chefs in this town that were worthy of as much veneration as Chef Ruta, so that the breathless posts about his cuisine (and Eric Ziebold, another person whose food I very much respect and who seems like an extremely good and worthy and respectable person, but whose endeavors are the subject of overwhelming hagiography on this board) would not seem, in my fully subjective perspective, to stand out nearly so much.

We all want the same thing here.  Ubiquitously transcendent and exciting food at ubiquitously cut-rate prices that nevertheless allow for the highest quality of ingredients and the highest possible standard of living for the chef and all of the kitchen and front of house staff.  That's little enough to ask, surely?

($26 or what-have-you for a jambon beurre is still presumptively ridiculous this side of Zurich (I think still one of the most across-the-board expensive food cities in the world?), though, and I say that unapologetically as someone who has spent far too much on food in the last decade!)