Gadarene

Unpopular opinion: people on this board venerate Frank Ruta too much.

And it probably speaks to the overall paucity, relatively speaking, of high-quality food in this town, especially (but not exclusively) for a reasonable cost.

The breakfast here is actually pretty good.  It's become a staple of my early morning flights out of DCA.

The harissa is pretty awesome.

14 hours ago, cheezepowder said:

But FYI, you can't eat at the bar yet.

Weird.

I've found High West Double Rye to be a really good value for a sipper.  And, of course, you really can't beat Old Overholt for cocktails, at least cost-wise.

On 3/31/2017 at 1:51 PM, Ericandblueboy said:

What sources are you using to select restaurants?

I'm going for almost a week in July.  So far I've looked at the Michelin guide and picked out Kiin Kiin and Era Ora.  I need to find meself some Danish food - tasting menu preferred.

Oh, all these Michelin starred restaurants offer very expensive wine pairing.  I assume one can order wine by the glass? or maybe beer by the bottle?

I want to reiterate my strong recommendation of Radio.  Really, really good food in a warm and friendly environment, and significantly cheaper than most of the other set menus in town.

Also, I want to put in a vote for a juice pairing at one of your meals.  I got the juice pairing at Noma, and by the end of the meal, everyone else at the communal table wished they had done the same thing.  Just interesting, unique, and delicious concoctions.  (I also got the juice pairing at Geranium, which was similarly delicious, so this isn't just a Noma-specific recommendation.)  And yeah, at the places I dined, you could definitely order wine by the glass if you were uninterested in the pairing.

I have so so so so so many Portland recommendations, but I will limit myself to a handful right now:

Farm Spirit is doing some pretty astonishing things with Northwestern ingredients.  It's a vegan tasting menu and, despite being omnivorous, I had so much fun the first time I went in early March that I'm going again with my family in late April.  The beverage program is absolutely top-notch as well, focused on natural wines (as well as beers, ciders, and non-alcoholic choices) and offering some really, really interesting stuff.  One piece of advice, though, is to order your beverages a la carte rather than doing one of the flights -- unless they've adjusted the pricing, the flights were not good value (as in, you could order full pours of every one of the flight wines a la carte for just a little bit more cost than the half-pours you got in the flight). 

Chiang Mai is the tiny, warm Thai place clearly located in what used to be the living room of a cute one-bedroom house and turning out an extensive menu of flavor bomb dishes that you won't find very many places (the larb muang made with blood is earthy and herby and awesome) that you never knew you needed in your life.  A perfect antidote/counterpoint to the Pok Pok empire.  This is maybe my favorite place in Portland, which is saying a lot, because Portland has Nong's.

The Rum Club is the platonic ideal of a neighborhood craft cocktail bar.  Friendly, warm, comfortable, with fricking ridiculous and inventive and deceptively simple drinks (the finish of the Rum Club Old Fashioned goes on and on in about seven different directions), all reasonably priced, PLUS they have a little kitchen in the back that offers a well-curated menu of anything from bites to a meal, like the rockin' pozole I had here a year ago.  (Current food menu and current drink menu.)  Go to the Rum Club and you'll understand a little of what I mean when I lament at the quality of neighborhood bars in DC.

Tanuki is a one-woman labor of love that is an experience like no other.  Armed with a hotplate, a prickly attitude, restrictive hours (Thursdays through Saturdays if you're lucky, dinner only), a wide variety of sake, and an abundance of cheesy japanese horror films constantly playing in the dimly-lit room, the chef puts together dirt-cheap ($30 will get you more food than you can probably eat) omakase menus of Korean and Japanese bar bites in what looks like a dive bar, complete with old-school pinball machines.  The food is good -- sometimes very good.  But the ambience is something else.

Also, in a town awash with awesome beverage choices, I recommend swinging by the tasting room of Teutonic Wine Company.  Extremely friendly people and extremely cool wine that you're not going to find in very many places (I think they only distribute in Portland and to a small list of restaurants elsewhere; I first had a glass of their wine in Parachute in Chicago).  I recommend a glass of the Deep Probe if they have it.

I've got more recommendations, but that'll do for now.

I keep forgetting about this place now that only the Mt Vernon Square location is open; I need to go back!

With those prices, I will not be going there.

I'll go sometime from work.  That area is a lunch/dinner wasteland.  (Blah blah BLT Steak, Bombay Club, Oval Room blah blah.)

9 hours ago, dinoue said:

I think this is what Kushi was trying to be, but was poorly executed.

Kushi had a lot of tasty and interesting skewers at first (cartilage and hearts and so forth) but after a short time, they stripped down their menu drastically to only the most standard things, which was a real disappointment.

I always enjoyed them.  I'll miss it.

58 minutes ago, DonRocks said:

What a senior paper it would make for a Sociology major to write about Fast Gourmet becoming the media darling it was, then Juan "Nacho" Olivera opening TakeEatEasy - which was serving the exact same Chivitos next door to Vidalia - only to be a complete flop for some still-unexplored reason, and then for Fast Gourmet to explode silently, like a muted gunshot on TV, several years later.

Go to post #1 of this thread, and enjoy Rieux's "discovery" of Fast Gourmet while it was still a complete unknown on Jan 10, 2011, and then within days, it exploded like wildfire.

The still-unexplored reason is pretty easy, in my opinion: there's not a ton of foot traffic on that block during the day (as is the case in many blocks in the concrete canyons in that area of downtown), and even less foot traffic at night.  Result: few spontaneous customers, not much buzz, and thus it doesn't/didn't stick in many people's minds, even if they work in that area, as a go-to lunch/dinner option.  Is the izakaya that replaced it still there?  I work a few blocks away and love izakayas, and yet it's never on my radar.

1 hour ago, Ericandblueboy said:

Is puffed tendon just tendon deep fried so it puffs up like pork rind?  That by itself sounds interesting.

It is indeed.  It doesn't have much flavor on its own, though, at least in this dish.

10 hours ago, Ericandblueboy said:

How was the texture?

It's soft, not chewy.  They do it almost like a tuna carpaccio, spread out thinly on the plate.  (Disclaimer: the last time I had this dish here was over a month ago, so they may have changed the presentation since then.)  The texture is complemented nicely by the bits of puffed tendon in the dish.

Also, having read through the previous posts in this thread: sitting at the bar >>>> sitting at a table.  (A luxury, of course, of having a party of two at the maximum.)

The beef heart tartare here is mmmmm.  All hail a place doing interesting things.

This might be my favorite restaurant in DC, in terms of overall comfort to value to deliciousness to interesting bar program.  The marinara pizza is ridiculously good, once supplemented with olive oil and red pepper, and a steal at $13.  And the puntarelle salad.  Oh my.

Every time I come here I wonder why I don't come sooner and thank God that it's not more crowded.

The carrot and pineapple cake that is currently on the dessert menu is one of the best desserts -- nay, the best dishes -- in this town in recent memory.  Run, don't walk.

We ate here yesterday for the first time and enjoyed it.  The bun bo hue soup had nice flavor and generous helpings of beef, and the quail appetizer was quite tasty (although I'm not sure why they give you a salt-pepper condiment for it, since the sticky sauce it's slathered with is plenty flavorful on its own).  My girlfriend had one of the vermicelli bowls and was pleased that the noodles were well-cooked, rather than slightly soft as is often the case.  The place also has an interesting menu that warrants repeat visits to try different things; it's good to see some stuff -- even standard stuff, like broken rice with porkchops -- that you more commonly see at Eden Center rather than within the district.  As someone without a car, I appreciate that.

I was at La Jambe recently and the (excellent) bartender was really great about letting everyone know that Happy Hour was about to end and giving people one last chance to order at the Happy Hour price.  And the bar itself was very good about printing out a separate small menu which made it clear which items were part of Happy Hour and at what price, which -- as genericeric notes above -- many places inexplicably do not, even otherwise great places (looking at you, Johnny's Half Shell!).

On 1/25/2017 at 8:48 AM, Simul Parikh said:

I love it - very few of these exist any more.

...In DC.  I was in Austin last weekend and saw literally dozens and dozens of bars that seemed to fit the bill.  Many other cities, too (there's one on every corner in Portland, and they serve great food, too! plus you get bearded millennials sitting next to also-bearded old guys who've occupied those same seats since 1962).  DC is somewhat exceptionally an utter wasteland for neighborhood bars.

But yeah, I spent a couple of hours at Kingfisher after a birthday dinner at B Too in December, and it was pretty good.

21 minutes ago, DonRocks said:

My immediate impression is that it might be the atmosphere that hurts people's impressions of Centrolina: It's *very* utilitarian feeling - almost sterile. 

If you mimic my order from Oct, 2015, and Amy is in the kitchen, I can't imagine you not loving the food.

Far enough about mimicking your order, Don, but it wasn't the atmosphere that drove the detailed criticisms in the below posts.

On 7/10/2015 at 8:10 AM, jca76 said:

Thanks for starting this -- I'd been meaning to write about a dinner Sunday before last, and the slight additional effort of creating a thread had deterred me.  (Lazy, I know.)  We'd had reasonably high hopes for the new Centrolina in City Centre -- interesting-sounding menu, throwing its hat into a ring that already has a number of excellent Italian restaurants.  Unfortunately, it's not one of them.

We almost didn't order the buratta because the bf isn't the biggest fan of eggplant caponata, but ironically the caponata was probably the best thing we ate all night -- perfectly balanced sweet-sour-savory.  The burrata itself was the worst burrata I've ever eaten.  I usually love burrata, whether it's the excellent simplicity of the 2 Amys', whatever composed combination Fiola Mare is doing, or just a run-of-the-mill version like shows up on so many menus these days.  This one was served too cold, basically unseasoned, with an unpleasantly sour center that was almost mealy in texture.  We didn't finish it, which I'm not sure I've ever done with cheese.  
 

The carota (roasted, fried & pickled carrots, lemon, yogurt, turmeric) was much better (not a high bar, admittedly).  A creative idea, pretty plating, and carrots obviously went well with the yogurt (vaguely Middle Eastern).  I'd have liked if the fried carrots were crispier and more salted so that they stood out more against the roasted ones.

I went with the squid ink reginette with black cod (I think) and scallops, mushrooms, and butter sauce.  I'd assumed that the sauce would be a mix of chunks of seafood and mushrooms, so was totally surprised when what appeared was three large stuff pasta pieces with buttery mushrooms on top.  The pasta itself was too dense (almost gluey) at its folded edges (although it may have been entirely fine in a single layer), and the seafood puree interior was underseasoned.  Disappointing.  (Two weird notes on the pasta: (1) I'd asked when we were deciding what to order whether it was possible to do half-portions of pasta, and the waitress responded confusingly that the chef really didn't like it but it was probably doable if we want to share a few pastas.  Either allow it or don't, but we were left entirely unsure whether we would be being difficult if we did want half-portions.  (2) Google claims reginette is a lasagna-esque flat pasta, but these were definitely stuffed.)

The whole grilled branzino was the best overall dish, presented head- and tail-on but deboned (convenient), stuffed with rosemary, on a bed of grilled scallions with a grilled lemon to spritz.  Enjoyable but not as good as the whole branzino at Nostos or Fiola Mare.  Minor annoyance: it was served on a plate that was too small, with the tail hanging over the side.  I had to ask for another plate on which to put the tail/head to give me room to actually cut up the fish and scallions.  

We ended up with the pignoli tart served with a lightly creamy ice cream (creme fraiche, if I recall).  I liked the tart -- essentially a pine nut variation on pecan pie -- but found the balsamic drizzle underneath to be overpowering.  

Service was a bit odd.  The waitress was very nice and seemed to mean well, but also seemed sort of awkward and easily flustered.  White wines by the glass were served much too cold.  I think they've done a lovely job with the space, making it feel very airy despite the fact that it probably gets very little sunlight, tucked away in Palmer Alley.  Oh, and fair warning -- Google Maps thinks that the address is located a block west of where it actually is.  

On 10/19/2015 at 11:16 AM, Rieux said:

Had lunch today.  The pork ragu was just ok, and at times unpleasant.  While the pasta and tomato sauce were good, the suckling pig in the ragu was not good.  The shredded meat was fine, without much pork-y flavor, but there were large (very large) chunks of fat and/or skin that I had to remove in order to eat it.

My friend had the tomato soup (which was a very small portion) and the burrata, which was very mealy (as noted in a review above) and not unctuous.  Service was strange - overly chummy, with periods of over attentiveness (no you don't have to ask if we need anything to drink on the same trip to the table when you drop off our glasses of wine and the water).

At $100 for two starters, a pasta, two glasses of wine, and two weak cappuccinos, including tip, it was a pricey, disappointing lunch.

On 10/29/2015 at 11:56 AM, DPop said:

I got the Gnocchi instead of the pork ragu, but my lunch experience yesterday was similar to yours. The gnocchis were the anti-Frank Ruta version; very plump and soft, texturally and visually looking more like golf balls made of ricotta cheese than what I have become used to when it comes to this pasta.  This would all be fine if the flavors were there, but sadly this dish tasted more like something you would get at a red sauce Italian joint in Old Town, very tomatoey and gooey from the ample amount of melted mozzarella.

Or maybe I was just grumpy from my appetizer of Grilled Mortadella, which didn't work on a number of levels for me.  It read well on the menu, but looked nothing like the picture they posted on their Twitter account (https://twitter.com/CentrolinaDC/status/592127665357901824).  It was two cold cut slices of mortadella like you would get at the deli counter at the Italian Store that had been grilled a bit, making them somewhat rubbery and tough, over top of some greens lightly dressed with balsamic and pine nuts.  The flavors were OK, but at $10 this dish is absurdly overpriced and could use some more conceptualizing if it is to stay on the menu.

Also, and this is a bit of a minor quibble but might wind up being significant as we enter the Winter months, but I question the choice of treated concrete floors in a space like this. I walked in from the rain yesterday in my wingtips and felt myself sliding as soon as my foot left the rug at the entrance.  I would imagine that they will have to get creative when there is snow on the ground outside, I would imagine that it will get quite slick inside on a busy dinner service if rugs aren't put down.

The contrast between the (several) good and (several) bad reviews in this thread is really striking to me.  Not knowing which experience I'd have myself, I'm not inclined to go.

5 minutes ago, Simul Parikh said:

Hubris...

Yet, Americans love comebacks.

Hopefully he does what he should have done in the first place - high quality, small operation with good food, good service, and blossoms. 

Blossoms are essential for any good restaurant, I agree...especially in the springtime.

Suna was amazing.