Gadarene

Never in my life did I expect to see someone I respect calling Deschutes a crap beer. It took me quite aback. Their Black Butte Porter is damn near my personal idea of beer perfection, eminently quaffable on all occasions. And not hoppy neither.

Bell's and Deschutes? Oh, no no no. Don, I'm interested in your perspective: I was back home in Southern Oregon recently for Fourth of July, and was perusing the beer selection of the local hypersupermegamart Fred Meyer, a Portland-based chain that is now an arm of Kroger. There are Fred Meyers throughout Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, including in Brookings, my tiny little corner of southwest Oregon just above the California border. The beer selection in the Brookings Fred Meyer is prodigious, with many, many Oregon-based beers from brewers such as Deschutes, Ninkasi, Full Sail, Rogue, Laurelwood, Portland Brewing, Base Camp, Caldera, Cascade, Green Flash, McMenamins, Pelican, Bridgeport, and so forth. If these beers are readily available down in Brookings, then they are surely readily available at the other hypersupermegamart Fred Meyer locations throughout the state, and many of them can also easily be found in supermarkets up and down the West Coast (I definitely remember seeing Laurelwood, Full Sail, Green Flash, and Ninkasi in a random market in Truckee, California last summer, for instance, and of course Rogue is a standby of Whole Foods throughout the country). Are they all "crap or quickly turning into crap" by virtue of having the volume to be carried in abundance by Fred Meyer stores in the Pacific Northwest? If not, where are you drawing the line? What makes Deschutes a crap beer now, just because we can (hallelujah) finally get them on the East Coast? Is the difference in scale for 7/11 (if Deschutes is indeed available there, which I haven't seen yet) really so massive compared to their previous footprint of the Western half of the country (they were easy to get in Austin two years ago) for you to write them off so summarily? Or is it that the Black Butte Porter and Fresh Squeezed IPA now are presumptively crap because they are now available on the East Coast (brewed out of Deschutes's North Carolina facility, unless I'm mistaken), while their Armory XPA and Deschutes River Ale still are as good as ever because you can't get them out here? Has Rogue's Morimoto Soba Ale been crap all this time because you can get it in Whole Foods? I think you do a disservice to the brewers from places like Deschutes and Bell's who have clearly been quality-focused for such a long time; unlike something like Blue Moon or even Goose Island (which is FAR more ubiquitous), they deserve the benefit of the doubt in believing they can scale their operations without compromising their integrity as committed craft brewers. It's one thing to say, look, if a beer is so widely available that 7/11 can stock it, then it's not a "craft beer" for some definitions of the term. It's quite another thing to then proclaim that all such beers are crap or quickly will be, which I find ridiculous.

Barcelona on 14th has half-priced bottles of wine on Mondays, both in the dining room and at the bar. You can find some pretty great value.

The cocktails here are really great.

Well, whenever it does or doesn't happen, my perhaps-controversial opinion is that DC can't be considered a great food city until we have a relative profusion of small, chef- or ingredient-driven, interesting, high-quality places. Which we do not remotely, in the present state of things.

Well, lifting the height restrictions is never going to happen, practically speaking. So I'm back to being sad! (I agree that so much of it has to do with density, though.)

I'd like to know whether it will ever be possible for small, interesting, niche-focused places like this to survive in DC in any significant number (they exist in profusion in a dozen other cities I've visited, large and small). Call me a pessimist, but I have a hard time thinking so. And that makes me really sad.

Aw, man. That sucks a lot.

Here is a link to a couple dozen of my photos of Granada street art; I've got more in a Google Photos album that I can't access from work, so send me a message if you'd like to see those as well.

Sure! With the caveat that I'm a thoroughgoing amateur at photography and thus can't vouch for the quality or composition of these pictures to a discerning eye. But they sure are pretty to me. Let me see if I can pull a few of the best to post here and then provide a link to my album if you'd like to see more. (Madrid, by the way, is a remarkable street art city, even more so than Granada; if you haven't been and you're interested in that sort of thing, I highly recommend it.)

The beet greens and the roasted half-chicken I had here last night were two of my favorite dishes in recent memory; this kitchen is really humming on all cylinders. Plus the bar program is fantastic and the service was, as always, wonderfully warm. Thanks to Jill especially for making me feel at home each time I come in. This restaurant is a remarkable treasure and I'm so happy to have it in Adams Morgan.

Depressing.

Unless I've missed it -- which is possible -- there doesn't seem to be a dedicated thread for Andalucia or any of the delightful Spanish cities located therein. My girlfriend and I spent five days in April drinking sherry and enjoying cheap, delicious tapas in Sevilla, Granada, and Cordoba before heading up to Madrid and Barcelona. I've given my recommendations for the latter half of our trip elsewhere in this forum, so here are some of my favorite places and impressions from our too-brief time in Andalucia! (I'd love to make it back and explore more of the region, as I felt we barely scratched the surface.) I thought we were really fortunate to find a number of places that had that ineffable combination of great food and drink, great value, and great atmosphere that made me want to come back again and again (which, in several cases, we did – despite my having compiled a long list of places to try for each city). We spent two nights each in Seville and Granada, one quick night in Cordoba, and then four nights each in Madrid and Barcelona. Every one of the cities was awesome in its own way -- Cordoba was probably the least fun because we weren’t there for that long and because I ended up getting sick that night, but I still enjoyed it a ton. If pressed, I’d probably favor our experiences in Seville slightly over Granada and Madrid slightly over Barcelona, but I would have happily spent another month or more just exploring all the places we went. The history there is just incredible; it may be unfair of me, but so much of the U.S. feels so plastic, anodyne, and characterless by comparison. Wandering down a random narrow alley and finding Roman walls or a 500-year-old church, or stopping at a random town for lunch and being the only tourists in a gorgeous 1300-year-old fortress…we just don’t have anything like that here. I love it. I wish I’d been sooner. I wish I could go everywhere. Sevilla The Alcazar was stunning, but my favorite part of Seville was the labyrinthine network of streets; every seeming dead end turned out to have a couple of picturesque alleyways splitting off from it in one direction or another. We stayed in the Hotel Casa de Colon, a renovated boutique hotel with an absolutely perfect location and a very reasonable price. I highly recommend it, but only if you pay the extra 10 euro or so and get one of the larger rooms with a balcony; I think the standard rooms are a little small and dark, but ours was spacious and airy. Our favorite places to eat in Seville: the back bar at Casa Morales (run by the same family since 1850; we went there twice, amazing atmosphere and everything was delicious, especially the imperial anchovies and the tortilla); the counter in the back of the grocery at Casa Moreno; Las Golondrinas II across the river in Triana (not much ambience, but phenomenal carrillada – pork cheeks – and the radishes are insanely tasty); Las Teresas in Barrio Santa Cruz (we went here twice also; I loved everything about it starting with the dozen legs of ham hanging directly over the bar seats – I highly recommend the secreto iberico and the boquerones fritos); and, for breakfast and atmosphere, Bar El Comercio (I still wish I’d picked up a bottle of the murky green olive oil they sell here, and their collection of antique cocktail and sherry bottles is something to see). Granada We rented a car and drove from Seville to Granada; the AirBnB we rented in Granada had both a spectacular view and a free parking space, which is pretty key in a city where automobile traffic into the historic center is strictly regulated. The Alhambra was everything it was made out to be, and the old Moorish quarter was very fun to walk around in (if a little steep at times), but the most enjoyable thing we did there had nothing to do with history. There’s a particular street artist in Granada called El Nino de las Pinturas, and we found a map online of the approximate locations of a lot of his pieces and then spent a morning going from one to the next in a sort of street art scavenger hunt. So much fun, and some of the photos we took are gorgeous. Favorite bars/restaurants in Granada: the snails were pretty decent at Bar Aliatar Los Caracoles; we had a great Moroccan meal at Tajine Elvira (get the eggplant dish that’s sort of like a hot baba ghanoush, and get the chicken and vegetable tagine as well); the wine bar at Taberna La Tana was awesome and the free tapas that came with every drink were generous and delicious; but my favorite place was probably El Tabernaculo, a tiny hole-in-the-wall run by the proprietor by himself and festooned with religious regalia everywhere (everything here was delicious; I didn't realize until after the fact that this was one of Anthony Bourdain's stops for Parts Unknown -- he sat in the same seat I did, but that's unsurprising since there were eight barstools at most). The N42 and Cordoba We drove from Granada to Cordoba along the N42, which is incredibly scenic. Along the way we stopped at Alcala la Real, a picturesque town of 22,000 that’s towered over by a Moorish fortress built in the 8th century. This is where we wandered through the fortress for a couple of hours and were literally the only tourists there; I was really, really impressed by how good (and high-tech) the exhibits were. Anywhere in the U.S. this would be a top tourist attraction that would be jam-packed from morning until night (not least because it would be pretty curious for an 8th century Moorish fortress to turn up in America). From there we took a slight detour to the mountain town of Zuheros, where we had a lunch of chuletitas (little chops) from milk-fed baby goats. I feel no remorse; they were delightful. In Cordoba we stayed at the NH Collection hotel, which was very nice except for the fact that our room was inordinately warm and there was no air conditioning, so they had to move us – at 1 in the morning, with my stomach feeling terrible – to a much smaller and less nice room that was, at least, cooler and more comfortable. We spent that evening (before I started feeling sick) at the Cordoba annual Cata del Vino festival, where for a 10 euro ticket you could enter a large covered pavilion and sample a fair amount of Montilla Moriles fortified wine, which is that region’s version of sherry. It was a lot of fun; there were literally thousands of people there and I think we might have been the only ones who spoke English as our first language. It’s basically an excuse for friends to dress up in going-out clothes, get together, and drink wine in a big tent, and I was surprised at how young the average person was. (I was also vividly reminded that Spain’s legal drinking age is 18, as several of the people we passed were definitely wearing braces.) Unfortunately my stomach starting acting up so we didn’t stay as long as we might have, and despite my having the names of half a dozen places that are supposedly amazing for dinner, that wasn’t in the cards and we ended up just making an early night of it. The next morning we spent a free-admission hour at the Mezquita – stunning, breathtaking, amazing – and then caught the train for Madrid. Places to eat in Cordoba: I never got to try them, but Blanco Enea, Bodega Guzman, Casa Rubio, and Taberna San Cristobal all looked excellent when I did my research, and they will be my first stops if I'm ever in town again.

I guess I haven't consciously noticed it on the shelves in the last few months. If it's not on the market now, I hope it comes back soon. (And I'll doublecheck the next time I go into any of the places I mentioned.)

Monkey 47 is quite good, albeit expensive around these parts for a 375 ml bottle. I'm pretty sure you can get it at Irving Wine and Spirits on Mt. Pleasant, Batch 13 on 14th, and S&R Liquors (S&L?) on 18th and K. I think I also saw it at the wine and spirits store in Cleveland Park a few doors down from Ripple, but I'm not positive. I know this is belated, but I hope it helps.

I was surprised that I didn't end up enjoying Barcelona as much as Sevilla, Granada, or Madrid. Parts of it are quite pretty (Gaudi is great, and the Poblenou Cemetery is positively astonishing), but it just takes so damn long to get from one neighborhood to another. We also had a much tougher time getting into bars and restaurants in Barcelona than in any of the other cities; there were at least a dozen instances over five days where we tried to eat/drink somewhere and failed because it was too crowded, it was closing, the wait was too long, and/or the servers just flat-out didn't acknowledge us for long enough that we felt embarrassed and annoyed and left. We stayed in El Born, which was cool-looking and chock full of bars and restaurants, and yet somehow simultaneously didn't feel "real" to me, being as it was a kind of hipster/scenester/expat disneyland. That being said, we had some great experiences there. Disfrutar was simply phenomenal and one of the best high-end meals I've had in a long, long time. The service was incredible, the food was inventive and delicious, and the sommelier (who I think is the sister of the chef, unless I misunderstood?) was soooooo friendly and passionate and knowledgeable (and suggested top-notch pairings) that she elevated the dining experience single-handedly. The meal was also a damn good value, all things considered (we did the middle option of the three tasting menus, the Festival menu, and it was 105 euros for ~20 separate dishes). Don't miss this place. Go here. Now. Another amazing place is La Pubilla, a Catalan restaurant next to La Llibertat market. We walked in for a late breakfast at the bar here, having an egg-and-bacon dish that was lusciously rich and decadent, and loved it so much that we phoned them for to book a table for dinner on our last night in Spain. (Apparently we were lucky to be able to sneak in for their last breakfast service, as I've read that there are habitual lines for lunch and reservations are highly recommended.) The service was awesome and the food was phenomenal (and very, very reasonably priced); as soon as I look through my photos I'll remember what we had and post a follow-up with visual evidence. The menu is very market-focused and is always changing, so just order whatever looks tasty to you and you'll have a great time. So good. So, so good. (By contrast to both these places, we had a dinner tasting menu at Michelin-starred Hisop, and while the food was good, the experience was both strange and underwhelming. For such a small place, the service in particular was at times bizarrely slow and inattentive, as if they were missing a member of the waitstaff that night -- at least one person looked to be pulling double duty. I was so excited for this place beforehand, and we left feeling like we could have gone any number of other places and had a better time.) We ate at the bar at highly-regarded Llamber (around the corner from our AirBnb) twice and it was excellent both times, though in neither case did we have a full meal. And Bar Tapeo was one of my favorite places on our whole trip, the kind of cozy, unassuming tapas bar with a wonderfully hospitable owner, a relaxed atmosphere, and (most importantly) absolutely KICK-ASS food that I had despaired of finding in Barcelona until we ended up there on our final full day. I don't remember exactly what we had except that he was clearly quite proud of one of the daily specials (something with cock's comb? pig's feet? beef cheeks? i need to ask my girlfriend; she'll know), and when we ordered it we loved it so much that we sung its praises to the American couple who came in after us and made them order it too. And the wine here is, happily, well-curated and awesome. I also had a great breakfast in this place in the Gothic Quarter (can't remember the name, but will try to find it) after being turned away from the brunch place I was trying to go to (i was eating by myself and they had a single open seat at the bar, but they said i needed to put my name on the waiting list for a table because the bartender decided not to fill that seat with anyone. I mean!). The place i ended up was everything i love about Spain; a single small room with a couple of cheap tables and chairs, overseen by a crusty-but-affable old guy who's probably been there since 1963, with a couple of guys in the corner reading newspapers who have probably been there since 1964, serving a limited breakfast menu which at its most fancy consisted of bread with tomatoes and olive oil (unlike virtually everywhere else in Spain, he didn't have ham because "ham is too expensive!"), drinking wine from one of the many barrels that line the wall behind the counter, and the whole bill comes to $4 or $5. That was fun. ...Okay, I think I had more good meals in Barcelona than I initially remembered. I would happily go back and explore more.

We spent a phenomenal two weeks in Spain a couple of months ago, and I thought I'd share some of my favorites from the various cities we visited. Apologies for the lack of detail; I'm not very good at writing food reviews, and when I think about doing it, I just end up putting off posting. Some favorite tapas bars from Madrid, mostly in El Centro and near Plaza Santa Ana (which is an ostensibly touristy area, but we tend to gravitate towards local color, grit, and ambience, and I was pleasantly surprised how untouristy all these places seemed): Casa Gonzalez (family-run wine bar, great atmosphere, great wines, get the pork cheeks; we came back here multiple times); La Venencia (just down the street from Casa Gonzalez; ostensibly a favorite haunt of Hemingway’s – tons of atmosphere and like a place out of time; serves only sherry and cured meats/cheeses olives; the dried beef (cecina) is delicious; note that the proprietor is crusty and has a longstanding no-photos allowed policy); La Chata (great traditional tapas bar; I loved the lettuce hearts with anchovies (cogollos con anchoa) so much that we went back a second time just to get them again; the oxtail (rabo de toro) was also great); Bodegas Ricla (tiny space with standing room only; one of the few places in Spain where the people behind the bar seemed genuinely happy to see us, rather than vaguely harried and no-nonsense; the boquerones in vinegar are excellent, as is most of the menu); Casa Toni (on a VERY touristy strip, but this place is great; the pig ears and the boquerones fritos are both recommended; I'm embarrassed to say we kind of got kicked out -- or, rather, I'm pretty sure they decided to close early rather than take further orders from us -- when a pair of loud and drunk Americans came in off the street and proceeded to attach themselves to our party, which I guess is a risk of that location). I wholeheartedly endorse the wine at each of these establishments as well (and in places where I wasn't as confident about their selection, the following tip from Rick Steves served me extremely well: when in doubt, ask for una copa de crianza; it'll be better quality than what you'll get if you ask for the house red or white, and at not much more cost). (We also did a day trip to Segovia from Madrid, which was lovely and felt like a world away. I can't remember the name of the place in Segovia where we had lunch, but it was old-school and white tablecloth and simply fabulous, if not cheap; both the Segovian specialty cochinillo (roast suckling pig) and -- especially -- the hake head I had was just sublime. When I look up the name of the restaurant, I'll post it here.)

I can't recommend Parachute more highly; the service is great, the atmosphere is cool but comfortable, and everything I've had there has been excellent. If the goat stew (yumso tang) is on the menu, do not hesitate. And my favorite Chicago bar is Billy Sunday. Among other things, it boasts an astonishing array of old bottles of amaro, listing glasses of 1960-era Campari next to 1970-era Averna and so forth for quite reasonable prices; the bartender told me that there are collectors in Italy with vast stores of the stuff that they’re happy to unload.

It's decent but quite pricy.

Weird. When we walked in Satirday morning, they gave us a laminated menu with the brunch prix fixe printed on it (it said the same things that you'll find under "brunch" on their website, which seems to indicate that brunch is served both Saturday and Sunday). One of the two women working there definitely seemed to be inexperienced/tentative/had some language barrier, but she still knew about the brunch menu (she handed it to us, in fact). I wonder what the deal is. Glad to hear you enjoyed the food regardless, though! Also, what's funny is that my michelada didn't come with a Tajin-coated straw. But we were definitely at the same location as you.

Just went here for the first time (Columbia Heights location), and this place is PHENOMENAL. The brunch is easily the best deal in the city (and I don't mean "best deal for brunch," but best deal for food, period). You get a starter, a main, and a dessert for $14.95, plus your choice of beverages for $2 each (the Bloody Mary was really good, but the michelada was better). Every one of the courses was outstanding, and it's almost too much food overall. I had the pozole rojo as the starter, and it's one of the best pozoles I've ever had; excellent depth in the broth. The huevos divorciados for the main were huge and very, very good. And for dessert, my gf and I each got the toreja, which is a lovely piece of french toast with caramel sauce, vanilla ice cream, what looked like corn flakes for crunch, and a dusting of powdered sugar. The toreja alone could have been a delicious breakfast. Total cost for both (including a horchata, a Bloody Mary, and two micheladas): $40 + tax and tip. I'm definitely going to be coming here again as much as I can before they close; I wonder if Mt. Pleasant is in their free delivery area?

Just ate at the omakase counter tonight (I think our sixth time in the last five years, but the first in the spring, and seasonality is so important). Phenomenal as always. My favorite meal in DC, particularly now that Little Serow has toned down the heat and stopped changing their menu as frequently. Simply a great experience if you're open to sushi and willing to try interesting, quality ingredients. (I still think about the tuna spinal jelly we had here three years ago; I remember exactly how it tasted.)

The mortadella sammy is something else. And any of the pastas, And the grilled pork main with taleggio polenta. And the interesting bar program (albeit definitely more expensive than I would want it to be in a world where this is my neighborhood restaurant -- Mt. Pleasant, close enough -- and I could gladly hang out here three times a week). And the service, well up to Little Serow standards of openness, friendliness, and genuineness. This place is great. I look forward to them changing up their menu with the seasons, so I can try as much from this team as possible. (I'm not a fan of the salt-crusted sardine, though.)

The charred ribeye here was EXCELLENT last week. The other things I had were...fine.

Completely agreed.