giant shrimp

they won't throw you out if you are wearing jeans, in my experience, even lighter ones, although you may feel slightly out of place, if you tend to feel that way.

i'm sure you know what you are doing, but for those who don't i would start out cautiously. (rachel ray looked like she knew what she was doing, but i don't believe she did.)

this is dangerous territory. you really have to know what you are doing if you stray from a recipe, and rachel ray did someting like this on her show, which i was foolish enough to try. the results would have just about closed down a restaurant. also, i have followed a few mario batali recipes and don't feel that they are especially matched to cooking at home. i recall his chestnut soup turning into more of a sludge. i would look up first what marcella hazan has to say about sardines, although i don't have any of her books on me right now.

the service stands out, and they go out of their way to be friendly. based on one meal, i would notch up the food to neutral to positive, removing the pizza from the equation, about which there have been ample warnings. the maial tonne seemed to be all there but wasn't quite robust enough, the pork and whipped tuna sliced and spread a bit thin. a special cauliflower soup brightened with a dollop of mushroom was good but leaning toward blandness, creamless and reminiscent of the previous resident, viridian, in its early days. a tortelloni special was good, not glorious. the galletto was darker than i expected, the chicken a bit more grown up than it should have been but still tender though overly reliant on the butter in its sauce. the kale it was roosting on was cooked long enough to draw out its bitterness, something i avoid, but not entirely out of place and executed far better than a rancid memory of this from my grade-school cafeteria. the desserts are deconstructed and come with edgy accents, such as a sweet squash chip. the drinks are fortified, the seats hard. i actually like this place and had an enjoyable time, but dinner for two added up to about $170, which puts you in reach of tosca -- only about a 15 minute walk away if you live in posto's neighborhood.

same experience here. after half an hour or so, we were the only customers in the restaurant. i prefer having other people around. if i lived in betheda i probably would have been back a couple of times by now. the food was fine, but maybe not worth an hour-long trip to get there. and passage to india is just across the street.

this discussion is way too deep for me, and i don't think i have derived any valuable moral lessons from it to apply the next time i consider going to a restaurant, but one thing does bother me about this argument: leni riefenstahl is just about the oldest trick in the book.

the online menu may not be up do date, but there is nothing tricky about it. it provides a fairly good idea of what to expect. i don't understand this complaint.

the steak is expensive as ever, but prices have pushed down a bit. i have watched them over the years. they bob.

the cooking is even more uninspiring than the menu. fried dill pickle spears evoking fast-food hamburgers was the best thing we ordered, and it was downhill from there. the chef's meatloaf is purportedly from his mother's recipe, but this is a meatloaf that only a son could love: dark and dense, unsalted, a bit sweet, flecked with carrot and maybe onion in a syrupy sauce, served with mashed potatoes and boiled carrots that would make a nice mash for a hungry toddler in your party. far worse than the meatloaf was a chicken fried steak mostly memorable for coating your mouth with the taste of uncooked flour. biscuits, sweet and raw, were swamped in the gravy and suggested that the kitchen is not beneath taking a few shortcuts. these were from a mix. maybe some of these problems could have been avoided had the cook not been in such a rush with the order. entrees were served five minutes after the arrival of the appetizers, and the dishes left crowding the table were a slapstick accident waiting to happen, not that the shattering of plates on the floor would have been out of place. a large after-work group of diners was deafening, and the racket was ricocheting in every direction off the hard, drab walls of the dining room. deep and narrow with only one window at the front, this is not an easy space for a restaurant, but the original occupant, austin grill, made the best of things by opening it up as much as possible. kitchen has closed it in, achieving the feel of a bunker with bare prison lighting. the drinks here are too weak to provide much of a diversion. the bartender couldn't make a sidecar because he didn't have brandy, so he concocted a watery jim beam fizz. i know these are hard times, but whoever opened the doors to this place must have done so out of absolute desperation.

flip back even further and two people could have eaten an entire meal there for not much more than $100, with no reservations. of course, the meals weren't as elaborate in those days, but you still left with a home-made lollypop. today, a meal for two is pushing well above $300, and that's for the short menu, which i believe you need to order from if you want to share some goat, which is well worth getting. the wines by the glass are really first-rate, and a good value, and will open your eyes to the virtues to be found in sparkling wine from greece and vineyards in upstate new york. komi makes me feel like i am eating in a movie. it's incredibly calming, brooding in a healthy way. i wish i could afford to go there more often. i would make it a regular haunt.

check out this place in stanardsville, which is west off 29 when you are within about 15 miles or so of charlottesville heading south. i have been there a few times over the past few years, but not more recently than last winter. i wouldn't call it fine dining, but they did have good fried green tomatoes, and someone in the kitchen usually seems to know what they are doing: http://www.thelafayette.com/ have been there for breakfast, brunch and lunch, never dinner. (actually, this belongs in the previous category on small towns.)

the best place in the general area is cork, about a 10 minute walk to 14th street.

my wife's flat iron steak was a big hit at our table during a recent dinner -- cut thicker than it is often served, tender and resembling a more luxurious cut of meat. a side order of fries is satisfactory, the flavor maybe over-herbal from a dusting of (what i believe was) thyme. i guess corduroy got me hooked on the beets and goat cheese combination, and the version available here is just about as good. the cheese itself is rolled into truffles with chopped pecans and a few juliennes of country ham and one of sweet orange zest make it onto the plate. the carolina shrimp are simple, sweet and good, served basque style, which means they come with softened peppers, not with their heads on. (there are as many spanish as french motifs running through the menu.) the cooking here seems well under control, maybe too much so when you encounter the "cassoulet," a dish that for me comes with the connotation of letting things go. it is served here in a white bowl as a fan of lean pork medallions over perfectly textured white beans spiked lightly with sherry and garnished with fennel and onion compote. absent is the deep interplay of smoldering meat and fat with the rest of the ingredients. this dish definitely isn't one from the hearth, although it's satisfying enough without offering much excitement. the mildly honey- and cinammon-flavored rice pudding is similarly unthrilling, competent and about what you would expect from this dessert, if not from a kitchen that wants to make a big impression. (as i learned long ago from a new york times recipe, bay leaf can be a transcendent ingredient for rice pudding.) passionfruit mousse with grapefruit sorbet is a good idea for dessert, according to my wife. the wine list here isn't an abomination, but the selections tend to be surprisingly familiar and they lean toward california and the pacific northwest. a northstar merlot from wala, wala, wash. was good, and even better was the ridge the three valleys zinfandel. also available by the glass at palena, the latter is a good wine for washing down cheeseburgers. the wine list here is not a great place to go looking for nuances, and both wines were served at about the temperature that i like my bath water. all in all, this is a nice place to spend a couple of hours, but it comes at a fairly high price: a tad over $200, including two drinks.

maybe too many people were in town on friday night, but marvin seemed more like a scene and less than a great place to eat and drink. after three visits here, i am still a bit up in the air about how i feel about this restaurant. two ribs from a rack of lamb ($32) provided a puny amount of meat that needed some elevation in flavor and texture, served atop what i believe was a half-hearted stab at dauphinoise potatoes -- a soft white cake that would have benefitted greatly from some crust. a small salad of baby arugula felt acerbic by comparison to its companions on the plate, and out of place. a 10 oz. strip steak ($28) was even less successful, though any kitchen would have been challenged to rescue this tough, gristly, fatty piece of beef. asparagus continues to appear frequently throughout the menu, don't ask me why, because even on a good day it points up the shortcomings of this vegetable when it is found out of season. thanks to the stingy lamb portion, this was the first time we had room for dessert, and the toasted banana bread pudding, served with chocolate and salted caramel ice cream, was the highlight of the meal, although even here too much restraint in the seasoning and firing kept this recipe from being all that it could be. i have ordered three sidecars from marvin's bar, and they always seem to lack a center, an anchor to keep them from tasting diluted. this time, the drink came out rimmed with salt instead of sugar -- a mishap that was pleasantly corrected, but a substitution i have encountered at other places before (bebo) and that just makes me wonder. the bottom line, counting martinis, is that the drinks tend to be weak and they pale against the beer list. in a previous meal, marvin's delicious cheeseburger seemed to be headed for a fairly decent showing against stiff competition, but the long blonde hair packed into the meat unfortunately resulted in its disqualification. i had some nice things to say about the chicken and waffle, although it was definitely not as good as what todd kliman and others have described. my version, apparently, was missing some seasoning.

this place is quite amusing, but if you are not a lumberjack the joke may be on you. after devouring a delicious jar of guinea hen liver mousse with jelly about a year ago, i turned to my super-sized foie gras & feloniously dark and bloody boudin tart and got about three or four bites into it before i started turning, according to my wife, a pale green. i never felt so full in my life, and the prospect of continuing further with the meal was totally impossible. our son complained that his cassoulet reminded him of dirty socks and my wife was put off by a flintstones-sized bone protruding from her pork chop, which she said was just okay, nothing special, despite the dramatic presentation. nobody came close to finishing their food, so there was no dessert. i found the experience frustrating, and i was unable to get anyone to return with me a few weeks ago despite my assurance that with the first meal under our belts we now would know better how to proceed through dinner. my wife says she has yet to digest her first visit.

i, personally, have had none -- which doesn't mean they don't exist. i intend someday to find one, maybe this spring or summer. la roma on preston is the best of the few italian restaurants i have eaten at here. like a surprising number of restaurants in the washington area, they didn't exactly know how to make a negroni, but they didn't charge us for them either. your best bet may be to head for gatineau and look for something french. bundle up, too. it's cold up there. but you may encounter the opposite problem when you step into a restaurant, because many tend to turn the thermostats way up this time of year.

assorted east coast canadian oysters on new year's eve at lemeac in montreal. just about any "soup" at palena.

he reminds me of the loaves and fishes.

i haven't heard much about the sunchokes that showed up recently at palena -- not exactly a soup, maybe almost a veloute, but you eat it with a spoon. the small round cross sections of choke are perfectly smooth and arranged like points on a sundial around the bowl, with a few judicious date snips. actually there's much more to the dish, but i don't take notes and i live for the moment so my brain is usually half empty of the things i used to know. but i do remember liking it enormously. (it's was on the second course page, $15.)

it was nice to see this place almost full on sunday night, although i'm not sure exactly why business appeared to be way up, though wondered if it had anything to do with russians coming down the hill. in a recent visit to passage to india, we ran into tough samosas and lamb and bitter eggplant. all three, based on recent experience, were superior at heritage, though there is still more intrigue and depth to the cooking in bethesda.

sounds like a smart alternative -- although you probably have fresher, moister, better-tasting chestnuts when you buy them now at the farmer's market. i think that's part of the reason they aren't easy to peel. i was told to keep them in a damp towel in the vegetable bin in the refrigerator and use them quickly. the bittman recipe is aimed at seasonality, by the way. i'm not the biggest fan of chestnuts, and have made soups with them that are too rich for me, but i thought they turned out really well this time.

oriental chestnuts, shredded cabbage and shrimp. this is one of the more successful weekly mark bittman recipes i've tried out of the new york times recently. each of the three main ingredients is sauteed successively in peanut oil and united at the end, with garlic, ginger, dark seasame oil, soy sauce and scallions coming into play at various stages. peeling chestnuts -- even just half a cup -- is always a pain; it's peeling off the inner skin that nearly defeats me, but they are almost worth the effort -- browned and a little crunchy. he also has a delicious recipe for pears, roquefort cheese, walnuts and lettuce, and now is prime season for it. the cheese, unfortunately, is selling for $20 a pound at whole foods, though you only need about $7 worth. this is also the right time of year for deborah madison's Winter Squash "Pancake" with Mozzarella and Sage. the trick is to keep browning the pancake or mashed squash in butter until it becomes browner and browner but not burnt. she suggests stirring it up each time you want to form a new surface to brown on the bottom of the pan; but repatting it into a pancake becomes progressively more difficult the longer your sautee the squash. the recipe is relatively fast, after you've softened the squash in the oven. (i was listening to garrison keillor the whole time -- "indian summer is like starting up a romance after your first heart attack.")

he came back, and he's probably still there.

in case of an upset, i have a bottle of fernet-branca standing by.

i haven't read the story yet, but i did enjoy the marc rosenthal illustration. he's one of the best and you don't get to see that often enough in the post these days.