giant shrimp

he started on april 28, according to ripple on facebook.

i agree star of siam is an interesting thai restaurant. i have eaten there on three occasions, the last time a little over a year ago. but do you really need to reserve a month in advance? if so, times have changed. I just showed up, by myself, and never waited more than 15 minutes or so.

radius is more and more our palena cafe substitute, not that the menu is on the same scale. and why would it be in this neighborhood pizza place? the asparagus salad ($12) is about as good as it gets, with meaty spears, cooked perfectly, resting upon dark fingerlings. a crispy boiled egg, the yolk molten but not running like a poached egg, and dabs of sauce gribiche, are the emulsifiers, a bit theatrical and a reminder that asparagus and eggs are good companions. the sauce seems to me the next stage after pushing boiled white and yolk through a sieve, the basic treatment that gabrielle hamilton describes briefly in her recent memoirs on the difficult life of a person who has been driven into the kitchen because cooking is the best way she knows how to communicate with others, including her italian husband, who doesn't have much to say while riding undercurrents of marital discord. anyway, maybe for a limited time only because the specials here pop up and disappear according to the seasons, which have been notably whimsical in these parts lately, you can follow up with pan roasted chicken from pennsylvania ($18), served with potato puree, shallot jus and a hearty, (faintly, think pig in the water) bacony kale, comforting and assured. this was at least as good as chicken i had eaten a couple of days earlier in salt lake city at bambara, a restaurant in the monaco hotel, proving that good local chicken is commonly found in the kimpton chain. the chicken ($24) was heaped in a small mound. adding to the archaeological composition on the plate was a camembert bread pudding suffering from dry spots but acquiting itself for the most part as a nice stuffing -- and deep brown brussel sprouts. walking out the door i would choose to see the ethereal azure skies, glaring sun and glimmering salt flats over the mopey streets of mount pleasant, but if i had to settle on a chicken, both running neck and neck, i think i would go with what i found at the pizza joint. this time of year, i like the ramps, but i can take them or leave them, and have been leaving them mostly because i have been too lazy, or simply away, to go and get them at the farmers market. so it was nice to find ramps at bar pilar. they were available with the halibut, which was good ($12), but were better overall in the bowl of bucatini ($7). scallops were worth recommending as well ($12). you get just two of them, which got me to doing the arithmetic on small plates. this restaurant is serving asparagus ($7) at roughly 80 cents a spear; they are fine and can be dabbed into some slick and salty spots on the plate. the sauce for the bok choy with slivers of chinese sausage ($7) is watery, but you can pour it off the plate onto your food, and this dish, just as simple as the many others on the menu, leaves you yearning for more of the fleeting peculiar sweetness of the meat, which i suppose is a good thing and another virtue of dining on small servings.

just to keep this about restaurants: on the bus on our way to radius the other night for the usual rapturous risotto and papardelle and high-octane martini there was a young woman in the back seat loudly arguing with her mother over the phone, telling her off because her demands at home were eating into the limited amount of time she had to spend with her friends. we got off at the same stop and she shoved and brushed past us, using her oversized purse as a combo shield and weapon, then stalking up the street toward columbia heights. on my way to work on the bus a couple of weeks ago, i was immersed in my book -- joyce carol oates going on and on and on obsessing about the sudden death of her husband -- when i thought i heard sobbing. pretty soon i knew i wasn't imaginging something, the volume went up and a few rows away a woman was discussing the recent breakup with her boyfriend. it sounded at first like a death, and this went on and on and on. the bus was full, so the audience around her was truly captive, and the person sitting in front of her had to put down his book as she cried into his ear. she was ready to kill, but also shot full of arrows. my solution when i am sitting next to a loud person on the telephone, and maybe it is uncouth, is to join the conversation. these three-ways can get pretty interesting. the person on the other end, when they hear someone else in the background, will ask who is talking. at that point, the telephoner usually says something lame, code for i think maybe i am sitting next to a crazy person and i had better hang up. college students especially can get really foul mouthed when they are chatting boisterously with their friends, and sometimes i pretend i find their vocabulary offensive, if they are a seat away, even though i am not. but still, i'm not enjoying what i am hearing. i don't know about restaurant policies, but there is a rule on metro, right up there with getting hauled off and fined for biting into an apple, about playing radios and loud earphones. some of these telephone conversations are at decibel levels that easily should put them in this category. maybe metro should put up some new signs, like the clever one they came up with this winter about not being able to drive through three inches of snow: keep it down or we will sever your vocal chords.

allow me to agree. maximum pea flavor and i think with fava it suggests mint and it comes with parmesan shaved into faux pasta, i believe, achieved through some sort of noodling technique. the martinis here are super.

picking up on a conversation on the palena thread over the mini-artichoke sandwich, i wouldn't mind if the entire menu went miniature in the cafe if everything turned out as successfully as the desserts there these days. a pine nut tart not much wider in circumference than the size of a doubloon had me training on individual kernels. i was picking at them like a bird, and experiencing their texture and flavor was transformative, in a what's-new-in-the-kitchen kind of way. rounding out the pastry, a dollop of ice cream is used ingeniously to meld the sweetness of honey with the earthy ovine cream of pecorino. a single blade of rosemary garnishes the plate and invites deliberation, focusing your attention when you are eating it. the small world draws you in, but it never lasts long enough. you could wolf the whole thing down in a few gulps, and then i think it would leave a good flash of sugar.

things have been a bit dull in the cafe by comparison, and chicken a bit dry. maybe zora was right.

i doubt that an additional 1% tax on alcoholic beverages would cause much pain. it seems like my spirits have been going up significantly more than that despite the downturn. i am not proposing this, but d.c. home owners pay one of the lowest property tax rates in the nation. if d.c. were the 51st state, its 4.64% median tax rate would rank 47th among the states. (the highest median rate is 18.89% in new jersey.) veering in this direction would most likely be harmful to restaurant business.

I will gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today.

a close call, but it didn't blow my socks off, but what does these days, and i thougt it was worth the money. watch out for those small bottles of green sauce on the tables. as the bubbles should tell you, it's hand sanitizer. this is one of the only eateries i have ever been to where the cement floor made sense.

the food should be the point, and it was recently at a real low point. my wife commented that it was too bad we didn't have a dog at home to feed the inedible, raw steak that had gone mostly uneaten. the server was a bit clueless about this as well, except for noticing that the meat was overly rare. i have eaten at this restaurant frequently over the years, and was happy to see it open. it has always been a good training ground for young people in the restaurant business, the majority of whom probably go on to other things. however, the quality of the food here has really been allowed to slip. it should be held to a much higher standard.

firefly: half price bottles for sunday dinner (at least the last two sundays i have been there) masala art: half price bottles sunday through thursday (could be off by a sunday) heritage on wisconsin avenue: half price bottles monday through thursday

she's also been chopped. (too bad, i really had my heart set on dessert.)

somehow, i don't think alaska is prime restaurant territory, though you can always find decent places to eat. i was in seward in late september after deciding to run away from home for a few days. i wish i could tell you the name of the place, but it is downtown on fourth, just about the first place to open for breakfast, beyond the coffee/bakery shop heading towards the bay. look for an upside down old iditerod sled hanging from the ceiling, and in front of the kitchen attached to the wall a collection of one dollar bills mutilated by the customers. (i'm sure the locals will know where i'm talking about.) i liked george washington with the fu manchu best. the food is definitely not memorable here -- i sure don't remember it -- but i had some halibut that was good, and the menu is fairly extensive, featuring real food. the hotel seward has a small dining room with decent food. see if you can get them to cook some alaska spotted prawns and scallops absent the salad. i stayed at the inexpensive van gilder hotel, because it was haunted, and i would recommended it even though i encountered no bumps in the night. actually, i went to seward for the harding icefield trail, and you don't have to go too far up the mountain to have an opportunity to feed the black bears. mine wasn't having me; it was sitting down and looked like it was eating flowers from its paw. at the head of the trail, the park service instructs you to fend off black bears if they charge, because it means they have identified you as prey. brown bears (grizzlies), however, should be welcomed by playing dead -- unless they start eating you. then you are told to fight back.

I think frank rutas heart is very much in the café. And the food, while simple, or maybe not so simple, is in a league of its own. The chicken cacciatore I ordered there recently ($20) was the most memorable version of this dish I have ever had a leg, the meat of a mushroom, minty herbs, a seed or two of fennel and a fried egg soaking up the tomato sauce around the edges of the white. The presentation was restrained, but the whole thing was a little wild and mildly witty as well, and perfect for a winters night. Just as plain but edgy, fat slices of roasted artichoke heart are interspersed in a linear salad with pecorino and spicy greens and dabs of aioli ($13), an interplay of fiery warmth and zest that is so good you want to hold onto and savor the last morsel of artichoke that has to be the best in town. The desserts, too, are outstanding and I dont know if they are what is now being served in the back, but they are absolutely as refined as anything you would expect to find there, judging from a banana tartlet decked with two small caramel sauced logs up against a spoon of (crème freche?) ice cream ($9). The desserts were an exciting discovery when the new pastry chef came on board several weeks ago. I had trouble distinguishing some of the flavors from the sugar, but quince was one of them and I know it is hard when cooked to get it to live up to its natural aroma. Anyway, quibbling aside, the desserts were hard not to like then and they are even better now. By and large, the café is a new restaurant and the food is seriously good. i miss the ability to order from both menus, but the tab is coming out lower a glass of the portuguese monte vehlo is only $6 so if I keep saving the difference I should be able to afford to appreciate the cooking in the back before too long. (my wife insists she misses the fry plate, but I was starting to get a bit tired of it after ordering it maybe 50 times.)

the risotto has been getting better and better at radius. in additiion to a pork shank risotto at the end of the summer, i've had at least two different versions in the last month or so, and they are about as good as any i can remember at a restaurant. a half portion is generous ($10), and can easily be the center of a meal. we usually are too full to get around to the dessert, which is probably an omission we should correct, but it's difficult, because we would have to skip the pizza.

check out the price of green beans at the market these days. i passed up some mature long beans because they were selling for $9 a pound and instead picked up a small box from the fruit stand for $5. at the time, $5 seemed like a good price, but when i got home, i decided to weigh them, and they weighed less than six ounces. i believe that comes to more than $13 a pound.

not as of last weekend, but the wood-fired oven is being used and the front and back have been separarted menu-wise. and there's a new pastry chef. the desserts have shrunk in size and are now almost precious. change is definitely in the air.

this broth sets off foie gras like nothing else, small pads of it melting on your tongue with an evanescent taste of cloves. it's also sort of an adventure. maybe i was dreaming this, but i think there was some cockscomb in it recently that was yielding in texture and intriguing though reticent in flavor. the broth, though substantial, is light enough to float the flavors of what's added to it. for a number of reasons i haven't been able to get to palena for a few weeks, which may be why i am having a difficult time driving the soup out of my mind.

my result was a nice sorrel soup at buck's.

they have raised the price by about this much on many items where i buy my food in this economy. i think our total check for two was pushing $300 at my last visit in may, but the food was much better than merely edible.

i didn't say they weren't worth it, just that they were expensive, and somewhat offbeat. i am happy that someone is carrying these, and in the meantime have learned the difference between astringent and non-astringent varieties. i am assuming that what is available at the market is the former; i know the wild ones around here are. i haven't pedaled out to persimmon tree lane for years, so i don't know if it is still living up to its name, but i remember that it was difficult to time them and they were not easy to pick.

heinz has had them lately at the dupont market, but they are expensive, $8 a pound. i used them for a pie a few weeks ago, stirring in some eggs and unhomogenized milk (sugar and vanilla also) with the pulp and did not have a textural mess. i ended up with something, in flavor, approaching a pumpkin or squash pie. however they are strange, impossible to eat when they are unripe and too sweet for some tastes when they are edible. the peel hardens if you bake it. the batch of persimmons i bought were almost too ripe to use raw, which may be the best way to use them, but sparingly. they can have some of the same digestive effects as sunchokes and escolar, so i would not mix them with either of these ingredients.

my experience is that okra gets slimy when it's hot. if you don't like okra, slicing them will just spread them around more. it's hard to overcook them, but they are definitely done if they are breaking open. maybe you should look at them as green beans; the main difference is that they can cook quite a bit faster. i think they are an interesting vegetable, and as you can see from above, there is a lot you can do with them, but i like them best when they are simply prepared. they have a good flavor and i don't mind the slick texture.

Not sure how often if pops up, but coins of calf liver wrapped in pancetta on a beautifully composed plate with an amoeba-shaped balsamic puddle was the star of a recent palena café menu, bargain priced at $9 (maybe $11, my mind is shot). Zucchini jalfrezi with fresh and dried peppers and onions at masala art is too good for vegetarians only, the zucchini frying up faster than the peppers, so there is some crunch mingling with the softness, as well as a few licks of fire if you head for what is red and dried on the plate. Among the appetizers without tamarind chutney (for those who don’t like it), chicken tikka and chicken 55 are delectable ways of starting a meal. It means you will probably decide to forgo the chicken masala, which is outstanding with a sauce that’s made for delving for flavors, but the lamb chops, among other things, are good too, maybe particularly satisfying because there aren’t that many opportunities at Indian restaurants to eat meat off the bone. The cilantro and salt nan is a rich bread and there is something magical about it in which you can imaging tasting the faint sulfur of eggs. There was nothing sobering about the affogato at bibiana the other night. The nutella gelato was good enough by itself, and I didn’t have a chance to flag anyone down in a busy dining room and didn’t feel it was really worth the effort, but it had been whisked out of the kitchen before anyone had a chance to anoint it with espresso. After just one meal, I don’t really have the lay of the land at this restaurant, but a good strategy would be to ask your server and go with the hits, not that we encountered any out-and-out misses. They are going out of season fast, but local tomatoes were impressive, even more so because this has been a hard summer for them. They were as good as I have encountered in any restaurant lately, best of all ordered with a luxuriously milky burrata, but also adding color and tang to a pale plate of plain branzino that tasted fine but had cooled down and softened in texture after it was brought to the table and then deboned, not any easy job. Next time, I would order it with the bones; I like picking at my food and find it a pleasant way of slowing down the pace. Belon oysters were sea-fresh, some specks of grit in a couple left from the shucking. Veal sweetbreads were well-cooked but fairly standard despite their billing, nothing stellar in the offal department. Wheat cavatelli were clenched into small caterpillars, accompanied by fennel sausage and broccoli rabe, sprinkled with red chili flakes and pecorino, an interesting alignment in which rustic equals dark and spicy, the absence of sunshine. The controversy never really had a chance to get started between the two people sharing the pasta because it was heavily salted, salted maybe twice. There was no quibbling over marubini, supple ravioli filled with veal in brown butter, parmesan, pancetta and sage, an obvious crowd pleaser. Buck’s fishing and camping is another reliable place to find expertly prepared tomatoes, but time is running out on its clever caprese salad, which substitutes home-made cottage cheese for mozzarella. The pillowy cottage cheese is well worth ordering, but instead of being soft and chewy when freshly made, the curds were tough and extra chewy, which just makes me wonder if enough people have discovered just how good the cottage cheese at bucks can be. It would be interesting to try it with fruit as well. If anything, the desserts these days are getting more decadent than ever judging from a poached pear in valrhona chocolate sauce with brittle and ice cream.