ulterior epicure

Thank you Ulterior. Just to clarify, I was the pastry chef at Cafe Boulud in Palm Beach for 2 years with Zach Bell and prior to that I was in nyc at Daniel and db Bistro Moderne. I have done quite a few events though with Raphael and Gavin, great chefs and I always had fun working with them.

Even so, you're clearly very talented. Best of luck at CityZen.

So this will be my first post as I would like to introduce myself to the community.

I have replaced the irreplaceable Amanda Cook as pastry chef at CityZen and Sou'Wester. She left me some big shoes to fill but I am more than up to the task.

Coming to DC from Cafe Boulud, I am humbled and honored to work for such a great chef in Eric. My goal is to elevate his cuisine and the dining experience at CityZen by staying true to the wonderful ingredients, myself and the restaurant. CityZen is one of those restaurants, to me, that sets the standard and then goes above and beyond.

Everything on the dessert menu at this moment is inspired by the season. We have some caramelized fairytale pumpkin bread with ginger ice cream, also a nice dish of red wine poached mission figs with mascarpone semifreddo and tellicherry pepper. There are a few others that I will leave to you to come in and see. The menu changes often so there is always something different happening at CityZen.

Hope to see you soon.

MP

Excellent. Having worked under Haazs (and Kaysen), you've surely got a lot of great things to share with the dining public at CityZen. I look forward to seeing your menus, and hopefully tasting your desserts.

Del Ray, Del Ray, Del Ray... that's in Virginia, right? Recalculating, recalculating, recalculating... Does the metro run out there? I'm a sucker for ice cream.

Not sure why you're asking, but if you want to maximize chances of a sighting...

Just about choked on my own spittle.

Oh, Don, I thought you knew me better than that. The last thing I want to do is eat where THOSE people eat. Honestly, I'm just getting a little rusty on my D.C. power scenes and needed a refresher. I have conjured in my mind scads of places that fit the example I'm looking to make, but no particular names or specific dining rooms are surfacing.

I mean, I suppose the Monocle is a bit divey. And the Capitol Hill Club is only for members of one side of the aisle.

The Round Robin is almost perfect, except it's way too much bar and not enough restaurant.

The problem is, the current administration is making those clubby places out of date in a way that they never were before.

Citronelle, Ray's Hell-Burger.

No, less bangle, more cigar.

Oval Room and Bombay Club come to mind, also Tosca and Charlie Palmer Steak.

Yes, I was thinking more of the clubby, old-guard types, like the Bombay Club and The Palm. Any others?

This is going to be a very odd query, but I was wondering if the members of this board could help me come up with some usual suspect restaurants where one might find power-brokering politicians and their kind.

i've only been to Rosa Mexicana last year, but it was enjoyable and the service was very nice, so I'd give it a go again if I were at National Harbor with time constraints.

Thanks for all your suggestions. My business trip was permanently postponed.

However, I did help out a couple of colleagues who did end up going. They managed to escape the National Harbor and had lunch at Hank's in Alexandria and lunch (or was it early dinner?) at Central Michel Richard.

D.C. is begging me to return. So many places I need to eat there!

Oh! Someone else knows that Jimmy Johns exists!! I thought they were just a midwest thing, although I swore I saw one in College Park once...

#12, easy on the mayo, heavy on the avocado.

Potbelly. Seriously.

Oh, yes, I know full well the value of Potbelly. Between Chipotle and Jimmy Johns, Potbelly fueled me through many a late-night cram session in college.

We've only been to Bond 45 and Rosa Mexicana. Both are edible and both have great views (in some spots).

Your enthusiasm brings tears to my eyes.

And Don, always the reliable source, thanks for those suggestions.

Help me dust this thread off.

Say you're trapped at the National Harbor for about 48 hours with no foreseeable sign of escape, where would you eat?

I might have A.D.D. compared to the rest of you. I was seated with a direct eye line into a kitchen. Without trying to be rude, I'm sure I was mesmerized by one of the cooks tossing and twirling those fluffy pitas more than I should have. As I said above (somewhere?), when you're sitting in a dark room and there's a bright source of light, it's hard NOT to gaze toward it, especially if there's activity going on, however mind-numbing it might be.

Good Zing don.

Any chance you can get that recipe from Mr. Monis, those dates are seriously delicious. I have tried to make them on my own, but they don't turn out the same.

I can give you three of the ingredients.

1. Medjool dates.

2. VERY HIGH-QUALITY EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL.

3. Sea salt.

Don Rocks will have to supply the rest.

Olive Oil Poached Escolar (a painful $27) with an abundance of stewed cherry tomatoes, black olive powder, corn two ways - three poorly cooked, surprisingly dry, pieces of escolar - one of my favorite inexpensive fish - without any bread to soak up the impressively skinned tomatoes served in a clumsy (but modern) bowl.

Ouch. Dry escolar. That's not an easy achievement.

A long-overdue downgrade for this tired restaurant.

I'm nodding with some familiarity.

I had to restrain myself from ordering the Katsikaki, and I'm glad I did, because it gave me a chance to try the earth-shattering Lavraki me Alati - one of the most perfectly cooked examples of fish I've ever eaten.

Do not - repeat, do not - feel guilty about bypassing the Katsikaki or Suckling Pig for this triumphant fish!

I cannot and will not regret the wonderful, roasted goat and suckling pig I had at komi. But a wee envious of that gorgeous salt-encrusted fish that was served to a neighboring four-top the night I dined. Next time. Next time.

Great to see you on DR, I've enjoyed your blog for many years. Your photographs and La Tartine Gourmande's have been some of the most exquisite food photographs taken over the past few years.

As for the topic at hand, I think photographs taken tastefully are not a problem. However these kind of rules are usually written for people who need them and unfortunately they punish everyone uniformly.

lion, thanks so much for the welcome and kind words.

Yay, I'm happy as a "clam!" Finally graduated from my shrimp shell.

Below is a lengthy excerpt of my blog post. Photos and more verbiage can be found over there.

************************************

I have very good instincts about restaurants.

They work for me, anyway.

I'd say that about 80% my restaurant experiences match my expectations.

I tend to walk in with a glass slightly less than half-empty and hope that the restaurant can fill 'er up. If it doesn't, there's not a tremendous sense of loss.

Rarely, however, I encounter an unexpected knock-out; a restaurant experience that far surpasses my expectations. Thrilling, these are the meals I live for.

My recent dinner at CityZen, unfortunately, was not one of them.

...

Then there's Eric Ziebold, Corey Lee's predecessor at The French Laundry.

I have been fascinated by him ever since he first arrived at CityZen in 2004.

Like the rest of his Keller colleagues, his ascent onto the national culinary scene has been impressively quick and refreshingly quiet.

In 2005, he was named one of Food + Wine's Best New Chefs. In 2008, he won the James Beard Award for Best Chef Mid-Atlantic. These awards, having come and gone, haven't stolen him from his position as a working chef. Indoctrinated with the Keller work ethic, he has seemed far more dedicated to his craft and kitchen than to pursuing fame or fortune.

Every one of Keller's disciples, whose restaurant I've had the chance of visiting, has been in the kitchen the night I visited. Ziebold was no exception. Of course, Ziebold has an extra incentive to show up for work - his kitchen is open to the entire dining room.

Our table, in the smaller dining room often used for private parties, was the closest one to the pass. Sitting on a concrete floor next to a glass wall lined with metal, I was surprised to find the noise level quite manageable. Only the deafening clatter of the whisk and copper bowl, which injected itself episodically throughout the evening, was slightly annoying.

Neither Houston nor I were terribly hot on the six-course chefs' tasting menu ($110). Preferring the luxury of choice, we ordered three prix-fixe dinners to share. We selected nine dishes, asking for the third main course to be halved. Therefore, we had two sets of first courses, a main course each, shared a cheese course, and each finished with a dessert course.

I have to be honest: Ziebold's menus have never interested me. Perusing them regularly over the course of five years, my imagination has never been captured.

And that seems to have been my reaction to every Keller and Keller alumnus restaurant I've visited. I've left every one of them shrugging.

So why visit this one?

Because everyone I know who has been to CityZen has highly commended the restaurant to me. And, because, I am on that eternal quest to have my expectations unexpectedly surpassed.

Hope springs eternal.

I arrived with my expectations heavily checked, though.

Whereas I expected to be mildly bored, I actually left the restaurant deflated.

By the end of the night, CityZen had managed to siphon off a good deal of my slightly half-empty glass.

Service, at first, seemed razor-sharp. But it quickly dulled.

It was a very busy night. And it was apparent in the lack of attention and wildly inconsistent pacing. We waited at least 25 minutes between a couple of our courses, even longer for dessert. This wasn't as much of a problem towards the end of the night - we were getting full - as it was towards the beginning.

Some restaurants are able to pull off the round robin-style of service seamlessly, a relay with well-rehearsed baton passes. Our rotating servers seemed more like last-minute covers trying to fill in the gaps.

My empty wine glass sat on our table for more than half the night, even though I said I wasn't having any wine. Silverware was misplaced.

Bread, which was served from a large cigar box, was stone-cold. It wasn't quite icebox-cold, but it was unnaturally cold. Cold focaccia is not good focaccia.

The cheese course, which had me particularly excited (a trusted friend had said the selection was especially notable), arrived on a plate, not on a trolley, as my friend remembered. It's not the trolley I missed, but rather, the implied ability to choose from a larger selection. More troubling, however, was the fact that our server wasn't sure how to identify two of the cheeses she was serving us. For a restaurant of CityZen's caliber, this was disappointing.

But these are all trivial concerns next to the extremely fishy-tasting snapper I had as a main course. I smelled its fishiness before it landed on the table. The snapper - two thick filets wrapped tightly in caul fat, skin-side out (a cleverly bound "Crepinette of Florida Red Snapper") - was beautifully cooked. The fish was moist and soft within, crispy on the top and bottom. But it was ruined by its odor. I left the majority of it uneaten, focusing instead on the bed of softened Savoy cabbage, whose hamminess helped mask its fishiness.

The pommes Sarladaise that accompanied Houston's "Pan-Roasted Guinea Hen" were limp and greasy; the guinea hen, unspectacular. The boudin blanc and a swatch of creamed spinach, however, were very good. Ziebold could have started and stopped with those two items and had a blue ribbon plate.

And this is what I learned about Ziebold's cooking from my narrow experience: I preferred his heartier, bolder-flavored creations. They seemed more honest. More present. Maybe, even more Ziebold?

My favorite dish of the night was my first course, "Grilled Guinea Hen Liver." It had all of the guts and gusto of a rustic country dish, yet the precision of a Keller alumnus. It was head and shoulders above the rest. It was the type of dish - the quality, not necessarily the content - that I expected to parade out of Ziebold's kitchen consistently.

The nuggets of livers were amazingly tender and the confit of cabbage unnaturally silky, bathed in a rich guinea jus. If there was one disappointing thing about this dish, it was the black truffle, which had no aroma whatsoever, tasting instead of bitter flecks of char.

Houston's first course, the "Clam Chowder Crepe Soufflé," was wan by comparison, not rich enough to be a chowder. It was like all of the ingredients of a traditional chowder washed up in a tidal pool next to an omelet. Creative, overly precious, forgettable.

Ziebold's more refined dishes struck me as being Keller clones. That chowder soufflé even arrived on Keller's signature houndstooth Bernadotte china.

The "Pan Roasted Loin of Kanagy Farms Shoat," for example, looked and tasted like it could have walked straight out of per se under Benno's tenure. The shoat was wonderfully tender. It came with excellent jus (clear as a bell, clean as a whistle), and perfectly turned canons of fruit and vegetables. It was all very textbook, and just about as exciting as one.

Both of the amuses bouche were bold and delicious volleys with which to begin the meal, if not a bit predictable. Something creamy with something salty. I especially enjoyed the red pepper butter, which punctuated silky olive oil panna cotta with sweet-salty savor.

Then there was the "CityZen Pork Bun," which was very odd. I had imagined it to be something akin to a steamed char sui bun filled with melting head cheese. Instead, this "bun," shaped like a burrito, was more of an over-sized dumpling. More dough than filling, it relied mostly on the golden, pan-fried crust on the outside for personality than anything in it. But the rosy bed of "minced pork cheek" - corned, apparently - was delicious.

Headed by James Beard Award-nominee Amanda Cook (best of luck in May!), the pastry department here is solid.

Those cheeses, as common as they were, were exemplary, especially the Bleu d'Auvergne, which was especially meaty that night.

Both of our desserts were sophisticated versions of simple classics. Sweet teeth should look elsewhere for a fix, these desserts were lean on sugar, focusing instead on the natural flavors of the ingredients. Cook targets dessert-eaters like me.

The highlight was my "CityZen Rootbeer Float," a creative reinterpretation involving a sassafras soufflé and an edible straw (made of potato flour, I believe). It would have been even better had the "spiced milk broth" been served in a little creamer so that I could pour it into the warm, fluffy soufflé like you would do with creme anglaise normally. Instead, the wonderful spiced milk - subbing in for the frothy head off a root beer float - sat in a shallow pool around a quenelle of vanilla ice cream.

Houston's "Banana Fritters" were surprisingly hefty nuggets, each filled with a mashed banana filling. They were accompanied by a daringly bitter chocolate sauce that was two parts smoky, one part earthy. This was an adult dessert. It begged for a glass of red wine.

CityZen is a handsome restaurant. It's predictably sleek and modern - grand, even. But it has hardly any character. It might be listed under "high-end, nondescript hostelry" in a catalog somewhere: plush settees; high thread count linens; floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall, temperature-moderated , glass-encased wine racks. A gleaming kitchen. High ceilings. There's some Las Vegas in its pedigree.

Highlights, there were a few (I failed to mention the warm, buttery mini-Parker House rolls that arrived in a small cigar box with our main courses, and the excellent "Jack of Allspice" cocktail that came in a pretty, long-stemmed coupe). Disappointments, there were more.

Shrug.

Does anyone know when, exactly (month would be good), Miller left Norman's in Orlando?

A blogger and a photographer, I must say that the kind of food bloggers/photographers that Mr. Achatz describes are the bad apples in the cart that ruin it for the rest of who don't use a flash, tripod, or any other equipment. I just have two hands, a camera and a lens. I take a couple of photos. I put the camera away. I eat. I enjoy.

The brand of ridiculousness that Mr. Achatz describes, I object to. It is repugnant. And it's silly. I've even seen people with over-powered zoom lenses standing on their chairs (!) to get a shot. What a circus. Too bad.

And now the L.A. Times weighs in; a healthy discussion.

Yet few chefs have banned such photography. A sluggish economy has made them wary of alienating customers. They also know the photos help generate free publicity, as does a positive buzz on social media networks.

Sometimes, chefs reason, it's better to try to embrace the shutterbugs.

Lefebvre, for one, is grateful. The food paparazzi have let his wife, Krissy, use their pictures for free for marketing purposes. The online buzz helped him quickly sell out every reservation for his latest endeavor -- a restaurant that will be open only for seven weeks.

Alinea's forum where Grant goes slightly off on diners. I saw this originally on CH.

A blogger and a photographer, I must say that the kind of food bloggers/photographers that Mr. Achatz describes are the bad apples in the cart that ruin it for the rest of who don't use a flash, tripod, or any other equipment. I just have two hands, a camera and a lens. I take a couple of photos. I put the camera away. I eat. I enjoy.

The brand of ridiculousness that Mr. Achatz describes, I object to. It is repugnant. And it's silly. I've even seen people with over-powered zoom lenses standing on their chairs (!) to get a shot. What a circus. Too bad.

much like the uproar against end zone celebrations, the phrase which comes to mind to me is "act like you've been their before."

Maybe chefs will start photo'ing every dish they make and uploading them to your bberry when you dine there, then we don't have to worry about this any more?

Yes, Tom Colicchio tried/did this very thing with his short-lived concept, Tom's Tuesday Dinner. He didn't upload them to pdas, but photos of the week's menu was available online.

There's a thread in News and Media. I'd like to hear why you think it's ridiculous to have a no photo policy. And if you don't use flash, how's your photo going to turn out at Komi? Did you bring a tripod?

You can read my thoughts HERE.

No, no tripod. If you have the right kind of camera and lens, you can easily take a photo inside komi with no flash or tripod. You just have to have very still hands. If you go on my flickr, many of the photos I have taken in restaurants have been under lighting conditions similar, if not worse than komi. If you saw my photo of the outside of komi, I can assure you that the lighting outside on the sidewalk at 9 p.m. was just as dark, if not darker than inside the restaurant.

Why is it ridiculous? There's thread on this topic. There's no doubt that flash photography is annoying to others. I've never taken a pic at Komi and as long as that's their policy, I won't.

I agree, flash is annoying and obnoxious. I don't use flash.

Edited to add: Ever.