First The Washingtonian, this week, On Tap Magazine. The guide to relieving boredom offers a shoutout to Fud, Fun Things To Do In DC, DCist, The DCeiver and Wonkette, calling us “Blogs We Love.”
Why are we so special? According to the article, Fud “teaches even the most hopeless of us where and how to eat.” We also get some appreciation for refusing to look down on bar food and snacks. There’s even a picture of us!
Apparently a lack of snobbery can get you major props in this town. At least occasionally.
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05Aug
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04Aug
Weight Watchers recipe cards, circa 1974 are something that you just need to experience on your own. -
04Aug
The chef at Belga Cafe is pretty accomplished. Lots of noteworthy “palmares” to use a cycling term. It’s advertised as a Belgian restaurant complete with a proper Vlaamse chef. Having spent some time living in that part of the world, I am always anxious to eat at a place that is properly European. They offered a limited selection for Restaurant Week (RW):
Lunch
Red & Green—Tomato confit stuffed with baby grey shrimps and Salade Roulade with goat cheese and fresh herbs
Mussels—Mussels with Rodenbach beer, asparagus and bacon
or
Steak—Grilled hanger steak with béarnaise-beer sauce, farm vegetables and Belgian fries
Red Fruit Soup—Cherry and peach beer soup with fresh berry’s, home made vanilla ice cream
Dinner
Tomato, Sushi & Cigaar—Tomato gelee with seafood and curry-creme, a Chinese salad with Belga’s Cigaar and ‘Belgian Endive Sushi’
Rabbit and Crawfish—Rabbit fillet and sausage with sautéed Girolle mushrooms and crawfish tails, accompanied by a lobster and béarnaise sauce
The Belga Dessert Sampler—Belgian chocolate, summer fruit, home-made ice cream and Belgian Waffle
Nothing particularly struck a fancy with me, plus I wanted some good Belgian mussels, so I forewent the RW menu and went straight for the normal menu. I had:
Lauwe Aspargesalade: a baked asparagus salad with frisee tossed in a simple vinegarette topped with slightly cooked pieces of salmon. I have to note here that they totally forgot I ordered this. As I reminded them after one of my dining companions had already finished her salad and they were setting down the flatware for the next course, they finally brought it to me. Time was about 40 minutes after we sat down at the table. I’ll revisit this issue later. The salad itself was perfectly done otherwise. The salmon was fresh and just the right combination of seared on the outside and pretty much raw on the inside.
Mussels with Rodenbach Ale, bacon, and asparagus: Nothing really to say except this was exactly what I was looking for. Served with Vlaamse frites, this really hit the spot. Not a bad thing to say about this and you get exactly what you think it is. The mussels themselves were perfectly done.
Ice cream with waffles and chocolate sauce: Simple, exactly what the name of it is. The waffles were soft and tasty, the chocolate sauce was the consistency of Nutella, but good nonetheless. It reminded me of getting waffles at this corner pastry shop on the Leidsestraat in Amsterdam. Not Belgian, I know, but they were good waffles.
So I have to mention that the service was flat out bad. Between them forgetting my salad, LONG delays in service, I was really ready to hate this place. I really wanted to hate the aspargesalade but, damn, it was good. I just couldn’t get myself to do it. The place was packed, and we even had to wait quite a while to get our seat even though we had a reservation. The staff was trying though, and I think RW just really pushed the limits of the small space and the small staff. I’m not quite sure I could hold that against them in good conscience. I definitely would like to go back when it’s not RW and see how different things are then. I’m definitely going back for the mussels.
Belga Cafe
514 8th St SE
Washington, DC 20003
(202) 544-0100 -
04Aug
Yeah, yeah, DcFud has done its share of talking about Ceiba, but we feel it’s a moral imperative for us to share any and all of our Restaurant Week experiences, so we feel we’re on at least moderately solid ground here.
The popular restaurant from the Ten Penh, DC Coast family doesn’t skimp when it comes to Restaurant Week. Though appetizers and dessert selections are partially limited (offering only one of their famous ceviches along with all their soups or salad, and three dessert choices), the restaurant allows patrons to choose any entree off the restaurant’s extensive menu for the $30.05 deal (there’s a justifiable $7 surcharge for the Ribeye steak).
My best decision for the evening: the golden tomato gazpacho, served over a crab ceviche with a tomato gourmet. This was a delightful surprise; I’d ordered it after wavering between this and the ceviche, and seeking our friendly waiter’s advice. The delicate flakes of crab added a richness to the cool broth, and the real treat was the sorbet – tomato sounds like a less than appealing flavor, but it added a lovely sweetness to the dish.
For dinner, it was crab two ways – a crabcake over avocado, and a lightly-fried softshell crab over a shredded jicama salad. The salad wasn’t my favorite part of the meal, though I enjoyed the crisp jicama, but the crabcake was hearty and tasty. This was my first softshell experience, and I’m sure it won’t be my last.
Not much of a dessert person, none of the three selections interested me too much. I went with the key lime panna cotta, served with what was either papaya or mango. The overall effect was too sweet for my palate, though I enjoyed the dish’s creaminess.
With dinner, inspired by a recent Dcist post, I had a Spanish rose, which was an appropriately light accompaniment (I couldn’t tell you the label, though, and it seems inaccessible on the website). A friend had less success with her choice of a Riesling.
Companions were pleased with halibut, black bean soup and scallops, though a friend’s salmon dish had a strangely sour purple-colored sauce that none of us found particularly impressive.
Sure, we ate at 9 p.m., but the restaurant still deserves credit for giving us attentive, unrushed service during this busy time. As we were celebrating a birthday, they added nice touches like personalized menus and a candle in the birthday girl’s dessert. We also were given a beautiful table near the window.
Our incessant promotion aside, Ceiba’s a great bargain when RW comes around. -
03Aug
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a control freak. I do need to do things MY way. This ends up being true with recipes. I change them to fit my quirks and idiosyncrasies all the time.
So one night, some of J’s co-workers are coming over for dinner. They are bringing a fabulous salad and we’ll be tossing some homemade pesto (that I made and froze) with some pasta. Salad and entrée done. I simply cannot have a dinner party (such that it is) without dessert.
I look for a cobbler recipe since they are fairly easy to assemble. Being the control freak I am, I don’t want just any old cobbler, I want the cakey kind. There are two kinds of cobbler, the biscuit kind that has what is essentially a scone dough floating on top of the fruit, and the cakey kind where the cakelike batter oozes down into the fruit and marries it into a fruit cakey mess of goodness. I find the following recipe on Epicurious.
For filling
1 stick butter
1 teaspoon lemon juice
4 cups fresh blueberries, rinsed and drained
1 cup sugar
For topping
1 cup self-rising flour
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla flavoring
1/2 cup of milk
Accompaniment: Fresh whipped cream or vanilla ice cream
To prepare the filling:
Preheat oven to 375°F. Place the butter in an 8 x 8-inch square glass baking dish (no substitutes), and melt the butter in the microwave. In a mixing bowl, combine lemon juice and blueberries. Add the sugar and mix well. Add the blueberry mixture to the baking dish with the melted butter. Do not stir.
Make topping:
Combine all of the topping ingredients in a small bowl. Pour this mixture over the blueberries and bake 45 minutes, or until brown. This recipe is also good for apples, blackberries, and peaches.
A STICK of butter? A CUP of sugar in the fruit? The poor fruit will be doing the backstroke in a pool of sugary butter? I promptly cut the amount of butter and sugar in the fruit by half and cut the sugar in the topping by a third. Along with the lemon juice in the filling, I add a dash of REAL vanilla. I also add a half a teaspoon of cinnamon in the topping batter for added flavor.
I crossed my fingers about this because I changed the recipe fairly radically. It turned out wonderfully. Tasting a piece of the topping without the fruit, I actually thought I could have cut the amount of sugar in half, not just by a third. While it’s not always advisable to play with recipes when it comes to baking, my control freak mind can’t help but tinker with a recipe. -
03Aug
When people claim to be self-taught on a certain subject, most often they actually mean one of two things: 1) ‘Yeah, I went to school for it but it doesn’t count ‘cause they didn’t really teach me anything; or 2) ‘I have huge gaps in my knowledge base.’ Zaf is guilty of both answers, and with her current hand-to-mouth-ism she isn’t getting to the culinary institute of NY any time soon. There was only one thing to do- learn it on the cheap in Vietnam.
This is a roundabout way of saying that a few weeks ago found me cruising around the provincial village of Hoi An, about five hours south from the DMZ. I was looking for one of the fabled cooking schools, but finding one was tougher than getting a Ha Noi bookseller
to give correct change. Why? Because every single store was pushing cheap silk knockoffs of last years J Crew catalog, made while you wait. So when I say ‘finding one was tough’, what I actually mean was ‘I deeply regret that I was forced to stop and buy a silk shirt every five feet.’
So it was through blind luck that I finally found a small sign in Hai Scout Cafe where I stopped for a bowl of the local noodle dish, Cao lau. The Red Bridge Cooking School: a full half day’s lesson in traditional Central Vietnamese food was 14 dollars US and it was still the most I’d spent on anything, including hotels, since I’d arrived in the country.
The next morning started with the required walk-through of the local market. We established the medicinal uses of turmeric (stick it on zits), how to choose a good squid (flesh should be white and stiff) and what’s up with all that unripe papaya they eat (you have to use a special peeler-thing).
All the while getting pushed, cursed at, and stepped on by tiny ladies with yolks of soup and peanuts slung over their shoulders and baskets of lettuces and fish and kids stacked high on their heads.
Then we all scooted onto a boat and put-putted towards the school, up the muddy stream that flows through the village. A whole bunch of fisherman in wooden canoes and conical hats were throwing their nets into the water, and further up there were huge nets the size of tennis courts lining both banks on bamboo poles. Apparently at night they shine a light in the center and then scoop out all the stuff that it attracts. Like tourists.
The school turned out to be a restaurant with an extra big gazebo out in front overhanging the river. For Vietnam, land of the impromptu and jerry-rigged, it was surprisingly well done. We each had our own stove, all utensils were provided, and there was no lack of demonstrators, dish washers, people to make sure we didn’t light ourselves on fire, and a translator to explain it all.
The menu was a warm squid salad, roasted fish, eggplant stew in clay pots, yellow vegetable pancakes, and finally, homemade rice wrappers to use for spring rolls. These last things were so damn hard that not a single one of us got the bamboo flippy-motion the first time around; mess ups and waste water were thrown directly into river.
Anyway, I only found out later that the Red Bridge School is the most famous cooking school for English-speakers in Vietnam, with a recent cover article in the NY Times. Who knew. I’d just stopped for a bowl of noodles. -
02Aug
Thank god some folks are such serious gluttons for punishment. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to present you with our new DCFud writers. We’ve roped them in with offers of fame and fortune and now their culinary writing will be ours, all ours!Patrick (PKG)
PKG has got our restaurant reviews and recipes covered. He also plans to write about the joys and thrills of outdoor charcoal grilling, since he’s threatening to buy a sophisticated infrared thermometer just so he can measure grill temperature as a function of number of Kingsford briquettes.Avram (SouperAvram)
SouperAvram’s not much of a cook, or even much of a writer, but DCFud’s unofficial Free Food Offer Correspondent is known for going to great lengths to NOT pay for food, from hounding corporate offices to standing in line for hours at a time just to get a decent deal.
Chunae (CZ)Chunae is on a Socratic quest for the best food and is determined to find it. He’s not sure at what point he turned into a foodie, but he thinks the advent of FoodTV had something to do with it.
Jenn (JEB)JEB is a lover of food and drink, and even though she has taken several classes about wine, she believes that there is no better way to learn than to taste.
TC Duong (TDC)
With no professional “cred” at all, TCD continues to find new venues to spout off about cooking and dining because he does both all the damn time. He and his partner J run the DCFood Blog. Their wedding was described as a Quaker, social justice, feminist, anti-racist, Southern barbecue, pan Asian fusion, and scent free wedding. -
31Jul
There are a million reviews of CityZen out there already, so I won’t be writing about how great my pork cheek salad was. Rather, I’m going to talk about what I didn’t order.
The thing that struck me is that CityZen really does an excellent job of telling a culinary story. Every course builds upon the previous one and at the end, you kind of feel like you’ve been taken to a different place and have come back. It’s trite, I know, but it’s really the only way I can explain what it’s like to eat there. And to be honest, I can’t recall ever having an experience like this eating anywhere else.
The thing they don’t tell you is that our three-course meal was actually a six-course meal because of the amusées that came before the salad: a stem of sauteed mushroom with a wild mushroom purée, followed by an olive-oil custard topped with a Spanish-spice butter sauce. During the meal, they brought a small wooden jewelry box of twelve miniature Parker House rolls that were heavily brushed with melted butter and liberally salted with fleur de sel. These were unbelievably good; once you have one, you and your dinner companion will fight over who gets to eat the rest.
After the entree and before the dessert came a small scoop of watermelon sorbet floating in a hyssop liqueur, and after the dessert came two little madeleines with a single blueberry in each, two tiny, TINY vanilla rum cakes (about the size of a Rolo each) and a plate of assorted sweets ranging from cherry jellies to chocolate truffles. Amazing.
That’s all of the stuff we DIDN’T order.
To get the obligatory information out of the way, you can either get the six-course tasting menu for $125 per person, or you can do the three-course menu, from which you pick an appetizer, entree, and dessert, for $75 per person. I had the aforementioned pork cheek salad which was grilled pork cheeks served on top of a vinagarette of parsley, coriander, and a demi glaze; it was all topped with some microgreens and wild mushrooms. For the entree, I ordered the wild king salmon which was served rare and topped with a type of green bean and morel mushrooms. Finally for dessert, I had their take on the famous Nestlé Drumstick ice cream. I know their menu changes regularly so if you don’t see something you like one day, go by the next week to see what’s up.
To sum up: transcendental food, service and atmosphere. If you can go, you have to go. Don’t even bother thinking about it. Why are you still reading and not on the phone making a reservation?
CityZen
1330 Maryland Avenue, SW
Washington, DC 20024
(202) 554 8588 -
29Jul
So many brands of iced tea only get half of the definition correct. They might be cold as hell, but each sip is a harsh reminder that claims of “Natural flavors’ in the US can be backed up by coal tar, chicken skin, and my personal favorite, that grapefruit aroma infused from grasshopper bits.
For those of us who prefer our tea to have something to do with plant matter, stalking the local 7-11 can be a daunting and thankless process. I would like to offer the following spotters guide in the interest of tagging these rare animals for future capture and study.
Malted battery acid
This syrupy brown liquid is perpetrated in the form of Lipton, Snapple , and Nestea, brands known for the gooy chemical residue they leaves on the roof of your mouth and that toxic burn at the back of your throat. If they appear premixed at a restaurant they’re either noxiously sweet or dishwater bland when the poor server gets the syrup to water proportions confused. There is no hope for rehabilitation, shoot all species on site.
The mimic
The utter putridity of the malted battery acid variety has left the habitat open to any tea that won’t outright poison you: Arizona, Sobe, and Nantucket nectars. These drinks do a decent tea mimic and sometimes even include tea leaves as part of their manufacture.
Liquid hippie
There are many ways to get a hippie in liquid form, not the least of which is a blender. But in the last couple of years a couple of teas have taken a more domesticated approach: Honest Tea, The Republic of Tea, and Tazo. They’re real tea alright, often sugarless and always organic, as every label proclaims loudly. Drinking them will also single-handedly close the hole in the ozone layer, plant a new rainforest, and impregnate the endangered species of your choosing.
Milk tea, hold the tea
It’s the same concept that created, guacamole-flavored Doritos, pre-made Ritz cheese sandwich things, and peanut butter and jelly spread. If you’re going to be putting two ingredients together anyway, you might as well sell them as a single, low quality product. Milk and tea. In a bottle. Some places even warm it up. Then you have…warm milk and tea in a bottle. Well worth the tranquilizer dart. Try Gogono Koucha, or Kirin. Yes, Kirin.
That green honey rosewater stuff
A shy and retiring beast, the natural habitation for the green-honey-rosewater brands seems to be Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia. But not, for some reason, Vietnam or Australia…or anywhere else in the entire world. Which is really too bad because I would happily sell both kidneys and an ear if it meant just one more sip of this sweet sweet concoction. Ito En makes good ones. -
28Jul
Today’s article for discussion:
Let them Eat Canned Tomatoes
“For the newer generation, a love for traditional fine cuisine is cast as fussy and snobbish, while spending lots of money is, curiously, considered egalitarian and wise. I object to this equation. Shopping is the province of the privileged; fine cooking is not. Indeed, great cuisine arose from privation.”
Julie Powell discusses the foods we eat, what they say about class and decency, and how that can be misread.
(Bonus mention of Brillat-Savarin!)
