Man Stops Traffic at 17th and K to Demand $200 Million
Morning Roundup: Goodbye, Abe Edition
Judge Throws Out WTU Suit Over Teacher Layoffs
Vegetate to Close at the End of the Month
Morning Roundup: Rain Won't Go Away Edition
It's been a delicious year in D.C. The city has seen a number of interesting new restaurants and eatieries, including spots like CommonWealth, Art and Soul, Cork Wine Bar, Adour, and Ray's Hell-Burger. The DCist food staff got together to look back on their favorite dishes, desserts, and drinks of 2008.
Cork served up one of Eric Denman's favorites — Pernod-braised lamb. The dish is a tender pile of shredded lamb shank atop small flagelots that have been cooked in chicken stock. If there's one thing Chef Ron Tanaka knows is how to add flavor to his dishes with incredible stocks that run the gamut from conventional veal stock to the unexpected scallop stock made with connective tissue in the shell. Eggplant chips and small parallelograms of squash, zucchini, and tomato add color to the dish.
Tanaka's old boss at CityZen, James Beard Award Winner Eric Ziebold, also adds to our list of most memorable dishes of 2008. Andrew Schneider was a fan of the braised shoat belly, which appeared in August. As he describes, "The small square of shoat was perfectly caramelized, giving it a powerful, rich flavor, even as the meat fell apart at the slightest touch of my fork. The shoat rested on a bed of homemade chorizo, beans, and a reduction sauce; it was reminiscent of a late summertime adaptation of cassoulet."
It was not surprising that most staff initially responded with dishes from Komi, mirroring the restaurant's receipt of a fourth star in Tom Sietsema's Fall Dining Guide and its third place ranking in the Zagat Guide. Andrew Chriss notes, "Considering the flavor, texture, and creativity that goes into each of the dishes prepared by Chef Johnny Monis, choosing a favorite dish is akin to selecting your favorite kitten out of a wide-eyed litter." The goat cheese s'mores are a goat-cheese marshmallow placed in between two Parmesan crisp crackers and spread with a little dried fruit paste. The s'more is only one part of the plate, wedged sequentially between a foie gras cream puff and a hot pepper "jelly cube." The winning progression of flavor as you move from the silky to the sticky/sweet to the spicy is a testament of the flavor profiles exhibited throughout the entire meal.
Alicia Mazzara favored the amuse of "crackerjack soup." As a kid, she notes, the best thing about Cracker Jack candy was the dinky little toy inside; usually the peanuts were stale and the caramel was burnt. Komi's soup tastes like a fresh, warm batch of caramel or kettle corn (the way you always imagined Cracker Jack candy might have tasted if it hadn't been sitting on the shelf for who knows how long). The soup channels all of the flavors from this childhood snack—caramel, nuts, salt, sugar—with almost none of the associated textures. The pale, peanut butter-colored soup is velvety smooth and thick enough to coat your mouth in a creamy, nutty blanket. Big flecks of sea salt provide a touch of crunchiness, as well as an electric burst of sodium.
A number of restaurants headed into the great outdoors this year. Comet Ping Pong launched a street furniture controversy with their ping pong table. Brasserie Beck also added al fresco dining, and their Belgian bread pudding tops Whitney Satin's list as one of the must-have desserts in DC. Loosely based on one of chef Robert Wiedmaier's family recipes, this decadent treat combines layer upon layer of Beck's crusty, freshly baked baguettes with molten bits of Belgian dark chocolate and tart cherries. The pudding is more bready than most, but it also lacks that eggy flavor that sometimes mars versions with a heavier custard element. Swirling a forkful in the pool of thick vanilla cream perfectly moistens each bite and provides a nice sweetness to round out the more bitter flavors from the chocolate and cherries. The end result is surely worth consuming those few (OK, many) extra calories to top off a Beck meal.
Another standout dessert in 2008 was Tosca's modern take on tiramisu. Though it falls in the "oldie-but-goodie" category compared to some of the offerings at D.C.'s newest restaurants — and the current cupcake craze when it comes to confections — Rebecca Cooper found it to be the best after-dinner dish she'd sampled this year. Chef Massimo Fabbri's somewhat de-constructed version of the classic Italian dessert, which boasts espresso-soaked chunks of cake, rather than ladyfingers, and cold mascarpone cream, is perfectly proportioned. There are no overly wet pieces of cake, no liquid at the bottom of the martini glass turned parfait glass that it is served in, and the cheese is flavorful and well-blended. The feather-light Italian custard, a zabaglione flavored with cappuccino that finishes the dish, creates the exact texture tiramisu strives for: one that is rich but at the same time not too heavy. You can sample this luscious treat any time at Tosca, even on the restaurant's daily pre-theater price fixed menu — so make sure you save room for dessert.
And to my surprise, Sushi Ko delivered on New Year's Eve with their panna cotta. I never expected to find such a flawless version of an Italian dessert at a Japanese restaurant. The vanilla custard-like gelatin dessert is topped with a dusting of espresso powder and toasted slivered almonds for a perfect melding of sweet and bitter.
This was definitely a year with many other memorable dishes: roasted marrow bones at Bar Pilar, Monday night fried chicken and mashed potatoes at CommonWealth, Todd Thrasher's pineapple pisco sour for Repeal Day, curried lamb with saffron rice from Sawatdee, pig ear fries at Tallula, soft shell crabs on black ink tagliarini with grilled ramps, cherry tomato, chile flakes, and wasabi tobiko at Tabard Inn, and braised pork cheeks at EatBar. With a list like this, we hungrily look forward to 2009.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
LOL! As if anyone can afford to eat like this anymnore! Good one!
What? Not one word about the closing of DC's premier dining establishment?
The best thing about the recession is that you now have an excuse to make this stuff at home. If you've got an iron pot and some oil, you can find the ingredients for scotch eggs in your local 7-11. Bone marrow is available at most grocery stores: place in iron pan at 450 for 12 minutes. Cool. Spread on toast with coarse salt and parsley caper salad. It's the consistency of warm butter, but with the flavor of steak. And if you haven't heard, the stuff they put in spicy tuna rolls is the tuna trimmings they're about to throw out because they're going rancid, mixed with spicy mayonnaise. There are much more cost effective ways of giving yourself violent, explosive diarrhea. Like the Gut Blowout Special at Pho King.
Do the DCist foodies have a mandate to write a la Lord and Lady Marchmont of Posh Nosh fame (www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzjR0yL4f0Y). To wit:
"it was reminiscent of a late summertime adaptation of cassoulet."
"The winning progression of flavor"
"favored the amuse of"
"electric burst of sodium"
and the best...
"The pale, peanut butter-colored soup is velvety smooth and thick enough to coat your mouth in a creamy, nutty blanket."
Forewarn your Arga, anyone?
If there's anything my tongue needs right now, it's a thick, nutty blanket.
At least they didn't say the pied de wombat confit with micturant frissee and lime foam fecal "air" was not uninspired.
If I didn't know you were a raging family man, I would accuse you of latent homosexual tendencies. But I concur - the last quote was akin to a bad review of a porno. Not that I'd know that, or anything.
Hey, they call it food porn for a reason ;)
as someone with blatant homosexual tendencies i can tell you, DreadPirateRoberts, that there are plenty of 'raging family men' with latent homosexual tendencies... it's not an either/or thing, it's where do you fall on the scale.
Excellent point. But to your point, not all posters fall on the same point of the scale o' sluttiness.
Having just had spicy tuna rolls from Spices and Sushi Sushi on Macomb in the past 2 weeks, yet not suffering in any way as a result, either I have a cast iron gut or you're wrong. (I'd concede to "wildly speculative," though.)
In your case, you probably had a decent sushi chef, fresh tuna, and an authentic Japanese mayonnaise, as opposed to the usual culprit of intestinal distress, "Uncle Hitler's Blitzkrieg Brand Panzerkämpfmayo (mit Iodine!)®"
Pig ear fries? Seriously??
Sounds kind of good to me, but then again I'm one of those guys that eats everything on the pig but the oink.
Crispy pigs ears are dee-lish. Elegantly unctuous with a rich, mellow porkiness. Kinda like firmer, less fatty bath chaps.
Yes. They were awesome: just a bit of resistance from the cartilagineous meat that had been slow-cooked to make it tender, then battered and fried.
I prefer Hot Water Soup! Just add hot water and season to taste.
Cooking at home with spices and flavored sea salts is the way to go these days. For an eclectic range of both, Secret Stash Sea Salts should do the trick.
www.secretsalts.com