Wild striped bass with a red wine poached egg and caper beurre noisette.

Love it or hate it, it’s officially Restaurant Week. Participating restaurants are offering dinner for $35.09 and lunch for a recession-friendly $20.09. If you haven’t booked your reservations, there’s still time to do your civic duty and stimulate the economy. A number of choice spots will be extending their menus into next week or for the rest of the month. Check out DC Foodies for a complete list.

Poste Moderne Brasserie is offering Restaurant Week lunch, brunch, and dinner. Diners have a choice of three appetizers, three entrees, and three desserts. There are also some specials, such as spiced poussin, duck confit cassoulet, and prime rib available for an additional charge. While the ideal Restaurant Week situation is to be able to choose from the entire menu, Poste has done a nice job of offering three very diverse options within each course. All the items are dishes that appear on their regular menu, and portion sizes are quite generous.

My dining companion and I decided to avoid the upcharges and stick with the regular Restaurant Week menu. For the appetizers, we ordered the poached farm egg and roasted pork belly. The farm egg is similar to a frisée and lardon salad, except with the addition of pistachios and green beans in a light tarragon cream sauce. The pistachios are a sweet, crunchy counterpoint to the jiggly egg and salty bacon. However, the strong tarragon flavor threatened to almost overtake the delicate egg. Texturally, this dish is not for the faint of heart; not only is the the yolk runny, but the whites are like a barely-set custard. If you like your eggs over-hard, you might be better off with the pork belly. Most of the fat is absorbed during the roasting, leaving a hefty, deeply porky tasting hunk of meat. Our piece was just a little bit dry, but the flavor was otherwise superb.