This article was also published in the Financial Times.
Every journalist heading off for Washington DC hopes to find their own ‘Deep Throat’, the informant who played such an influential role in the Watergate affair. And although I had one lined-up, it was initially difficult to get him off the topic of politics, which he continually referred to as ‘the only game in town’, and on to restaurants. Eventually, however, he opened up.
“Eating out here isn’t quite as exciting as in New York, San Francisco or LA,” he began, “but it is pretty good nowadays and it is certainly a lot, lot better than it used be.” The three major auditoria brought people out at night who needed to be fed and, more recently, the new MCI Centre, where basketball and ice hockey reason, he continued, that there was never that much choice was that many simply chose not to eat out. “Rather like London, the majority of the entertaining was done behind closed doors in peoples’ homes and although there were one or two grand luxe French places and numerous inexpensive cafes, there was nothing in between. The major catalysts for change were initially the Kennedy Centre which with its are played.”
The other significant change to this distinctive city has been the commercially driven urban regeneration in the area surrounding the impressive Union Station which up to a decade ago was not an area even a hard bitten journalist felt comfortable walking through. Now it is home to a growing number of condominiums and office buildings and what was Chinatown has now been reduced to China Block (as in numerous American cities many of the best Asian restaurants have relocated to the suburbs for their lower rents with the Japanese restaurant Makoto on MacArthur Boulevard a particular recommendation).
In its place has arisen the popular, bustling Penn Quarter (so called because of its proximity to Pennsylvania Avenue), home to the burgeoning restaurant empire of the hugely talented Spanish chef, José Ramo Andrés.
Andrés’ initial foray into the city was at the narrow three storey Café Atlantico with an open kitchen on the first floor and a prerequisite that all the waiting staff be pretty fit – or as one commented to me ‘you have got to have good legs to work here’. The food is predominantly South American but with two particularly interesting innovations, a six seater counter on the second floor, known as the Mini Bar, that serves an extensive, experimental US$95 menu which can be booked at 6.30pm and 8.30pm only and a much less expensive range of brunch dishes at the weekend under the catch-all heading of Nuevo Latino Dim Sum Brunch.
Round the block and opposite where next spring Andrés will reopen his once successful Mexican restaurant, Oyamel (which in its original site my informant had described as ‘imaginative and spectacular’) is his simpler tapas restaurant, Jaleo (of which there are another two branches in Bethesda and Arlington), where we propped up the bar for 10 minutes with a glass of fino and a plate of cod fritters.
But the most impressive of all Andrés’ current restaurants is the most recent, Zaytinya, which occupies a great corner site on the ground floor of the Pepco Building. With large windows and a high ceiling the simple but friendly interior is an obviously easy place to meet and relax judging by the numbers who flock there, particularly early evening during the week. But the food itself is good enough reason for going there.
The menu draws its inspiration from the meze of Greece, Lebanon and Turkey to which Andrés has applied his obvious knowledge of the Spanish way with tapas so that if the portion sizes are slightly smaller than those normally served in a Lebanese restaurant they make up for this in a singular intensity of flavour.
And great colour. What struck me most forcibly as three of us tried to juggle the eight dishes we had ordered for our lunch (which came to US$145.09 with three glasses of wine, including sales tax but not service) on the table was just how visually exciting they all looked on the table. The baba ghannoush (aubergine dip) topped with bright red pomegranate seeds; the pale yellow of the puréed Santorini fava beans; the grilled chicken with the auburn walnut sauce; the finely, diced squid, fried in extremely fresh batter and served with a pale, but pungent, garlic sauce, and perhaps best of all, small, crisp courgette flowers, deep fried and stuffed with feta cheese. There was obvious competition too in this field from the pastry section with one dessert, a layer of Greek yoghurt topped with a thin apricot purée and diced pistachios, particularly delicious.
Lunch the following day before I headed back to the station was to be at one of the city’s long-time institutions, Kinkead’s and as we walked in my informant forewarned me of two further particular aspects of eating out in Washington DC. The first, increasingly prevalent everywhere today, would be the absence of wine on the tables, “there’s a lot of iced tea drunk here at lunch” he commented ruefully. And the second, equally prescient, was that as we were walking in at 1.15pm it would be to a relatively quiet restaurant. Because the Federal Government is by far and away the city’s biggest employer, he explained, and its working day starts early, then so too do restaurant lunch hours. Bookings at 1.00pm or 1.15pm are much easier than those at noon.
Bob Kinkead has dubbed his restaurant, ‘An American Brasserie’ and the sight that greeted me as I walked into the bar area epitomised this democratic aspiration. A smartly dressed barman was leaning on the beer pump chatting away to an equally smartly dressed businessman eating what would otherwise have been a solitary lunch.
We ate in the restaurant upstairs and the extraordinary speed with which our food was delivered, our first courses actually arrived before our order for two glasses of white wine, testified to the fact that the major rush was over. But my two Kinkead classics, crisp Ipswich clams with a tartare sauce and fried lemons and a Maine lobster roll, were as good as I had been told they would be. Most user-friendly, although sadly we were not able to take full advantage of it on this occasion, was an excellent wine list which cleverly puts next to its wines two colour bars, descending from pale yellow to gold for the whites and from light red to dark red for the reds, to demonstrate their transition from crisp and light to rich and full bodied for the whites and from medium bodied to rich and plummy for the reds.
The city’s most highly rated kitchens at Citronelle and CityZen in the Madarin Oriental eluded me on this trip, sadly. But I left Washington DC with the distinct impression that what so impresses me most about an increasing number of American restaurants – the friendliness of the service, the apparent equality between customer and waiter and the great value of their mid-priced restaurants – this city seems to have in spades.
Citronelle, www.citronelledc.com
Café Atlantico, www.cafeatlantico.com
Jaleo, www.jaleo.com
Zaytinya, www.zaytinya.com
CityZen in the Mandarin Oriental, www.mandarinoriental.com
Galileo, www.galileodc.com
Obelisk, 202-872 1180, dinner only,
Cashion’s Eat Place, www.cashionseatplace.com
Black Salt, www.blacksaltrestaurant.com
Kinkead’s. www.kinkead.com