Restaurant Week Miniseries, Part III: Dan & Brad's

This is the third and final installment of this week's three-part Restaurant Week miniseries. Yesterday, I told about lunch at Kaz Sushi Bistro in DC, and Monday I discussed our experience for a dinner at U Street's Vinoteca.

Part III, Dan & Brad's

Our Restaurant Week explorations and adventures culminated in an early weekend evening dinner at Dan & Brad's, the restaurant of the Arlington Hilton in Ballston. It was very quiet for a nice place for dinner on a weekend, but it was just six PM, so I didn't think too much of it.

For what was lacking in crowds, it made up for in service and ambiance. The look of the place is very homey, with a twisting layout to the dining room, and little private nooks overhanging the lobby below. The decor was English-feeling-Euro and was very sharp. Despite being the only ones there, we were sat in the middle of the most open dining room rather than a private nook for two, and I was admittedly a little disappointed.

Our waitress was very attentive, knowledgeable and elegant, winning me over with the bits of proper French she threw into her descriptions. She started us with some crunchy, warm bread and fresh butter, a simple, rustic pairing that outclassed the bread and butter/oil that the vast majority of places ever offer.

The prix fixe RW menu was very intriguing, but had almost nothing to do with the normal menu. This was a little bit of a letdown, since the menu had seemed filled with unique dishes, but at the typical $35.08 for dinner, offering a selection for three courses, I still couldn’t pass up the RW menu. RW at D&B’s also had the option for an additional flight of three wines (a Cabernet, a Chardonnay and a disgustingly sweet, undrinkable ice wine) for $10. We decided to sample the sampler together and got almost three glasses for the price of 1.

The menu for the first course included a seared ahi tuna with a bean and olive salad, a warm ancho chili-rubbed beef tenderloin and fig salad, an heirloom tomato Carpaccio salad, a crab and corn chowder and a fresh chilled gazpacho. A hard choice, no? Julia chose the tomato Carpaccio, which had a bright, country feeling and tasted extremely tangy and fresh, but it was huge slices of tomatoes -- nothing near how I would envision a Carpaccio of tomatoes. It had some nice greens on top and was deliciously dressed with olive vinaigrette and some gorgeous, cool goat cheese, so I still found it to be a very unique salad.

I, on the other hand, was apparently in a very "meaty" mood and ordered the tenderloin salad. It was rightfully far smaller and daintier than the more robust tomatoes, which is a rare feat for a meat dish up against a vegetarian one. However dainty it might have looked though, it didn't matter. The perfectly medium tenderloin with the ever so slightly sweet sauce of sour cherries and the soft, melt-in-your-mouth figs was a warming and winning combination. It was one of those dishes that is just enough food and goes down so smoothly that you want to kiss the plate after. Yes, that was this dish. You never know when they're coming, but I refrained from actually kissing the plate.

I had to save the plate-kissing for the entrees. The dinner choices were equally if not more interesting than the salads. There was a pancetta-wrapped beef filet with caramelized onion grits, a loin of lamb with warm Swiss chard and mint-pesto gnocchi, a seared black cod with carrots and fingerling potatoes, an Alaskan salmon with fennel apple slaw, and a sage-pumpkin ravioli. To continue in my unusually "meaty" mood that day, I decided to try the lamb. And I was not disappointed one bit. The meat was perfectly done, with just enough pink in the middle. The taste was just a little peppery and was juicy and tender. I also really enjoyed the presentation, with a few small slices accompanying the rest of the mini loin. It was flanked by some very flavorful and crispy chard with amazingly light gnocchi and pesto on top. I loved how a dish that could seem so heavy was actually quite light. I was thrilled by this dish and would have likely thought about kissing THIS plate, were I not so distracted by the most innovative dish I have seen in some time.

I am speaking, of course, of Julia's unsettlingly good entree of bright orange pumpkin ravioli, with crispy sage, a brown butter sauce, pumpkin seeds and bittersweet, crunchy chocolate shavings. Was it savory or was it sweet? Quite hard to tell, but the taste blew my mind. The smallest amount of chocolate turned a dish I would never bother ordering (gourd-filled pasta) into a dish I'll never forget. Simply put, creative innovation and a penchant for sparkling the palette can turn a typical dish into a mouth-watering treasure. I know, since my mouth quite literally watered. I was completely content after these two courses, and barely noticed the pretty good crème brulee I had for dessert.

I was so overwhelmed by the last entrée that I completely forgot to kiss THAT plate either. So instead, on the way out, I kissed the girl who had brought me to this wonderfully elegant and underrated restaurant.

Missed the first two installments of the Restaurant Week miniseries? Check out Vinoteca and Kaz Sushi Bistro, and remember to save up a few extra dollars and calories for Restaurant Week 2009!

Check out my reviews of these places in even more detail at Menuism.com!

Restaurant Week Miniseries, Part II: Kaz Sushi Bistro

This is the second installment of this week's three-part Restaurant Week miniseries. Yesterday, I discussed our experience for a birthday dinner party at Vinoteca off U Street in DC.

Part II, Kaz Sushi Bar

It takes a lot to get me to spend $20 for a lunch. Honestly, I'm a little surprised that Restaurant Week was able to. It was probably a combination of things. My coworker Steve had told me that Kaz Sushi was one of the best sushi places in the city. It's located at 19th and I St NW (right near work), so Becca and I decided to invite a few coworkers out for RW sushi at Kaz, since we normally had no excuse to go there. So four of us made a reservation for a Friday Kaz lunch and made the three-block journey under the sunny afternoon together in eager sushi anticipation.

I won't say much about the look, decor or service at Kaz, since I rarely do, and since it was adequate but not noteworthy. I will fill that space with a few notes about their regular menu. It was filled with very interesting combinations both in Maki rolls and in the Nigiri pieces. The prices were a little high for sushi, but with high-end ingredients like truffles, foie gras and kalamata olives being thrown around with the likes of tuna, salmon, lobster and whitefish, along with other not-sushi-like complements like almonds and garlic chips, I was still quite intrigued. Plus, their vegetarian sushi was even impressive, with a red pepper and asparagus roll, and a sundried tomato and portabella roll, to name a few.

It was with this diversity now intriguing me that I was disappointed to learn how ordinary the lunchtime RW menu was at Kaz, even at the prix fixe price of $20.08. Essentially, they offered a miso, a seaweed salad, a scoop of ice cream and a sushi choice. The choice was either a sushi tasting or a bento box. The bento included a California roll, Japanese short ribs, Barbecued Mackerel and a couple other little tastings. The sushi tasting was a spicy tuna roll, a spicy California roll and then one each of tuna, salmon, flounder and cooked shrimp Nigiri. To me, these seemed like either skimpy or uninteresting choices for over $20, during RW, but it was lunch so neither was actually insufficient. There is a reason that I don't like spending $20 on lunch though.

I ultimately ordered the sushi tasting and found it to be quite tasty. The spicy California had a great kick and they worked the orange roe, which normally dons a Cali roll, into the rest of the sushi, which I found to be much more pleasant. The spicy tuna roll had a similarly flavored kick, which I quite like with my sushi rolls, but it was the smallest spicy tuna roll I've ever seen. It was wrapped seaweed-side-out and was no larger than a regular tuna roll or a standard vegetarian sushi roll like asparagus or avocado. Usually spicy tuna rolls are quite large, so to see a small one was certainly noticeable and the slightest bit disappointing, since it did taste so good. The Nigiri pieces were not cut too thick and were quite fresh. They all had an appropriately rich flavor and color, and were very pleasant to eat. Again, there was nothing out of the ordinary here and the potions were modest, but it was certainly a good plate of sushi.

The other accoutrements were passable if not typical versions of miso and green tea ice cream. The seaweed salad was actually the only huge portion of the meal, and I was initially excited, since it is one of the tastiest and healthiest items on a Japanese food menu. However, this version was actually drenched in a creamy, sesame dressing, which did not dramatically change the taste from the typical salad with just a light sesame finish, but certainly did wonders to kill the healthy aspect that I usually like about this salad.

I think Kaz makes nice sushi from good quality fish, and has some extremely interesting sushi innovations. Through which, Kaz has likely made its name. However, the RW patrons were not offered anything interesting, unique or name-making-worthy. Even at over $20.

They might have intrigued me just enough to give it a shot for dinner, where I make the sushi selections, but it's not going to be any time too soon.

Stay tuned for the third and final installment in this week's Restaurant Week miniseries, as I reveal our trip to Ballston's Dan & Brad's.

Restaurant Week Miniseries, Part I: Vinoteca

For those of you who don't know, last week was restaurant week in the DC-NoVA area. For those of you don't know what I'm talking about, RW is a week where you don't feel guilty about eating out three times at nice places, and simultaneously somehow feel like you're contributing to something. To what, I don't know. Culture? The economy? Our waistbands?

Well, no matter the reason, we ended up going to three very different RW venues to sample the cheap(er) fare that some of the finest area restaurants were offering. For the next three days, I will highlight these three places -- Vinoteca in the U Street area of DC, Kaz Sushi Bistro near Farragut Square in DC, and Dan & Brad's in the Arlington Hilton in Ballston -- within and without the context of Restaurant Week. I hope it will help to determine whether you should go to these places and/or Restaurant Week in general in the future.

Part I, Vinoteca

When Rebecca (not of Becca's housewarming) invited us out with her friends to celebrate her birthday and the choice was Vinoteca, I was pretty excited. However, I needed to look at the RW menu before I could get fully excited, as my last RW experience was in New York City last year and was skimpy, limited and forgettable. To my pleasant delight, this RW menu looked fabulous, and after looking at it with Becca (of Becca's HW) I couldn't wait to go, and Becca even made a plan to go later in the week.

Full disclosure: we've been to Vinoteca before, but it was only for wine and cheese. And as I've clearly established before, I don't review wine, especially sans food. So this was my first official dinner there. The menu had always looked interesting to me, with a mix of comfort food updates and upscale Euro, and I had always been looking forward to trying their highly spoken of dinner fare.

This wine bar/restaurant has kind of a rustic, hole-in-the-wall look from the street, near the corner of U and 11th, but is actually pretty new and has that feeling inside. Besides the onesey bathrooms with barely-there locks (oh my!), everything about the place feels pretty chic and comfortable.

RESTAURANT WEEK MENU -- $35.08, prix fixe before non-included wine, tax and tip

FIRST COURSE

The first course was a raw oyster in a white wine mignonette-like sauce with cucumber foam, all in spoon, accompanied by a glass of a decent and unnamed sparkling wine. It was pretty tasty, but didn’t seem too well-liked around the table. For our table of 7, we also ordered a bottle of Zardetto Prosecco and a bottle of the “three ranches” Cabernet Sauvignon. Both were enjoyable, but neither was paired with anything in particular, so I suppose there's not much to say. Vinoteca has a nice selection of wines, but even as a total wine novice, the menu doesn't seem anymore in-depth than most classy restaurants, and the prices were quite high.

SECOND COURSE

After the oyster and some underwhelming bread and olive oil came the first course. Julia had a mesclun green salad dressed lightly with vinaigrette, shallots and shaved celery root. I sampled some and found it to be a very tasty and elegant salad, but a little ordinary considering the other first course offerings were slightly pricier on the regular menu. I bypassed that and the choice B of the first course, the chilled split pea soup, and chose the cured salmon Carpaccio salad. It was gravlax sliced tracing-paper thin, with a great fennel oil, shallots and shaved fennel. It was a terrific salad nouveau, with a great look and such an intricate, slightly salty flavor. The salmon really melted away inside my mouth, and I was quite pleased.

THIRD COURSE

The offerings for the entrée course consisted of homemade pasta with truffle butter sauce and greens, seared scallops and prosciutto, shrimp & grits with fried green tomato, and a bison hanger steak with potato croquettes. I chose the shrimp and grits and found it incredibly warming and tasty. It was garnished with some jalapeño and jack cheese sauce and had chunks of shrimp under the fried green tomato and a full jumbo shrimp on top. It appeared brilliant on the plate and it was even fun to eat. The grits were buttery and excellent, the shrimp was very fresh and not too salty, and the fried green tomato was spicy and well, sinfully good. As if to verify that my entrée was indeed the best of the four, I took an opportunity to taste Julia’s truffle butter homemade bowtie pasta with micro greens and Reggiano parmesano – and was quite literally floored. This was probably the most deep and developed taste I have tried since I have been in DC. Perfectly textured pasta with just a little pepper from the greens, mixed with the Reggiano, the truffle and the butter flavors. It was so simple and yet heavenly. I actually kept eating, and she had to push me off so she could continue enjoying. I could not imagine a better set of two entrées, which is why I never bothered to notice the other two less interesting-looking selections.

FOURTH COURSE

This course was the chef’s cheese course, which was the American cheese flight on the regular Vinoteca menu. Each person received maybe half an ounce each of Pepato, a tangy cheese with peppercorns, Winchester super-aged Gouda and a very soft and creamy Humboldt Fog. They were paired with about the same-sized portions of walnuts, blueberries and speck, a German prosciutto-like cured meat. It was nice that the first three courses were high on flavor but more medium in size, because it was fun to be able to try the different cheeses with everyone and still enjoy them. I quite liked the flight and actually thought the soft Humboldt was the most enjoyable. I would highly recommend the Vinoteca cheese and charcuterie – it’s diverse and actually pretty reasonable in price.

FIFTH COURSE

We finished off our evening at Vinoteca with dessert, and everyone had a choice between the lavender chocolate cake and the white chocolate bread pudding with macadamia nuts and caramel. The table seemed to order the cake and enjoy the bread pudding more, with myself ordering the pudding and enjoying the cake more. I usually don’t like chocolate cakes, but found this one beautifully soft, moist and not too sweet. The lavender was strong but seemed to go well. Apparently for the rest of my table, they thought the lavender was way too strong (“it tastes like you’re eating the plant,” remarked one) and preferred the more home-style pudding. I thought the pudding was okay, but a little one-dimensional after the caramel layer and that the hard nuts were a little off-putting in the middle of a bread pudding. I managed to squeeze down at least a few bites of each, so it couldn’t have been that bad, right?

In all, the experience at Vinoteca was very nice. For $35 a head for 5 courses, I was quite pleased. My high expectations for the menu were pretty much satisfied and reaffirmed my feeling that I would return any time for just the cheese, olives and charcuterie, and would ask them to improve the boring, small bits of bread they give you. But I think I would now return as well for a gravlax salad, truffle butter pasta and American cheese flight every so often, so maybe restaurant week did do its job?

Stay tuned tomorrow for my second of three Restaurant Week installments, as I delve into my lunch experience at Kaz Sushi Bistro.

Check out my reviews of these places in even more detail at Menuism.com!