Capital Nourishment – Dining Around D.C.

Image(Perhaps you’ve heard of him?)

The District of Columbia has neither the history of Boston, the sexiness of New York, nor the cache of Charleston. It is a manufactured city, born of compromise, and possessed (as JFK once remarked) of Northern charm and Southern efficiency. It is an industry town where politics and media converge both to dominate the culture and take themselves way too seriously.

When it comes to restaurants, it may not be in New York’s league (or even Los Angeles’s), but I like to think of it as a large, provincial city with an inferiority complex, always trying to compete gastronomically with the big boys. Sort of like Chicago with better seafood.

My own relationship with Washington D.C. goes way back and is a fraught one. Despite despising politics, I have been strangely drawn here for decades. So much so that I’m just as comfortable noshing around Georgetown, the Penn Quarter, or Dupont Circle as I am navigating the Las Vegas Strip. The obligatory family museum visits when I was growing up led to interning for a Senator on Capitol Hill in 1971, where a big dose of Vietnam War debates inoculated me forever from the disease of partisan politics.

Thankfully it didn’t blunt my appetite for the town, which I think deserves to be more famous for its restaurants than it is.

When I’m in the District (every year for the past ten), I lean towards the tried and true. There’s a whole contemporary food scene with gastro-pubs aplenty, but when I’m there, I enjoy sliding into restaurants that fit like a well-worn blazer, run by decorated veterans who have honed their craft, like José Andrés and Fabio Trabocchi.

Oyamel Cocina Mexicana - Eater DC(Let’s taco about how great Oyamel is)

If you hang around the Penn Quarter, you can eat very well and never leave the Andrés orbit. Our last trip found us popping into Oyamel for some exemplary tacos (above) and mouth-searing aquachile before we hit the National Gallery. Across the street is the amazing Asian-Peruvian mashup of China Chilcano  (the $70 Peruvian tasting menu is a steal) and down the same block you’ll find the original Jaleo, which, despite its age (circa 1993), remains one of the best Spanish restaurants in America.

Having eaten in all three multiple times, I can confidently state you can close your eyes and point on the menu and still be seduced by whatever shows up on your plate  – whether it’s a soothing huitlacoche quesadilla, a bracing Peruvian ceviche, or the liquified olives “Ferran Adrià.” A remarkable triple threat of authentic, in-your-face-flavors mixed with enough panache to keep us coming back for decades now.

The most popular of all is  Zaytinya — Andrés’ take on Greek, Turkish and Lebanese food, just a couple of blocks north from where it all started. All of his restaurants are busy, but despite Zaytinya’s size, age (circa 2002), outdoor seating, and multi-levels, it has become one of the toughest tables in town. One bite of the hommus ma lahm (with ground lamb and pine nuts), soujouk pide (spicy sausage flat bread), kebab platter or smoked lamb shoulder will tell you why. When they open a branch in Vegas later this year, you can expect it to be mobbed as well.

OUR TEAM — Fabio Trabocchi Restaurants(Fabio-lous chef)

I’ve never had a bad meal in a Fabio Trabocchi restaurant; indeed, I’ve never had a bad bite. He’s one of the best working chefs in America, and you could plan your D C. visit around each of his eateries and be assured of dining on cooking as polished as any in the country.

Fiola – DC is his flagship, and takes a back seat to no Italian, and        features menus  both traditional “La Tradizione” ($225) and more inventive Il Viaggio (“The Journey” $285). During the week (Tuesdays-Wednesday-Thursday), you can order a la carte and be assured that whatever appears (from the Pappa al Pomodoro to the mixed seafood pasta to the langoustine with stracciatella and limone) will compete with the best version you have ever had, both visually and in the mouth. The wine list is a dream (and full of trophy bottles, natch), and the waiters all look as good as the food. It’s sad that it isn’t open for lunch anymore, but snare a seat at the bar and you’ll see a parade of D.C.’s finest flock in for the unforgettable food.

RESTAURANTS — Fabio Trabocchi Restaurants

Moving to less formal waters, Trabocchi’s Fiola Mare (Italian seafood) sits right on the Potomac in Georgetown and wheels the catch of the day by every table for the discriminating to choose, while Del Mar (above) is located directly south of the The Mall at the District Wharf) is an eyeball-popping ode to jamon, tapas, sobrassada, and Spanish seafood. (Historical footnote: this completely gentrified, now-bustling multi-use riverfront was where we learned to gorge on Eastern Shore seafood back in the early 1970s, at the long-defunct Hogate’s.)

ABOUT OUR MENUS — Del Mar Restaurant

Del Mar practically assaults your senses with its primary colors, seafood motif, and endless array of fish and shellfish, both cooked and raw, and its jamon and paella presentations are José worthy. Both chefs now cast a wide net over the D.C. restaurant scene, and over two decades have done as much anyone to bring our nation’s capital into the big leagues of destination restaurants.

But man does not live by celebrity chefs alone, and D.C. remains the American capital of French bistros, even if their numbers have diminished over the years. One needn’t look hard in the NW quadrant to find Gallic gastronomy faithful to the haute bourgeois cooking of Paris. Here it is at its imported best, with more venues ready to provide satiety when cravings strike for ris de veau, steak au poivre, and moules marinière. Three old favorites are Bistrot Du Coin a few blocks from Dupont Circle (where the champagne list is legendary for selection and modest prices), Le Diplomate (a perfect facsimile of a Parisian brasserie, legendary for being packed at brunch), and the jewel box which is  Bistrot Lepic in upper Georgetown. Their menus are about as trendy  as boeuf bourguignon, but when you step through the doors, the warm embrace of wine-infused cooking permeates the room, the food, and your soul.

Image(Where the love affair began)

The oldest of the bunch — La Chaumière —  features a menu straight from 1976 and is none the worse for it. It had been forty-six years since we first ducked into the white, timbered dining room, and tucked into a Quenelle de Brochet Sauce Homard:

Image(Gefilte fish with a French education)

….and with one bite we were transported to that imaginary French farmhouse of our youth. When you cut your teeth on a certain type of cuisine you never forget it, and dishes like those dumplings, torchon de foie gras, Dover sole and crême caramel are what made me fall in love with food in the first place.

Image

As comforting as all of these are, even a nostalgic old soul occasionally looks for something new. Which is how, at the urging of a Filipino foodie friend we happened upon the Purple Patch in a not-exactly-tourist-friendly part of town.

To say we were skeptical at first is an understatement. Filipino has always been the Rodney Dangerfield of Asian cuisines. Fried, heavy and greasy, and dominated by flavors neither complex nor refined. To be fair, it is not a single culture, but more like a melange of regional foods (from over 7,000 separate islands) which are usually about as subtle as a  Manny Paquiao  right cross.

None of which applies to what Filipino-American chef Patrice Cleary is whipping up these days in the rapidly gentrifying Mt. Pleasant neighborhood — invoking  precise levels of seasoning and technique not normally associated with this cuisine.

Image

One taste of her vegetable slaw, papaya salad with cured pork (below), crisp, addictive lumpia, or hauntingly savory mushroom pancit announces that you have left the land of steam tables and greasy fried fish, and entered a new realm of sticky-rich lechon, lightly-fried tofu, and ginger-infused sweet-sour snapper, which command attention for their careful cooking, vivid flavors and balanced textures.

The restaurant itself is a confusing hoot: a tri-level maze of warrens, pockets, and hallways carved out of a Mt. Pleasant townhouse. I wasn’t sure we were in the same building when I took my seat in a subterranean skinny cavern of a space. None of which mattered once the platters of the shockingly fresh food start appearing.

Image(Atchara Papaya and Tocino Salad)

These recipes can hold their own with any Asian cuisine (again something not normally said of the Philippines), and were much brighter and lighter than anything I’ve ever tasted with this moniker attached to it.

It is something of a shame that a Las Vegan must travel 2000 miles east to find such a culinary celebration of this culture. Especially since Vegas is crawling with Filipinos: If all the them  exited tomorrow, there wouldn’t be a nurse left in Clark County.

But travel here we have, twice now, to what might be the best Filipino restaurant in America. An opinion our old friend, Washington Post critic Tom Sietsema (@tomsietsema) probably agrees with, since he named Purple Patch his Restaurant of the Year 2023.

Mabuhay!

Image(We love to Tagalog with Patrice Cleary)

>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<

Washington D.C. has come a long way since my days of dining at Kinkead’s (closed 2012), Citronelle (2012), Galileo (2006), Jean-Louis (1996), Duke Zeibert’s (1994),, and Sans Souci (1983). The power lunch crowd probably eats at their desks these days, and of-the-moment restaurants  (like Rose’s Luxury or The Dabney) are informal, chef-driven and aimed more at the Instagram crowd than the movers and shakers who once defined the dining scene.

While I have nothing against locavore-obsessed chefs and open-hearth cooking, much of the D.C. restaurant landscape now feels like any other big city  — where you can get everything from top-grade sushi to fabulous pizza to various world cuisines.  (West African or Laotian anyone?).

In 2024, you can dine as well in Washington as anywhere in America, but in the newer joints, you will feel like you’re eating anywhere in America.

Which is why I gravitate to time-worn bistros and old-school chefs. Give me classic Spanish, Italian seafood, or a French bistro any day (or an occasional envelope-pushing Filipino), and I am one happy Boomer, who still remembers the way we were, strolling the mean streets of Georgetown, in 1978.

April in Paris

Image

The trouble with Paris is the human body is only designed to eat 4-to-5 meals a day.

Such is the conundrum we face daily as we ramble down its rues, and contemplate the cornucopia before us.

Spring is the perfect time to provoke the appetite for this moveable feast. The air is crisp but not cold. It may rain a little but there is revival in the air, and spring in everyone’s step. Sun worshipers flock to the public gardens and you can literally feel the city stirring itself from months of slumber. April is too late for somber bleakness to blanket the city in its wintry cloak, and too early for tourists to harsh your mellow. You can dress up (or down) without fear of ruining your clothes through sleet or sweat, and walk all day without rising temperatures stealing your stamina.

Other than October, April is the ideal month to eat your way through Paris.

Image

So gird your loins and crack a bottle of your favorite fermented French libation, for here is another love letter to the City of Light, and why springtime is the best time to pursue its pleasures of the palate.

HIT THE GROUND EATING

Image(Frites thief)

It was around my third bite of a tangy tartare de boeuf  at Ma Bourgogne — one of my favorite bistros in Paris — that I realized one of my dreams had come true: despite my pitiful failure to master all but the most rudimentary words and phrases, I have never felt more at home than when I am dining in a French restaurant in France. (Lest you think me delusional, I can claim a fairly rigorous command of menu French — in comprehension if not conversation.)

“My Burgundy” puts me at ease even before we’re seated. The greeting may be in French (and they easily peg us as tourists), but they still ask (in jovial, broken English) if we prefer sitting outside (facing the gorgeous Place des Vosges), or inside, where the view may not be as spectacular, but neither do you have a highway of pedestrians jostling your table. We have the usual foggy-headedness from fourteen hours in an airplane, so it is comfort food we seek when ordering and we head straight for the classics.

Image(Grenache v. Mourvedre…how interesting,,,)

The fresh-cut tartare and some gorgeous smoked salmon hits the table while I am bloviating on the virtues of the house wine (50 cl of dense, grapey St. Emilion for 24 euros), as the groggy Food Gal feigns interest through sleepy eyes and soaks up some wine, and the atmosphere.

She finds additional solace in a soothing oeufs en gelee (another impossible-to-find dish on this side of the pond), and even after we’re stuffed and sleepy, we can’t resist the gossamer charms of an île flottante:

Image(Île of enchantment)

Less than three hours after touchdown, we feel like we’re right where we’re supposed to be.

Image(Ma Bourgogne)

We then trek back to our digs at the Grand Hotel du Palais Royale — one of the best-situated hotels in all of Paris — before resting up and strapping up for, you guessed it, dinner.

Only a few blocks from our hotel is the candy store for cooks known as E. Dehillerin, which is a stone’s throw from Rue Montorgueil (below) —  a pedestrian-friendly street where scores of cafes/bistros/restaurants beckon for a mile.

Stroll another ten minutes south and you find the cacophonous wonders of Les Halles and the Marais in one direction, or the beginning of the trés chere shopping district along the Rue Saint-Honoré, in the other.

Image(Dream Street)

Rue Montorgueil (pronounce Roo Montor-GOY-a) is filled with joints like this below, all of which tempt you to sit and watch the world go by, or plan your next three meals from a cozy table nursing a cappuccino:

Image

We’ll get to dinner in a minute, but first some oyster discourse …another reason to hit Paris in April before the season ends.

OYSTER INTERLUDE…or PLEASE EXCUSE OUR SHELLFISHNESS

Image(Marennes v. Belons)

France is the oyster capital of the world, and 80% of all oysters raised in France are consumed within the country. People used to American oysters — even the good ones from Cape Cod and Washington State — are in for a saline surprise when they slurp their way through these tannic-vegetal-metallic wonders, best described as licking a penny under seawater. April is the last great month of the year to get your fill of these briny bivalves, so consume by bucket-load we do.

They are sized by number on menus in inverse relationship to their heft: No. 6 being smallest, while 000s (nicknamed pied de cheval – horse’s foot) are big boys for those who love swallowing their fleshy/slimy proteins in tennis ball portions. We look for fines (small-to-medium) Ostrea edulis (called plates, flats or Belons, even though they don’t always come from Belon, yes, it’s confusing) usually in the No. 3-4 range, and always from Brittany, as these are the most strongly flavored (and usually the most expensive). If you like your molluscs on the sweeter side, look to Utah Beach.

Unlike America, oysters in France don’t travel far from seabed to table, so when you polish off a douziane at Flottes or Le Dôme, you will be so taken by their intensity, you’ll forget about how silly you sounded trying to order them in French.

undefined(JC’s Senior trip pic)

One does not live by oysters alone, so at Le Dôme Café one orders them solely as an entry point for a seafood feast amidst an old-school, brass and glass decor that would make Pablo Picasso feel right at home. The look may be classic, but it has aged like a soft-focus painting from the Belle Époque, and the service could not be better. The Dover sole is the standard by which all others are measured. Its firm, sweet, succulent nuttiness puts it on a level worth flying an ocean for:

Image(Hand-modeling by our staff)

TAKE A HIKE

The language of France may have defeated me, but the streets of Paris have not. Various map apps have turned the city from intimidating into a walkable wonderland.

In the past, we thought nothing of taking cabs or the Metro between sites and neighborhoods. Now we hoof it everywhere. Most of what a tourist wants to see (and eat) is within a three-mile radius of the First Arrondissement, and if you dress for urban hiking (thick, comfortable soles are a must), you will walk off those croissants in no time. And if you like to toggle between the Left and Right Bank (as we do), you’ll become as familiar with the Tuileries as your own back yard:

Image

Exercise is but a side benefit of all the sightseeing done much better on foot. Cars move too fast, and the Metro shows you nothing but your fellow sardines. Walking is the best way, the only way, to properly absorb the mood of a city. Even the ugly walks can be worthwhile; schlepping from the Trocadero to Saint-Germain-des Prés (if you don’t walk along the Seine) is one stolid grey block after another, but you get a feel for everyday Parisian life that you will never see if you stick to the tourist/scenic routes.

Five-to-ten miles a day is a snap for us these days, and a necessity when calories entice at every corner.  In my younger years (when ostensibly I was in better shape), I wouldn’t have considered walking from the Eiffel Tower to Les Halles. Now, as an aging boomer, I see that it is less than three miles (2.8 to be precise), and take off without a second thought.

The equation is simple: Urban hiking + bigger appetite – fear of gaining weight = more restaurants to explore.

SO MANY CROISSANTS

Our croissant quest began one morning at Stohrer — the oldest patisserie in Paris — and another at Ritz Le Comptoir: two ends of the pastry spectrum: one as traditional as they come; the other, a modern (perhaps too modern) take on puff pastry as you’ll see from the not-very-classic pain au chocolat below:

Image(Old school, actually, the oldest school)

Image(Croissant log au chocolat à la Ritz)

Neither of the above was the best croissant we had in our 17 days of patrolling the streets of Paree. We went high; we went low. We even went to a so-not-worth it 170 euro brunch at the Hotel Le Meurice which featured a tsunami of small plates aimed at the Emily Shows Off In Paris crowd.

Image(That’s a brunch of plates)

The meal had more moving parts than a Super Bowl halftime show, and like whatever the f**k this is:…was more concerned with choreography than harmony.

To be fair, its croissants were mighty fine even if they were linebacker-sized. (Any mille-feuille aficionado will tell you what you gain in girth, you lose in finesse — sorta like football players):

Image(Yeast favorite croissants)

Side note: the Meurice was one of the few places we encountered women as servers. Waiting tables in Paris (from the lowliest cafe to temples of haute cuisine) remains a valued profession very much dominated by men. Which is one of the reasons service is so good.

Oh No You Didnt GIFs | Tenor

I kid. I kid…

As for our best crescent roll we tried, that honor goes to an award-winner from La Maison d’Isabelle — which won best in show at some hi-falutin’ bake-off a few years back. In our contest, it was the compact, pillow-soft butteriness (encased in a delicate, easily shattered shell) that separated this laminated beauty from the also-rans.

Image(Crustomized croissant)

People were lined up every morning for them, as they were taken directly from the baking sheet to the oven to your hand: the kind of only-in-Paris experience that spoils you for French pastries anywhere but here.

Image(These are a pain to make)

THE OFFAL TRUTH

Image

The offal truth is you can’t find “variety meats” hardly anywhere in America. Americans have no compunctions about inhaling hamburgers by the billions, or polishing off chicken breasts and filet mignons by the metric ton, but put kidneys, sweetbreads, or brains in front of them and they recoil faster than a vegan at a hot dog stand.

This is where the classic restaurants of Paris come in to sate you with pleasures of holistic animal eating. As in: if you’re going to slaughter another living thing to keep yourself alive, you should respect the animal’s sacrifice and make the most of it.

Europeans are much closer to their food, both geographically and intellectually, and that relationship broadcasts itself on the menus of Parisian restaurants older than the United States.

Image(La Rive Gauche)

To give you an idea how old Le Procope is, they have a plaque out front (just above The Food Gal®’s noggin in the above pic) celebrating customers going all the way back to Voltaire, who, as you recall, died in 1778.

Whatever fat he and Jean-Jacques Rousseau chewed here is lost to history, but no doubt one of them was rhapsodizing over Procope’s blanquette or tête de veau when they did so. Three hundred and fifty years later, this 18th Century artifact (the oldest café in Paris) still delivers the goods, with cheery, old world panache, to regulars and tourists alike, at remarkably gentle prices.

Our “calves head casserole, in 1686 style” was about as hip as a whalebone corset, and all the more delicious for it. Besides being the most wine-friendly food on earth, it is also the most elementally satisfying. No tricks, no pyrotechnics, just foods to soothe the savage breast.

Image(Calves head, circa 1686)

Having successfully tackled a veal head, it was time to go scouting for lamb– at a cheese shop/restaurant perched atop the tony Printemps store near the Palais Garnier, of all places.

Laurent Dubois is reputed to have the best croque monsieur in all of Paris, so we escalated to his cheese-centric spot for a jambon et fromage, but ended up swooning over the navarin (stew) loaded with tender morsels of lamb napped with electric green baby peas in a mint-lamb jus sharpened by jalapenos:

Image(Ewe won’t believe how peafect this was)

On the cuisine bourgeoise level, this was the dish of the trip.

As good as the stew was, we were hunting bigger game. So we strolled through a spring drizzle to Le Bon Georges, a temple of bistronomy which combines classic technique with terroir-focused creativity, hyper-seasonal ingredients, a killer wine list, and very informal but informed service — all squeezed into a cramped, casual space. Like all in the bistronomy movement — the food was simple but surprisingly intense.

Service is by kids who may look like teenagers (with big, patient smiles), but you can tell they are no strangers to dealing with out-of-town gastronauts with all kinds of accents. The chalkboard menu tells you all you need to know (they will happily explain a poussin (baby chicken) from a poisson (fish) to the clueless), and the wine list is Michelin-star worthy in its own right, at prices far gentler than what you’ll find at tonier addresses.

The noise level is tolerable (we were in a back room closer to the kitchen) and the chairs were actually comfortable (not always a given). Describing the food as gutsy doesn’t tell half the story.

Image(Just getting started)

Clockwise from above left: duck paté en croûte with foie gras and prunes; smoked trout with orange sauce; morels with grilled onions, napped with Comté cheese/vin jaune sauce; and white asparagus smothered in vinaigrette, just the way we like them. And these were just the starters.

From there we proceeded to roast duck with carrot puree, sweetbreads over potatoes, and daurade royale (sea bream) with a citron/saffron sauce. We finished the meal with baba au rhum, soaked with booze drawn with a pipette the length of your arm from which you suck just enough libation from a humongous bottle (containing your spirit of choice) to bring it to your glass. Over the top? Of course, but also effective in sending everyone home with a happy glow.

We also got quite the show from chef Lobet Loic as he broke down a cow udder to include in a vol-au-vent concoction he was working on for the next night’s dinner.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1646381805308657665

 

“Just when I thought I’ve tried every part of the cow,” one of our social media followers observed. Us too. This was a new one for even an all-animal appreciator like yours truly.

Even our very French waiters told us it was a part of the animal they had never seen broken down for consumption. They were just as amazed as we were.

LISTING DU PORC

Our hunt for oddball animal parts was hardly over after Le Bon Georges and Procope, so to Le Comptoir du Relais Saint Germain we trotted the next day to make a swine of ourselves over Yves Camdeborde’s crispy, rib-sticking pied de cochon:

Image(I suffer from foot in mouth disease)

Then there was a trek to the far reaches of Montparnasse to try what many call the best cassoulet in all of Paris. (An honest cassoulet being harder to find in America than an authentic choucroute…or a toothsome lamb stew on top of a department store for that matter.)

Image

L’Assiette (“plate”) has received this accolade from Paris by Mouth, who knows her way around a Tarbais, and the version we had in this non-descript spot was so dense with meaty/beany flavor all we could do is quietly thank her in between mouthfuls.

Image(Cassoulet a L’Assiette)

L’Assiette is the ultimate neighborhood gastro-bistro, so small (we counted 24 seats) and so far off the beaten path that nudging your way past Instagrammers will not be a problem. Even as strangers, our welcome was as warm as those bubbling beans, and as soothing as the Languedoc-Roussillon red wine (Domaine Les Mille Vignes Fitou Cadette) that hit the spot on a chilly night.

Choucroute can go stuck rib to stuck rib with cassoulet, which is why this apotheosis of pork beckons us like a holy grail, and why we usually make a beeline to old reliable  Brasserie Lipp  to demolish a platter at least once every trip.

We’ve always been in Lipp’s thrall — from its 19th Century vibe to the burnished wood and ever-present cacophony — it is a restaurant where time seems to stand still.

We even enjoy the narrow, elbow-rubbing two-top tables that are so cramped, they make flying coach on Spirit Airlines feel like a private jet.

And we’ve always found the service to be the opposite of the bordering-on-rudeness reputation of the place. Even now, they gave our brood of six the best table in the house for a late lunch without reservations, and our aging waiter couldn’t have been nicer. (At Lipp, “aging waiter” is a redundancy, since some of them look like veterans of the Franco-Prussian War.)

This time, we loved everything about it…except the food.

Image(Not a naked mole rat)

Lipp’s jarret du porc (above) used to be de rigueur on every trip. This time, like most of our meal, it was disappointing, The portent came from a too-cold house pâté, then succeeded by a slapdash Dover sole and then the chewy pork knuckle, Everything felt perfunctory. Even worse, this “Alsatian” restaurant had but four wines from Alsace on its list. Wassup with that?

Perhaps it was an off day, but the food looked and tasted like no one in the kitchen cares anymore….which is what happens when social media ruins your restaurant.

Luckily, good ole Flo restored our faith in the flavors of Alsace.

Image(Not on menu: lots of falafel)

If Lipp is getting worn around the edges from over-popularity, Brasserie Floderer is holding its own in the sketchy 10eme Arrondissement. — perhaps for the opposite reason. To get there on foot, however, you’ll have to pass some pretty dodgy blocks and trip over lots of kebabs. You know things have taken a turn for the worse, we thought to ourselves as we surveyed the chickpea-strewn streets, when the falafel stands start popping up.

Against this backdrop of littered streets and skewered food, Flo shines like a beacon from days gone by:

Image(Toothsome time warp)

The interior feels like a movie set (above) and the menu is as no-nonsense as the 1909 vintage decor.

As the most stubbornly Alsatian of the remaining brasseries, the Franco-German classics check all the boxes: celery root salad (here cubed not shredded), textbook onion soup, and a “Choucroute Strasbourgeoise” of tender pork belly (poitrine fumée), spicy kraut, smoky sauccisse cumin,  a second sausage (Francfort) – because a single sausage choucroute is akin to sin when “garnishing” this cabbage.

Image(Choucroute is kind of a pig deal)

In case you haven’t had enough pork, there’s also a big hunk of shoulder (échine) to finish you off. How something so fundamental can feel so fresh for so long is a secret known only to Alsatian cooks. They also do a seafood choucroute here, named after Maison Kammerzell — the venerable brasserie in Strasbourg — but we were too busy pigging out to try it.

Brasserie Flo wasn’t the best meal of the trip. It wasn’t even in the top five. But there was something deeply satisfying about returning to a restaurant, far from the madding crowd, where locals still value out-of-fashion recipes for their pure deliciousness.

Which is why we never tire of Parisian bistros, brasseries and cafés —  places with deep roots in country cooking, which have withstood the test of time, and stand in proud opposition to the cartwheels-in-the-kitchen gymnastics of fusion food…and so much falafel.

This is the first part of a two-part (perhaps a three-part) article.

Image(Jardin des Tuileries)

Hail, Britannia! Part Two

Image

Man does not live by meat alone. Even if English cuisine is challenged by finding green things to eat, it more than makes up for it with its seafood. The British Isles take a backseat to no one in the flavor of their fishes and the succulence of its shellfish, and if you happen to be there in oyster season (the dead of winter) as we were, you will find no shortage of bivalves to keep your palate enthralled.

It would have been easy enough to stop into a fish ‘n chips shop around London, but we had bigger pisces to fry in our quest for the best. So off to Ramsgate we repaired (a couple of hours south of London), at the far southeastern end of England, to sample this iconic staple of British vittles at the Royal Harbour Brasserie — a cozy local’s favorite, located towards the tip of a half-mile long causeway, called the East Pier, overlooking the Ramsgate harbor:

Image(Ramsgate at night)

Our guide was an American friend of The Food Gal® who has called England home for the past 10+ years. He picked the restaurant both for the the setting (looking as if the dry-docked bridge of a ship had been hoisted wholesale onto the breakwater), the view (with windows on three sides giving everyone the sense of floating in the harbor), and the seafood, of which we plowed through some first class oysters and the best fish ‘n chips of our lives (made with local haddock):

Image(Chippee kay yay)

If you’re a student of fish ‘n chips (and let’s face it who isn’t?), you know that you’re looking for the perfect thickness of non-greasy, malty beer batter, fried to just done, so the moist, firm fish is enveloped in a steamy, soft, starchy blanket of just the right crunch giving way to a fish that’s allowed to show itself to its best effect. If done right, all you need is a splash of malt vinegar, or a dab of lemon dribble, or the slightest tang of tartar sauce to complete the picture. This fish was good enough to stand without accoutrements.

As for the mushy peas, we don’t get it. Never have, never will. No matter how concentrated the pea-ness, it’ll always be green wallpaper paste to us.

There, I said it.

After eating England’s national dish, it was back to London, where Wilton’s took us from one end of the seafood spectrum to another. Wilton’s is as iconic as any eatery in England, having been serving seafood in the city, in one form or another since 1742. For perspective’s sake — that is 280 years, and almost a century before the first restaurants opened in America. What began as an oyster bar is now the clubbiest of seafood parlors (in looks and clientele), catering to a carriage trade who know their fish like a ploughman knows his meat pies.

Image(How do you say ‘Hell ya!’ in British?)

Image(Luxuriating in Langoustines at Wilton’s)

The look and feel of the place may reek of old-school Brit exclusivity, but the welcome is warm and the service cheerful and courteous.  Located amongst the fashionable shops of Jermyn Street, this is a serious restaurant stocked with big fish in more ways than one. Our cozy two-top was perfectly positioned to watch the parade of patrons and waiters as they perused, pondered, and plated the various poisson to a fare thee well.

English food is best which is interfered with the least, and Wilton’s practically coined the phrase. This is food unfoamed and unfused (as Colman Andrews once wrote) — as true to its roots as Royals behaving badly.

The day we were there a coulibiac of salmon was being paraded around the dining room to ohs and ahs aplenty. (Typical Brit reserve seems to melt when faced with a salmon “Wellington” the size – and weight – of a fire log):

Image

Image

Dutifully wowed, we ordered our hefty slice, which followed a dozen oysters, lightly smoked salmon, Scottish langoustines, and, of course, the Dover sole, barely breaded and on the bone.

Image

The food could not have been more straightforward, or scrumptious — tasting as if everything had jumped directly out of the sea and onto our plates.

What passes for Dover sole in America (often Plaice, Petrale, or lemon sole) lacks the sweet, firm meatiness of the genuine article. This is the real deal: the thin flour coating barely sauteed to a whisp of crispness, then de-boned to four dense fillets of uncommon seafood richness — the pinnacle of flatfish sapidity, and one worth traveling a great distance to taste.

“Sapidity”… great word that.

Image

Built in the grand cafe style of various European capitals — Vienna springs to mind, or a high-ceiling-ed 19th Century railway cafe full of ladies in ruffles, bustles and huge hats — The Wolseley (above) is a modern restaurant masquerading as an artifact of days gone by. It is one of those eye-popping restaurants that wows you even before you take your first bite. Being so capacious allows them to hold back a number of tables for walk-ins (just like they do in Venice and Budapest), so even without a late afternoon reservation, we were promptly seated by the amiable staff and within minutes were tucking into some first-class oysters, surrounded by folks taking in British high tea, wolfing down finger sandwiches, crumpets, and other ruin-your-dinner- nonsense, which seems like sacrilege when coquillage this comely is there for the slurping.

The menu is huge, the crowds constant, and the vibe something Oscar Wilde would recognize. Food offerings toggle between daily specials and recipes from all over the map. Our tiny sample size — those oysters and some spicy, smoky kedgeree (a Hindu-English rice-fish fusion) is hardly enough to take the measure of the place, but for a couple of weary Yanks wandering through Mayfair on a chilly afternoon, it hit the spot.

Image(BiBi = Indian nana)

Britannia may rule the waves, but in London, its cuisine shares equal billing with any number of countries, and one week is not enough time to get but an amuse bouche of all it has to offer. You may have to search for Spanish tapas or Chinese dumplings, but Indian curry parlors are as common as corner pubs. High-end Indian (on a level found nowhere else in the world outside of the country itself), is also in abundance. We put aside our search for classic restaurants just long enough to slide into BiBi — a mere sliver of a space, tucked into the side of a tony address in Mayfair (above), featuring impeccably-sourced groceries (they list the origins of everything from the basmati rice to the ghee), fashioned into some real menu stunners: buffalo milk paneer, beef tartare, aged lamb, and a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing green chilli halibut that was as fiery as it was plain to look at.

I make no pretense in knowing the fine points of northern Indian cooking (Indian menus in America are more predictable than an IHop), so whatever metaphors were being mixed, or traditions being upended, went straight over our heads. But we’re savvy enough to appreciate the “Wookey-Hole cheese papad” —  a sharp, cheese-flavored papadum dipped into cultured cream, mango and mint, layered in a cup to look like the Indian flag, and the raw Highland beef pepper fry (a crunchy-spicy tartare that will snap your palate to attention):

Image

Every bite of every dish seemed to be a hidden minefield of flavor — studded with glorious little surprises like the cheese in those papadum, or seared free-range buffalo milk paneer cheese overlain with chillies and a fenugreek kebab masala:

Image

None of it familiar; all of it an eye-popping reminder of why god gave us taste buds,

From the sigree (grill) section, we tackled a small portion of almost fork-tender aged Swaledale lamb and finished with an exotic Indian tea (the charms of which were lost on me), and a creamy/puffy, panna cotta-like saffron “egg”, whose delights were not:

Image

How you react to BiBi’s high amplitude cooking probably depends on how much you want to invest in deciphering the serious and complicated stuff going on in the open kitchen. It is very much an of-the-moment Indian restaurant which is seeking to shift the paradigm for what people think of as Indian food. But even if you don’t like cogitating on your plate that much, the tastable sensations will blow you away…in more ways than one.

We can’t quite leave England behind without a few recommendations and shoutouts to a few other stops — each of which was notable both for what we consumed, and its very British commitment to first-class hospitality; even to a couple of rubes from the Colonies.

No self-proclaimed gourmand should ever visit London town without a stop at one of their iconic food halls. We didn’t have time to hit Harrod’s, but we were a short walk from Fortnum and Mason  and found ourselves wandering its floors several times, marveling at everything from its bowler hats to bangers:

Image(Banger? I don’t even know her!)

Those sausages were part of a simple English brekkie, side by side with the yellowest eggs we’ve ever eaten. Calling F&M an upscale grocery store is a serious understatement. It’s floors are stocked with the best in gourmet gifts and dry goods, from tea towels to jewelry to stationary. Stores like this simply do not exist in America anymore. This one was packed day and night. No wonder they look down their aristocratic noses at us.

We can’t conclude our travelogue without a mention of some serious imbibing. But first an aside: We ducked into several local pubs advertising local ales and cask-brewed this or that, but despite the adverts and charming surroundings, all seemed to offer the same, boring industrial suds you can find on this side of the pond (Guinness, Harp, Boddington’s and the like). Whassup with that?

We’re long past our beer drinking days, so it didn’t phase us, but a word of warning: If you’re a serious about your brews, choose your pub wisely, because despite their outward charms, many of them have become more standardized than Taco Bell. Where you can’t go wrong, as long as you have the coin, is a cocktail at the Connaught . Swanky doesn’t begin to describe the joint, but if you don’t mind paying $40 for a drink, you get a pre-cocktail with your libation of choice, and the joy of sipping in a whole new tax bracket.

Image(Duck! And order another manzanilla!)

But our favorite tipple of all was at the oldest wine bar in London  — Gordon’s Wine Bar — which has been pouring out amontillados and vintage ports since 1890. The subterranean space is a treat, and the list of fortified wines is something to behold. You can’t give away sherry and port in America, but here there were oenophiles of all ages sidling up to the bar, and ordering  beakers of old wood tawny like Winston Churchill on a bender.

Image

I guess that’s the thing about a country this old and this steeped in tradition; it doesn’t have to keep re-inventing itself. People appreciate, even luxuriate, in their history without a need to jump to the next big thing to satisfy their short attention spans and lust for the next selfie wall. Everyplace we visited was sedate and welcoming. Best of all, none of them felt like they were trying too hard — a refreshing respite from the relentless boosterism which surrounds us at home. Dining around London town fit us like a cashmere cardigan, and was the perfect antidote for the modern American restaurant.

Top 30 Cheers GIFs | Find the best GIF on Gfycat