Tag Archives: dining

The Rossi (and the Short North of Columbus)

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It is funny.  Since my life has led me Ohio-ward (certainly more than the 30+ years preceding), I have been to Columbus (well – bedroom communities therein) so much, but I have seen so little of the city itself.  So it was with a bit of excitement that I did get to hit the Short North area of the city – a bit from downtown and apparently where the “cool kids” are going.  Some of the highlights:

  • The Short North reminded me of Bridge Street in Huntsville, Alabama or Atlantic Station in Atlanta (well, allegedly – it popped up after my reign there ended).  It was fine, had a lot of the usual young people, girls in short skirts, douchebags in striped dress shirts.  Lot of the sorts of pubs where I’d hang out and fancier locales where I decidedly would not.  But it also looked new – not like a mall, but sort of like it was all built at once.  It felt developed – I guess where I live in Arlington, the Shirlington area would be a mini-sort of version.  Culture fabrication of a sort.
  • The North Market though, just off the Short North part of High Street – that’s the real deal.  The market was very evocative of Quincy Market in Boston, just under one roof this festival of foods and groceries.  Hell, there was a Jeni’s Ice Cream – and Jeni’s is pretty clearly the best ice cream that has ever been developed in the United States – so that is a plus already.  However, the other markets all looked wonderful – I wish I had a chance to get lunch there, but some of the key German-Polish places and the Italian stuff looked like the real thing.
  • We did stop at a fairly high end joint in the area – The Rossi – a fancypants sort of Classic American themed place.  Among the specials was one of the better butternut squash soups I have had.  The soup was not overly thick like a puree or an applesauce, and had a hint of heat – did a nice job avoiding cloying sweetness.  It offset a pretty sad charcuterie board that my wife got.  You know there’s a problem when the waitress could not identify the meats on the plate (and frankly they were salamis – whoopee).  But really where my heart sank was the Croque Madame I ordered.  How do you make a Croque Madame and skimp on the gruyere?  I mean, I don’t give a crap about the ham – there has to be some, but I don’t need to be overloaded like I was at a family restaurant.  However, why you order a croque or a Monte Cristo, or another artery stopping grilled cheese, is for stringy, unctuous melty goodness.  You have to be able to see the gooieness and determined that this is a fair price for possibly dying from a coronary later that evening.  It has to create that Pavlovian response.  Instead here we got a little cheese – enough to show that it exists, but an entirely unbalanced thing.  Also, the egg was overdone – the yolk was set which also undercut any unctuous possibility.  Of course this is a restaurant, and so we have folks who are giant fraidy cats about cooking eggs properly.  Oh well.  That said, the other dishes at the table (a salmon salad in particular) looked nice.  It is always hard to get fired up about a high end “American” restaurant – and this is not the place to start – but I am sure most people would enjoy it.

Thai Square

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Once upon a time my friend Andrew from school days gone by theorized a product lifecycle.  First, it’s disgusting (Who’d eat THAT??!!), trendy (wow, it says in the society pages, that people are eating this), mass produced (you can get it pretty easily in cities at least) and then a commodity (in your supermarket freezer section!).  Obviously Thai food at this point is a commodity.  Who doesn’t know Pad Thai, Green Curry, Tom Yum – it is a cliche at this point.  As such, Thai is sort of depressing to consider in the santizied, Americanized version of it.  Another restaurant, another set of drunken noodles and more basil.  Like getting beef and broccoli, you can laud execution, but the inspiration is just about nil.

So when an authentic Thai place pops up, or at least alleged Thai pops up, I go in with a sinking heart.  In the case of Thai Square in South Arlington, such pessimism is gobsmackingly unfounded.  We went here for a late-ish dinner while waiting for Marc Maron’s standup show to begin – I’d read some good reviews, but it’s Thai – so who cares, right?  However, from the very first bite of the papaya salad to the Floating Market Soup which I cannot discuss rationally, this is as good a Thai restaurant as I have ever been to – and with its relatively modest price point, perhaps the best value proposition.  The combination of spice, complexity and real finesse with flavors makes this restaurant experience as good as you can get in Arlington.

The first impression upon arriving here is that – well, it’s divey, or at least storefronty.  That said, while the outside lacks sex appeal, the inside is tastefully done – Yelp indicated that there was a renovation done on the space.  The menu itself is fairly busy – a combination of your typical Thai standbys, but I wanted to aim a bit higher, so we looked at some of the more authentic pieces.  The papaya salad, as we noted, came out first.  This was shredded green papaya with a really hot, but subtle chili-lime juice combination.  The acid and salad combination was compulsively noshable, and the heat sneaks up on you.  It is a really great first course.  For our entrees, we got the Green Shrimp Curry and the Floating Market Soup.  I know, I mentioned at the outset of this piece that the Green Curry was a Thai cliche, and so it is.  But here is one unusually good version – as the sauce was so smooth with subtle flavors, not just an avalanche of coconut milk.  I could eat it all day.  But the real star was the Floating Market Soup.  This is a meatball and beef soup in an unctuous beef broth.  The flavors are hard to discuss – just pure beefiness.  It had the feel of a braised beef soup or a really good  – hey words fail here.  The heat is solid, but does not overpower the show at all, and the noodles are cooked nicely.  But the real star was in its presentation, where they put a few pork rinds on top – which end up functioning like the bestest croutons on earth (vegans vomit now).

Pretty clearly we’ll be going back to this place again.. I’m not sure how many hankerings I’ll have for Thai vs Sichuan or Lao, but if this is Thai, sign me up.  I could use more Floating Market Soup now, come to think of it.

Sichuan Pavilion (Rockville)

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Granted, the last time I had done this was January 2009.  Sichuan Pavilion, located in God’s country in beautiful downtown Rockville, Maryland, is of course awash in praise from folks like Tyler Cowen who make a point to know these things (well, he certainly does not know economics).  Indeed my own memory was pleasant as well – come to think of it, I need to expound more on Sichuan in general instead of shorter posts (well with the exception of Mala Tang).    Of course all of this prefaces my visit recently to Sichuan Pavilion as part of a lovely evening in clearly the nicest place on earth – and while Sichuan Pavilion is a rock solid thumbs up, Cowen’s relative comparison to Hong Kong Palace is simply incorrect.

For this occasion, we got a chance to enjoy a mega family style sort of feast of all sorts of food.  The nice thing about this is that – well, you’re full, you try a lot of things, and get a solid cross-section of insights about the restaurant.  So, how was EVERYTHING??

  • Cold Noodles in Spicy Sesame Sauce – edible, but not very good.  The sauce resembled a fairly standard Satay type of deal flavorwise.  There was nothing memorable here.
  • Lotus Root Salad – a decent job.  Lotus root, in addition to looking nifty, has a jicama like quality to it.  That said, the salad did not pop.
  • Cucumber Salad – not as good as Mala Tang.  I like cucumber though.
  • ChengDu Dumplings – Sichuan flavored Pork Dumplings.  Are you kidding me?  Of course these were yummy.  The sauce though lacked the complexity and multiple notes of other places.  It was just not as floral, and the Sichuan Peppercorn was muted.
  • Ma Pu Tofu – a block and tackling sort of dish I understand.  The sauce was flavorful, although once again muted in the Sichuan flavors – a cuisine that normally attacks you in a good way.  I guess some will call it subtle, and I am a Cro-Magnon.  However, the subtlety can be there while the flavors are assertive – they aren’t mutually exclusive.
  • Cured Pork Belly and  Chinese Sausage with Garlic Sprouts – lovely.  Arguably the best dish of the night.  Of course it is bacon and sausage – so how can that not be awesome?  It feels like there was a lower bar to achieve here.
  • String Beans with Ya Chai – I have no idea what this Ya Chai is.  I mean I learned, it is preserved vegetable, but it is essentially a seasoning.  That added to string beans made a really tasty vegetable.  It was probably the best dish of the night since they did not have that pig meat head start.
  • Chili Chicken – My tablemate was looking for the amazing fried chicken with stuffed chili peppers of Hong Kong Palace.  Heck, so was I.  But alas, this is a standard chicken dish.  It is spicy – the peppers do give the heat, but not a lot else.  The chicken was also overdone, and sort of became too tough.

Overall, this is a solid B+ performance.  It is an excellent choice for Chinese, but Uncle Liu’s empire need not worry.  God I could use some Hong Kong Palace …

Cinthia’s Bakery

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One of the real joys of living in the greater Arlington area is the remarkably high number of Latino food joints stuffed in the area’s nooks and crannies.  Peruvian chicken, the pollo a la brasas is well known enough, and as Anthony Bourdain could note, Arlington is second to none there.  I’ve had good Peruvian chicken and good Salvadorian, but never the chance for Bolivian.  It’s such a random idea isn’t it?  Bolivian?  But it is true.  Cinthia’s Bakery and Cafe West of Bailey’s Crossroads is the real thing – at least doing the usual scan of clientele I’d have to attest to that.  It was bustling on a Saturday early afternoon, and the pure Spanish on the menu and whatnot both gave us a chance to see if we remembered anything from high school and gave us some notion of authenticity.

I got the Chairo, the Bolivian beef stew with potatoes and freeze dried potatoes (called chairo).  The broth had good body and flavor.  You could see the amount of work flavorwise that the bones and the oxtail and beef I saw in the bowl did.  The potatoes were boiled and cut rather large so they add some starch to it, but not a lot else.  LG got the Silpancho, which is a dish that layers rice, boiled potatoes, a giant schnitzel of what looked to be beef, and tomato and onion – oh yeah, and a fried egg on top.  The dish was large and starchy.  What was interesting was that the onion and tomato layer was just raw – no pico de gallo type of deal or anything.  The dish from what I had was good – but wow the starch was bursting.

I guess ultimately you have to give credit for authenticity.  The dishes were tasty – and given the mountainous, poor area of Bolivia – that the dishes were starchy and high potatoes and markers of “peasant food” (or at least as I see it) is expected.  That being said, this is a definite thumbs up.  This round of ordering was not knock my socks off, but very solid – and shows a lot of potential.  If nothing else, the chance is there to hone my espanol.

Flavors Soul Food

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Such a simple name, and such a totally nondescript location, Flavors is very easy to miss out on Columbia Pike if you are not looking for it.  Of course, as we know – these sorts of holes in the wall can be either an indicator of death to a restaurant or it is a symbol that it’s gonna be really really good.  What I can say is that if soul food is the hope, the clearly Flavors delivers the mail.  Oh does it deliver.  It is hard not to get the ‘itis just typing this review, but I will try to hold on.

When we went – it was near the end of the lunch service.  I wanted the special fried catfish, but they were out – so I settled for trout.  The guy behind the counter told us how long it would take – and did not take money until after the meal.  It was homey – and as I looked around it LOOKED like the clientele knew the place and came frequently.  I ordered fried trout with mac and cheese and collard greens with cornbread on the side.  We also got a bowl of fried okra.  The collard greens were lovely – good flavor and well cooked.  The mac and cheese was not as dense as it could have been (this is a good thing) but was as excellent and homey as you’d want.  However, the star was the fried stuff.

Deep frying is such a maligned technique.  So many people are afraid of it – citing grease and how manifestly unhealthy it is.  There is a kernel of truth here I suppose – but really it is about technique.  Basically, if you have the oil hot enough and pay attention to the food, very little added grease appears.  With the okra and the fish, the crust was flavorful and dry – my fingers did not even need washing – and the food stayed moist.  The chicken in the booth next to me looked similarly marvelous.

The price was not great – it was a bit on the expensive side.  However, this is exemplary soulfood.  I can’t wait to try the chicken.

Ravi Kabob I

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What happened??!!  Ravi Kabob, Arlington’s kabob powerhouse for as long as I’ve lived here, was one of the surest things in the area.  There are the two locations, on opposite sides of Glebe Road.  Recently I had the chance to take some take away from the original location.  Considering that this was Ramadan – the expectation were high – and the place was certainly bustling.  Customarily I don’t look at them not having any Chapli Kabob as a red flag – they don’t seem to carry too many of them around.  However, this time was different.

After the Chapli disappointment, I ordered the lamb kabob – basic blocking and tackling for these sorts of deals.  To go with the typical accoutrements, I got a samosa and a salt lassi.  The lamb was good.  The meat was well cooked and seasoned, and paired nicely with the traditional yogurt sauce.  And that is the extent of the good things I can say.  It is weird to rant and rave about a restaurant’s terribleness when the meat was actually done well, but it feels like Ravi Kabob was content with just satisfactorily checking the box.  The samosa was kept at much too low a temperature.  Combined with the lack of seasoning, it might have very well been the worst samosa ever made.  The chickpeas in gravy (I’d call it masala, I don’t know what you’d call it) also seemed to cleverly lack seasoning of any sort.  It just provided some texture with the rice and meat, but it brought nothing to the table otherwise.  It was unusually bad.  The salt lassi fortunately was decent.

In some ways, the review might be unnecessarily harsh.  But I have very high expectations here, and Ravi Kabob has usually delivered.  Sadly, this time was a crazy misfire – bad enough that one wonders if there is a deeper underlying flaw.

Alaska 2011 – Part II

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As the trip rolls into Fairbanks and Talkeetna, some more random notes:

  1. Fairbanks is a significant city certainly.  The University of Alaska at Fairbanks is the only place in the state you can get yourself a PhD.  We were there a couple of nights.  First off, the River’s Edge resort cottages in Fairbanks is a very nice little hotel.  It’s no Mandarin Oriental, but the little cottages are nice – made me feel like a homeowner however briefly.
  2. Also, we got to Fairbanks from Denali via the Alaska Railroad – something we used to get to Talkeetna as well.  Bottom line, railroad is THE way to travel.  It’s a shame that … well, let’s not veer into such naked politics, right?
  3. Our first morning in Fairbanks took us to the Creamer’s Field and Waterfowl Preserve.  This is basically a huge ass farm which attracts a lot of birds.  In particular, we found Canadian Geese and Sandhill Cranes, in great numbers.  Amazing how unbothered they were by us, until some dude with a dog walked by.
  4. We went up to Coldfoot, past the Arctic Circle, via a twin engine plane.  This was appropriately awesome, and the drive back south included just seeing the particulars of what makes the area tick.  The most amazing upset of course, was that the Arctic Circle was by far the nicest weather we had to date, with dry and in the 70s.  This trip also got us checked off for the Gates of the Arctic National Park – a park that I could not ever think of visiting in any other context.
  5. After the extensive adventure in Fairbanks, the Railroad took us to Talkeetna, a small town with a spiffy setup – and a cute downtown (or whatever you call the place to be in a town of 800).  This featured the best meal of the trip, a dinner at the Denali Brewing Company.  The sweet potato fries were lovely as was the blonde ale.  If you end up here … somehow … it is worth it.  The free taxi to the hotel was nice also.
  6. Morning featured a sled dog demonstration.  The yard where the dogs were seemed like a hell from a hoarding TV show or something with all of the dogs strewn about.  But they lived well – though in athletic training.  This must have been what East German Olympic training must have been like.  The guide was very funny.
Photographic evidence herein as usual is below.  Final leg takes us to Seward and the Kenai Fjords National Park.

The Denali Alaska Railroad Depot had some weird buildings, like where my dad is sitting.

A view from the twin engine

A view from the twin engine

The plane! The plane!

Coldfoot, Alaska is a legitimate outpost. Here is the inn, next to the cafe. The post office trailer and inn trailer are nearby - as are a gaggle of mosquitoes.

The Arctic Circle where 66-33 is. Amazingly, 70s when we were there.

Standing on permafrost, you take a hole like this and reach in, and you feel an ice block. It's really trippy.

The world's most famous plumbing? It's the Alaskan Pipeline, an infrastructure marvel like the Interstate Highway System that America seems rather incapable of now.

My mom was whining about not seeing a bear the whole trip aside from models in hotel lobbies (seriously, the hotel lobbies we stayed at all felt like elks lodges or something). This quieted her.

A Theodore Roosevelt sighting. I'll let that caption marinate for a minute ...

The sled dog demo in Talkeetna. Wow did this place smell ripe! But the dogs were magnificent, and the training they are given is impressive. Our guide is an iditarod racer.

Doggies in action. We had a turn but hard to take photos from the cockpit.

Puppies - that is all

The Ohio State Fair and Other Travel Notes

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Some picked up pieces from the latest trek to Ohio:

- The first major day took us to the Ohio State Fair.  It is one of the deals that seems grander in a childhood mind’s eye than it really is.  That said, there is a sky ride and a ferris wheel – granted the sky ride looked low enough that a fall might not even seriously injure anybody.  The fair was appropriately impressive with fried foods and giant turkey legs.  Indeed, if you have a significant other lady who will tear into a turkey leg shamelessly in front of you – you have a keeper.

Hampshire Pigs Racing

Pot Bellied Pigs - A slower, fatter pace

The other highlight besides the pig races – which yes, we wagered on (hey, it was only a dollar!) – had to be the petting zoo, which had a variety of animals, many whom seem in awfully close quarters for this sort of thing.

Pygmy Goats - Definitely the Petting Zoo Star

I think we can figure out what this one is.

Indigenous Ohio Zebra? Wait, what??!!!

- Day 2 took us to the staggering Hocking Hills in the Southeast part of the state.  This is a lovely state park which shows the hilly part of Ohio – which I actually never realized exists.  Compared to the north in the state which is as flat as any 80s R&B star hairdo, we got some legitimate hiking.

A view near the upper falls. Definitely the itch to bathe in the water. (considering it was so hot and humid)

A view of the flow of the water from the upper falls

Old Man Cave- Though I did not see any plumbing or FIOS for an old man to live there.

Ash Cave - Although less a gave than a crazy neat rock formation

- The final day took us to the North and Upper Sandusky.  The restaurant was The Village.  Given that I was arguably the youngest person there, it is safe to surmise that this restaurant was for the crusty old dudes demographics.  The menu did not belie this notion with the prominent inclusion of Cube Steak and a lot of other Real America treats which are homey but seem allergic to seasoning.  That said, I got a broasted chicken sandwich and broasted chicken is pretty darn awesome genrally.  Broasting, where the chicken is pressure cooked in oil – creates a crispy crust and a moist chicken while avoiding the greasiness that can hurt lesser fried chickens.  I am not sure whether the Village was good at broasting or if broasting is just that foolproof.

XO Taste

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Considering it is across the highway from Hong Kong Palace, XO Taste is a striking contrast in Chinese food.  The former restaurant has cast its lot with Sichuan cuisine and the associated flavor profile, while XO Taste is more about the kindler, gentler side of Chinese cooking in its subtler, more muted tones.  I am not 100% sure if seasoning is not available in that part of the country or not – but certainly going from Sichuan to Cantonese is a lot like turning down the blinds.

This is not to say that XO Taste is bad.  Indeed the live seafood and meat stations (where you see the pigs and ducks hanging about) looked truly impressive.  We sat down for a meal which started with a roasted pork soup.  This was a noodle soup, with sliced pork in that iconically chinese sparerib way, with the pink exterior.  The pork was well done and the mild broth had a lovely flavor which was downright quaffable.  The noodles in the soup were a bit on the short of al dente side, but it was not a fatal error.

The entree we ordered was a seafood and eggplant casserole which was also well made.  The eggplant was cooked well and permeated throughout.  The seafood was well cooked and – thankfully – the shrimp was not overcooked (an increasing rarity in these times).  The chinese watercress we ordered was also quite good – providing that fresh contrast and crunch to go with the softer tendency of the casserole.  Indeed the authenticity and flavors were there.

However, it might just my tastes and the nature of Cantonese in general.  XO Taste clearly warrants more comparison with the various Full Kee extrusions than with the Sichuan places I know and love.  The meal we had was good, and not a screaming ethnic restaurant bargain.  There is nothing to complain about, aside from the fact that there was nothing to say wow and get all weak kneed over.  XO Taste is good, but with a crackling vibrant personality like Hong Kong Palace living so near, it feels like a stodgy and boring.  There is a lot to admire about XO Taste, but like the Full Kees not a whole lot to inspire my affection.

Hill Country BBQ

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I guess the simplest way to think of Hill Country BBQ in Penn Quarter is that it is Vapiano for rednecks.  Of course Vapiano could easily be construed as an elegant trattoria for cheapskates – so there you go.  But in either case, the concept is the same – you get a card as you enter the place, and that keeps your own tab.  The menu items are in stations – think of a particularly swanky cafeteria – maybe the buffet on an ocean liner – and you visit where you want to eat.  This is good to avoid those operatic moments when a large party needs separate checks – and to be fair, the casual aspects of it make it a good dining experience.

Of course Hill Country is applying this openish dining concept to BBQ.  It is hard not to be a bit of a Q snob when you have spent time in the South.  I have never spent time in TEXAS, but my tour in Georgia left me with some expectations.  So the offerings for the BBQ I was more happy to have “good enough”.  I tried their Texas Kreusz Sausage with Jalapeno and Cheese.  It was not hot, but the flavor was there.  The sausage was not bad, but definitely a bit tougher than I’d prefer.  Trying food from others in our party, I could say that the ribs were pretty good – a bit less fall off the bone than you’d like but solid flavor.  However, the sides were uniformly satisfying.  I had a side of mac and cheese as well as a cucumber salad.  The mac and cheese was melty and rich – almost coma-inducing rich.  It was a definite comfort-food as a welcome supplement.  The cucumber salad was there for the illusion of health.  To their credit, the cucumber was not limp, and actually was cool and refreshing to go with the rest of the heavier food.  Another plus was their cocktail menu – I had a gin sling (their version) and it was very well done … that is decidedly better than Vapiano (or at least cooler).

The decor is wood benches and the building rather loud – I imagine it’d be a bit relentless when live music is going on there.  The market concept sort of renders the place feeling like eating at a busy mall or something.  However, the overall experience is fun and it’s a solid casual place if you want that sort of food.