Tag Archives: food

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Pizzeria Orso

Tyler Cowen’s choice for the best pizza in the area, Pizzeria Orso has been on our radar for a long time.  The place is run by a pizzaiolo who worked at Two Amys, which is apparently the high falutin pizza place for folks in the District – and walking in for lunch you could notice a high falutin sort of pizza vibe.  There was the wood oven, a blackboard with the specials listed, including a roasted beet salad with goat cheese – so that’s the vibe we’re dealing with.  Needless to say, given my love for this sort of   The decor is fairly – well I don’t know how to put it – standard.  I mean, no checkered tablecloth or anything but in a modern way entirely appropriate.

The menu is good and varied with a variety of individual pizzas and small plates – there were also specials including the aforementioned beet salad and a braised pork belly small plate.  I got two small plates, arroncini and their sweet corn agnolotti served on a crab-corn ragout.  The arroncini, risotto fritters basically, contained mushroom, taleggio cheese served on a vidalia onion puree.  It was tasty, although did not compare to the arroncini at Pupatella.  The agnolotti was tasty enough, but I was taken aback by only getting two of them – small plate indeed.  Together the two cost $17 which was a little defeating.

LG got a pizza, which had basil, onion, mushroom, tomato, mozzarella.  The pizza was a good neapolitan pizza.  Toppings were ok and cheese was solid also – but the sauce lacked in the simple flavor that we have experienced elsewhere (Pupatella, cough cough).  The other pizza on the table had speck, mozzerella, ricotta – the ricotta was a textural misfire, enough to mute the value of cured pig which is alarming to consider.  Both pizzas cost $13 to $15 apiece.

I normally don’t harp on price – but Pupatella in Arlington offers entree salads for $7 and a clearly superior pizza for less.  It’s not that Pizzeria Orso is bad – I liked it, and I could see how someone else would rave.  But it is demonstrably inferior to options that are not that far away.  Driving to Pupatella is a much better use of your pizza chasing time.

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Silver Fountain and DC Dim Sum in General

Thumbing through some of the mental notes about the eating life in beloved DC, it occurred suddenly that I have criminally neglected Dim Sum.  Of course, Dim Sum is the original brunch – where Chinese restaurant provides many small plates etc etc etc.  Obviously, we don’t live in New York – so the pickings are destined to be a little slim.  That said, recently when we visited Silver Fountain in Silver Spring, we stumbled upon what was pretty clearly my favorite Dim Sum experience.  But I’m not going to put a full review here – it’s Dim Sum, and at Silver Fountain ALL of the major blocking and tackling elements were good (shu mai, pork buns, congee, turnip cake) – but sort of work through the major elements that have shaped my view of the discipline in the area.

  • Obviously, DC proper is worthless for a real get your hands dirty experience.  Ping Pong Dim Sum in Chinatown is good, but also very gringo-focused.  The food is good, but on the pricey side, and meant to provide the motif of dim sum, but when you sit in a douchey DC bar decor, you know that this is a fancypants impostor.
  • A&J in Rockville has the Northern Chinese dim sum.  I’ve been twice – well once to their Virginia location – and liked it both times.  That said, the dim sum items were on a menu, and not on carts hurtling through the restaurant.  That is a bit of a bummer.  In a related story, I am shallow.
  • This starts veering me towards what had been our standby for years – China Garden on Rosslyn, located in the ABC 7 building.  This screamed dim sum to me – the very Chinese crowd, the enormous line after Church, the carts and the indecipherable markings as items are ordered.  It used to be uniformly excellent but in recent years it has slipped.  Things like the sticky rice end up having too much Chinese sausage and end up wallpapering over a less appealing texture.  On this side of the river, it is still the best – but the craving to do it has ceased mostly.
  • Silver Fortune we were lucky to get there for opening as the line exploded after we sat down.  The carts were in full force here too.  But between this place and China Garden, the food was just better, every dumpling, every leaf wrapped sticky rice, every Chinese broccoli, it all works.  The service was – well I would not say “spotty” but it felt weird to wait so long for the shu mai to show up – but once it did, order was restored.
  • Obviously, like any Sunday brunch, this really benefits from being with friends.  It is very much a communal operation as people stop carts and take stuff and you get to sample tons of things.  It is a slow, steady trip towards a serious food coma.
  • And no, I still can’t do Chicken’s Feet.
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Duangrat’s Oriental Food Mart

If I were to tell you that the best Kee Mao/Drunken Noodles I have had in this area came from a super divey grocery store counter, it would seem preposterous - although if you have read any of Tyler Cowen’s stuff come to think of it, you’d find Duangrat’s Oriental Food Mart entirely appropriate.  We’ve been devoted followers of Tyler Cowen’s guide of course – but this is the first time I’ve done something legitimately no frillsy.  If we are talking atmosphere, there is none – just dirt cheap interesting kitchen cooked Thai food.  What’s particularly odd about the experience is that the restaurtant Duangrat, run by these folks – came off as a relatively good but forgettable Thai joint easily surpassed by better fare.  Even around the corner, there is another restaurant run by these folks – Rabieng.  Next door to Rabieng is this grocery store – which is like almost every Oriental grocer known to man, complete with assortment of pickles, spices, alarming looking delicacies and a curious quasi-stale smell (yes this applies more to places like Great Wall than the resplendent Super H-Mart).  But in the corner, yeah back there – to the right – near all those big bags of rice – is a wood counter with a menu of options written.  Clearly the door of the unmanned area is connected to the restaurant next door, though at the counter is a bell to ring.  After ringing the bell (this is no bellhop sort of ding but a loud temple-esque sort of pealing), someone pops their head in, takes your order – you pay at the cashier’s line and they run your food out.  Drunken Noodles and a Bamboo Shoot salad for $14?  In this town?  Obviously this is a terrific price.  The salad was spicy and quite good, though I am not sure how fresh the shoots were, although sitting in the same bag as a hot dish might have hurt it on the drive home.  But the drunken noodles were a revelation – well seasoned and the noodles were well browned.  There was heat, but also the depth of basil and flavor, where it’s not just an endurance test.  It is one of the better versions of the dish I’ve had – and reason enough alone to take it for a spin again.  Certainly if you want Thai in a pinch, it is a lovely option to have at hand.

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District Taco

Well, clearly somebody likes District Taco.  Indeed, a lot of somebodies judging by the swaths of humanity whenever I’ve tried to get food here.  After seeing the crowds and hearing the stark raving gushing from friends of mine, you would expect District Taco to have been an eye opener.  There was once darkness but now I can see – stuff like that.  However, when considering El Charrito – our standard bearer for this sort of thing – District Taco works out as a pretty massive disappointment, sort of the difference between visiting the Grand Canyon and staring at a picture of the Grand Canyon.  Sure, the picture’s nice – and it resembles the thing, but when you sit on the ledge and stare into the ravine … come on now.

When I did get a shot at going to District Taco, my main investment was in the Burrito Mojado, which was a meat burrito of some ilk (I went with barbacoa – just like at Chipotle, the best of the meats in theory), covered with salsa chile black beans, cheese and such – basically turning a burrito into something more like an enchilada.  It was interesting since the salsa was allegedly authentic and “Yucatan Spicy” whatever that means.  Personally, it looked a lot like the Yucatan people liked chile con carne by what the salsa chile was.  Also the heat level was really relatively minor – and so you are left with a chile covered burrito the size of my head.  The beef was surprisingly muted flavorwise for something like a barbacoa.  Similarly the life partner’s spin with chicken and carnitas tacos were similarly unremarkable.  In all of these cases too, spicy salsa was in a bar a la chipotle with a variety of toppings of one’s choosing.  This is all well and good, but alas – you don’t really get much of a flavor of the enterprise and not much differentiation with stuff like California Tortilla (granted it is much much better than THAT).  El Charrito with the corn tortillas and more authentic seasoning and meat selection just blows it away.

Now is District Taco paying a sin here for not being the best taqueria I know?  I suppose it is – I can’t say that it’s BAD in any meaningful sense.  But on the other side, can I sit here and give it rarefied hype for POSSIBLY being better than Chipotle?  I like Chipotle – quite a bit actually – but if the goal is to justify the hype and legend of District Taco, simply being a Chipotle peer doesn’t seem like nearly enough.

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Bolivian Sunday and La Fortaleza

“I hope you like starch …”

So goes the refrain when I ponder those food trucks lining the access roads by Route 50 west of Seven Corners in what the mail carriers might call Falls Church but what is more properly known as “miscellaneous Fairfax County”.  Of course I am talking about Sundays, when the substantial Bolivian population in these here parts come out of the woodwork (ok, they probably live in apartments), and bring their culinary wares to the public.  I have to admit, this both intrigued and intimidated me coming out of the gate.  I had read reviews of the like from the usual sources for this sort of thing, and I had taken a small step in the Bolivian direction before – but the idea of the menus being entirely in Spanish and a level of flying blind IS in fact a little scary.

Yet there we were several weeks ago, parked at La Fortaleza, which is a converted ice cream truck which is encamped on 50-West near a Radio Shack.  Yes, the directions are THAT precise.  So leaving the car, I went out to the truck where a barrel shaped man was standing there.  I used the entire range of Spanish I knew to ask how he was doing.  While going through this incredibly tortured dance, I got offered a sample of the Chicharron, pork which was succulent, flavorful and tender off the bone.  And then I uttered several barely coherent syllables which ended up with me having two pastries in my hand and a large container of soup.  The pastries of course were Saltenas – lovely stuffed with meat, vegetable, eggs, olives.  To describe it would be inadequate, although referring to it as a lovechild of a samosa and an empanada might get you in the ballpark.  My own choice that day was the Sopa de Mani, their peanut soup.  The soup – suffice to say – was a bacchanalia of starch.  Yeah the broth was lovely with some peas, but then also lots of potatoes, and french fries.  Another time – at a different truck I had a brisket soup which featured what looked to be grits to be tossed in, also excellent.  But my favorite soup of them all was the ranga, a vegetable and tripe soup which will senda few of my erstwhile readers running in horror.  But – if you get past the texture of tripe, which is not universally admired – it is really tasty.  Add the chili sauce and you get a real kick to go with it.

Other dishes are clearly pretty authentic, but less successful.  The silpancho, a milanese beef on rice, was fine but my god we got a lot of rice.  The enrollado was almost an unpleasant texture  – LG disliked it, but it might have been less an execution problem than just being a texture that would be hard to work with.  The chicharron dish was excellent, but the dish still had some unrendered fat which threw us for a loop. That said, it is a minor quibble.  Indeed, hard to get high and mighty about a cuisine that I am only learning about and enjoying while sitting on the pavement in a parking lot like a day laborer with mucho trabajo.  It is overall an excellent experience – and La Fortaleza is particularly excellent, though we have vowed to try to see a few more of the vendors.  On Sunday there are seriously nearly 10 or so trucks lining that stretch – selection is not a problem.

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Columbia Firehouse

In the pursuit of a proper mint julep on Derby day – a day I lost a dollar due to somebody guessing I’ll Have Another – one of the places where our search went in vain alas was Columbia Firehouse.  This is kind of funny considering the fairly Southern twist in the menu of course – but somehow despite that, we stumbled into a pretty darn good meal, competitive with Society Fare in the Old Town Alexandria fancy casual sort of deal, solid B+ level American cuisine.  I did get mint julep somewhere else fortunately.

As the link seems to indicate, the Firehouse DOES make something of its faculty with cocktails.  I ordered The Avenue, an erstwhile combination of Maker’s Mark, Calvados, Passion Fruit and and Grenadine.  Of course, with passion fruit involved, there is a fear of cloying sweetness.  Fortunately though the drink has more finesse than that.  Indeed there is some tang and a tinge of bitterness that offset the other notes (of course that is probably the whisky talking).  It was good.

The rest of the meal was concerned with sampling their spring pea soup – this was a lovely soup that is smooth and subtle, but accented with the garlic and chive flavors.  Honestly, it is one of the better examples of the pea soup genre (one with a very high amount of variability as anyone who has tried Campbell’s condensed can tell you).  The other stuff I had was part of their charceuterie, sausage and cheese platter – which was more of a mixed bag.  The charceuterie was flat out awesome – both the pate and the cured pork belly were wonderful.  I could eat the belly all day – and die at 38, but still.  The cheeses were all pretty good, although the stinky Grayson was the best.  Alas, the sausages were not very good.  I had the chicken sausage and italian sausage, and both were dry and overworked.  The homemade sausage was alluring but ultimately a downer.

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Girl Scout Cookie Rankings

Wow.  Do you realize how hard it is to walk by any subway station now?  The one at Ballston, near where I live – the girls are out there with their enterprising mothers, and for four dollars a box, they are trying to kill me.  Fortunately, I have resisted so far.  However, it IS that time of year – and considering all the bandwidth I waste doing power rankings, how can I miss ranking something of true social and political import?  I read about the Girl Scout Cookie program and it says that it “helps girls do great things.”  I have no doubt it does – but I can’t verify that claim, but I can surely verify that the cookies are delicious and will turn me into a dirigible if cookie season were 12 months long.  But that’s my own lack of willpower talking.  What about the cookies?  Well – one man’s Girl Scout Cookie ratings.

INCOMPLETE GRADES:

  • SavannahSmiles – I have to give credit to what these cookies mean in theory, in addition to having a very strong name.  Lemony cookies dusted with powdered sugar.  These might be good – they are promising, but I tend to lean on my perennial choices, so I have to plea ignorance.
  • Thank You Berry Munch – Alas, my cookie order has not arrived yet.  This is my controversial pick for my bushel.  White fudge chips and cranberries have a chance to give a nice taste contrast.  On the other hand – considering the nature of cookies and American palates, these might be inundated with white chocolate which would overwhelm with sweetness and probably make my wife make a face.  Of course that means I’d have to eat them all – every cloud has a silver lining.

AND NOW, THE COUNTDOWN:

6. Dulce de Leche - OK.  How do Dulce de Leche chip cookies make the bottom of the list?  Seriously?  Well, first of all – the standard for Girl Scout Cookies is pretty amazing.  Being 6th is no insult. However, this was my wild card choice last year – and I was disappointed.  I think I had just seen a Good Eats episode singing the praises of Dulce de Leche, and the extra depth it had over ordinary caramel.  But really we just got the worst of caramel here – sweet without a counterpoint.  If I was in prison, I’d eat them no doubt.  It’s not a horrendous cookie – but in such a bountiful pageant, why compromise?  Grade: C+ 

5. Trefoils - It’s short bread.  It looks like the Girl Scouts logo.  As cookies go, they are fine.  They are stable, solid – and boring.  It fails in comparison to the Big 4, and I never crave them.  But I can’t say anything bad about them – they are just sorta there.  Grade: B

4. Do-Si-Dos - Now we start with the good stuff.  In some ways, this is cheating – I mean it’s peanut butter for frak’s sake!  This is the sandwich cookie, and it does a solid job.  It is the first cookie that really pops flavorwise.  It is good, but the others are better.  Grade: B+

3. Thin Mints - Ah yes, the people’s cookie.  And to be fair, it’s a very good cookie – and unlike cookies with peanut butter in them, there is not a statistically significant population that could get hives or die from eating them.  But the 49% cited in the survey seems high to me.  Frankly, I’d see Thin Mints as the #1 cookie only because it appears in everyone’s Top 3 – it is the Mitt Romney of Girl Scout Cookies (well if Mitt Romney did not come off as a total douchebag).  It is not a gold medal cookie to me, but I certainly put it on the medal podium.  Grade: A

2. Samoas - This is probably the most polarizing of the cookies.  Obviously I am an admirer – but I know people who hate them.  The coconut gives a chewy texture that is reminiscent of some “no-bake” cookies I have tried before.  They are also sweet, and didn’t I complain about that with the Dulce de Leche?  However the coconut and chocolate give it a couple extra dimensions instead of just caramel.  This is not a cookie for everybody I suppose – but it’s a cookie that’s easy to get passionate about.  Grade: A+

1. Tagalongs – I keep having to remind myself when I type this that these cookies are not Filipino.  On the other hand, they do taste like they are of a different place, where people are happy all the time and everybody has a pony.  Chocolate covered peanut butter cookie patties.  You have the sweet, the salty, the peanut butter, the textural complexity a cookie offers.  Frankly if they baked in some bacon bits, it would almost become too good a cookie for people in this humble dimension to be ready for.  It would be overwhelming, and best left for higher order beings.  As is, it is way too easy for me to ransack this box in a Tasmanian Devil like fury.  This is impossible to discuss rationally – and I am not sure how I have managed not to forage for cookies yet. Grade: A+

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Hill Country BBQ

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.

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We the Pizza

Spike Mendelsohn, the quirky, talented but not THAT talented cheftestant on a couple different versions of Top Chef, has established a couple of places doing upscale (well, it’s all relative) versions of iconic American.  For example, his first joint, Good Stuff did the shakes and burgers thing – but at a higher level.  Right next door to that place on Pennsylvania Avenue is We The Pizza, which is of course, a pizza place.  Burger joints are a dime a dozen, and Good Stuff is a pretty good version therein (though the rosemary fries were kind of offensive), but when Ray’s Hell Burger is around, well you can tell where I stand.

Like Good Stuff, We the Pizza is fashioned after a 1950s sort of motif.  You see the pies right as you enter and then order in line, get the beeper, then eat upstairs.  I took advantage of the surprisingly good $10 value – two slices and a homemade soda.  I had an orange cream and the slices are mozzarella and roasted tomato, and the Forest Shroom, a wild mushroom white pizza with truffle oil.  Across the board, the crust was thin, and crispy – not a cracker type crust, but more traditional – definitely good.  The margherita type pizza was very solid – with the additional depth of the roasting, it is pretty good.  On the other hand, the forest mushroom might have actually been too “mushroomy” which I cannot actually believe I am writing.  The truffle oil was a bit heavy-handed, and kind of obscures everything else.  Without a creamier, milder counterbalance, the mushroom is overbearing.

In some ways though We The Pizza is hurt by the existence of a similarly hip upscale pizza place in Pupatella, in Arlington.  Pupatella serves similar pizzas, but the brie gives its wild mushroom some smoothness that Spike’s place lacks.  The margherita at Pupatella is more traditional – with the chewy foldable slices and brick oven.  Obviously I should not hold Pupatella’s greatness against We The Pizza – you can only be what you are.  Spike’s place is a good pizza joint, but does not have the wow factor that makes it that urgent to go to the Hill for.

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Myanmar

I can say at this point with great certainty that I love Burmese food.  Like many other Southeast Asian cuisines, Burmese has that amalgamation of Chinese and Indian sorts of notes that I enjoy.  Thai is of course most folks’ exposure in this area, and that is great – even if this is the inauthentic “Pad Thai” sort.  Personally, there are often more sweet notes there than I need.  Burmese instead brings more pure heat and Indian curry sorts of notes – and I am sure I am articulating this totally incorrectly.

Anyway, so far, the only chance I’ve had to to explore this was the highly estimable Mandalay in Silver Spring.  As the review I wrote for THAT reason showed, I am a big fan.  So it is with some level of delight that I can say that Myanmar, Falls Church’s Burmese entry – is better, and one of the “must go” places in the area.  The place – like many of these treasures – is located in a nondescript strip mall off of Lee Highway.  The service is a little slow I suppose – they don’t get the orders wrong or anything – but the food more than makes up for it.

For the appetizer, we ordered lentil puffs.  These deep fried darlings were well made, without an excess of oil, and a surprising lightness.  The side sauce was a good sweet and spicy sauce.  We also ordered soup, the mohingar – the fish and noodle soup.  They served the noodles separately from the soup which was probably a poor decision – the noodles did not taste like anything.  However the soup itself had great flavor – the spice and the fish come together nicely.

The other two dishes we had though were what separates the meal really.  The salad was a delightful chickpea tofu – a Burmese specialty that I had never had before.  The salad looks like it should be mango or something.  The tofu is a unique texture, and augments the very complex salad nicely.  The meat course we got was the chili pork belly.  The wait staff warned us it would be hot – and we like the heat – but this delivered in ways I did not anticipate.  The flavor of the gravy and pork belly was of course magnificent, and the belly was perfectly cooked.  Hey, it’s pork belly!  It was also, as mentioned earlier, spicy.  It was very spicy, and the heat does not go away.  It is not so hot as to kill the tastebuds, but it is not for the faint of heart in the least.  But on the evidence of the flavor, other more benign dishes will be of high quality.

Myanmar is clearly NoVa’s best Burmese choice – and it might be the best around period.