Restaurant Reviews in the guise of an essay

It might surprise my readers to hear that I don’t like restaurants very much, as a general rule. They’re often expensive and pretentious, or bad, or crowded, or too trendy. In most cases, I can make a version of whatever they’re serving that’s better than theirs, or at least more suited to my tastes and for far less money. And yet, I do occasionally eat out, and it’s not always a mistake.

I’ll happily eat out, for example, when I think that the chef has a special expertise with ingredients I’m not familiar with cooking– this tends to happen with pricier French style restaurants. In this vein, I recently visited Bistro 123 in Vienna, Virginia, a decent little Parisian type restaurant that tastes much better than its strip mall location suggests at first glance. And though most of the meats are probably best avoided, the grilled boar being saved only by generous slatherings of a juniper tinged butter sauce, the kitchen does a commendable number on its sweetbreads cooked a la meuniere – that is to say, dipped in flour and fried in flavorful butter until crispy, and served simply with a lemon sauce and capers. Even if the bread I greedily mopped up the dish with wasn’t the best, and the restaurant desperately needs a more classical baker (key lime pie after a menu of escargots and sweetbreads?), this is the kind of meal I don’t mind heading out for. It’s very unlikely I’ll find sweetbreads I can trust in a supermarket, or anywhere else, and once I find them I’m not entirely sure how to clean them – hiring a chef to do the work for me seems like the best plan.

I’ll also eat authentic ethnic foods out with little guilt. To be sure, I’ve grown a little tired of normal Americanized Chinese food, which also has a tendency to be exceedingly greasy for some reason, but I still love the spectrum of flavors that cuisine relies on. A neat solution in the Virginia suburbs can be found at a real hidden gem – A&J’s restaurant in Annandale, which serves cooked to order dim sum all day. As far as I could tell, A&J make few compromises for the American palate, given the menu full of pig’s ears and beef tendon, and their cooking is better for it. And while those items are exotic, as far as Americans go, their best dishes are actually quite accessible – a stingingly spicy cucumber salad, laced with hot peppers and half cloves of garlic, was delicious for example, as were their scallion pancakes, handmade vegetable dumplings, and pan fried vegetable rolls, all of which needed just the tiniest enlivening drops of soy sauce for full effect. A&J also caters to those interested in soups – I found both the pork and radish broth and the cabbage and bean curd soup to be unexpected and diverting surprises, especially when eaten with one of the aforementioned fried doughs, or with their pungent smoked chicken and a few seasoned peanuts. With prices per plate averaging something around 3 dollars, you’re hardly likely to go broke trying everything out ; none of my visits broke 20 dollars for two.

Similar inexpensive pleasures await the hungry luncher at Amma’s Vegetarian Kitchen, also in Vienna, Virginia. Though the affable host’s English seems to only extend to the words “lentil” and “spicy”, his tiny kitchen in the back turns out really quite amazing meatless Indian food, including the absolute jewel of his menu, a giant crepe like dosa stuffed with spiced potatoes for just $4.99. In fact, the dosa is so good that it fulfills both reasons to eat out I’ve mentioned so far – none of my efforts to recreate the lentil and flour crunchiness of the Indian speciality have been very successful, and with the cooking lesson so inexpensive, I think it’s folly to turn it aside. But if you’re not up for dosa, the restaurant prepares a wide range of pulses and beans in a variety of pungent stews, pastes, and patties, all characterized by real, substantial, heat. Of those, though, my favorite was definitely the chick peas, especially when accompanied by a large round of freshly baked bread and a cup of salty yogurt lassi. Simple, yes, but also well under $10, honestly made, and delicious.

Finally, I’ll eat out when I have to. Most often, this happens at airports – I get incredibly hungry while waiting for things to happen, and with airport quality trending dramatically upwards in the past decade, these hunger pangs no longer have to be assuaged with furtively crunched bars of inferior chocolate. Ronald Reagan Airport in DC is a great example of this dramatic recent improvement. Once the province of institutional style cooking, the airport now boasts a series of quite decent restaurants at locally acceptable prices. By far the best I’ve seen so far, though, is the Legal Seafoods tucked next to the entrance to gates 35 (or so) to 45. Sure, it’s important to be skeptical of chain restaurants, , but when a chain can produce the first oyster po’boy I’ve ever had that was more about the powerful taste of shellfish then about the comforting savor of batter, I can have no objection. And when that sublimity is accompanied by some entirely respectable French fries, so rarely found in restaurants, my potential objections turn necessarily to praise. Barring a duty free shop, money and caviar, or a few boxes of European chocolate and perhaps a cognac at a Continental airport, I’m not sure you can eat much better before flying - and after all, is there anything more amusing then smiling benevolently at your fellow passengers while they desperately gnaw at their gummy meals in the plane, stuffed to the brim with quality vittles?

Of course, I’ll sometimes eat out from laziness. I’ll be tired or unimaginative. I’ll get a pizza from Pinocchio’s, just outside my front door. I’ll go fetch some sushi late at night, or perhaps a putatively Mexican style wrap filled with beans and inexpensive cheese. But usually I keep my dining out to the occasions I mention above. There’s been a certain banalization of dining out, I think, that makes home meals less exciting and restaurants less memorable, and I think it’s bad for both sides. If I can work on reversing the trend, at least in my life, that’ll be a victory for food – and it’s rules like the above that might make it happen.