Text 15004, 231 rader
Skriven 2007-05-04 10:24:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: meals 455
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A few amusing if not amazing meals with my father.
Normandie Farms with him and my brother.
I know that this place has gotten a pretty bad rap of late,
along with other haunts like the Old Angler Inn, but it is
one of the few remaining places where I used to go with the
old man when I was a kid forty to fifty years ago (someday
I'll take him to the Olney Inn and the place at Comus as
well). The food is actually much better than the recent
reputation, though not so good as the antique reputation.
It's now run by Indian people, which is not an altogether
bad thing.
We're treated deferentially here (age has its rewards, and
the old man is 89, and I'm 55), and they keep the fireplace
cranked up well past the season (my father is always cold),
and, as I said, the food is okay. Oh, it's an OpenTable
restaurant, so I get essentially a buck off each time we go.
My father ordered oysters Rockefeller followed by soft-
shelled crabs. The starter was pretty good (I had a taste),
and the main course was odd but very generous - the crabs
were smothered in a peculiar topping of pine nuts, minced
tomato, bacon, and parsley: not bad tasting, but not doing
the crabs much good, either. As he's ancient and weighs
just 100 lb, he got kind of full and gave me half a crab,
which I ate senza bacon and pine nuts and junk like that. It
was fresh but cooked at too low a temperature, so the shell
part was a little chewy.
I'd warned Jonathan that we were going out to lunch the next
day, so he forwent the appetizer and just had rainbow trout
topped with some crab concoction. I can't report on how this
was, as although he will accept tastes offered by others, he
generally will not without prompting offer tastes of his own
food.
I had oysters on the half shell (though no sweetie to
practice on) followed by shad roe. The oysters were wretched
- I'm not sure why, but they had been rinsed and tasted like
slimy blobs of nothing. The shad roe made up for that - I
got an enormous pair that must have come from a 10-lb fish.
The roe was topped with bacon, which was fine, and anchovy
butter, which was one of the stupidest combinations I've
encountered in recent years. I scraped off most of it. I'd
asked for the shad roe medium rare, and it came as ordered.
The (Indian) waiter checked to make sure, good for him.
Jonathan had some kind of dessert that I can't report on;
my father and I split a dish of pistachio gelato that was
pretty nice.
As my father seldom drinks and my brother is the permanent
designated driver, I just had two glasses of Mark West
Chardonnay, which is well but not over oaked, good berry
flavors, good long lemon-blackberry finish. I like Mark
West wines for the price.
Surprisingly, my father, mellowed with age, pulled out
his AmEx card and paid for dinner.
==
Next day, Trapeze with him and my brother and my sweetie.
The deal is that Jonathan, who loves to drive, takes me to
a suitable meeting point, where we meet Carol, have a meal
together, and I go home. The Olney/Burtonsville/Fulton
area is sort of halfway, and there are two fairly nice
restaurants that we go to to do the handoff. One is the
oZ Chophouse, the other is Trapeze across the road, which
looks pretty similar and which I guess is related somehow.
The former is a meat place, the latter a fish place. We
didn't go to oZ this day, as it serves brunch on Sunday,
and we didn't feel like brunch.
Here too the staff are deferential (I care not for myself,
but it is good that they are not impatient to the ancient).
My father had cream of crab soup (he said it was decent)
followed by the fried oyster plate, listed under appetizers.
This was four very big oysters, fried nicely, served over a
bed of dry fried leek slivers. Excellent. Jonathan's fish
and chips were nice tilapia, a big serving, in a puffy batter;
somewhat seasoned chips; coleslaw, which he substituted the
veg of the day, steamed asparagus. Carol, who likes fish,
went against the tide and had a French dip - a biggish
roast beef sandwich topped with American Swiss and sided by
a cup of "jus" that wasn't oversalty or from a package: also
good. I ordered the crabcake sandwich senza bread - this
was a tiny cake of decent meat bound with a discreet amount
of filler and seasoned with an insane mishmash of celery
seed, nutmeg, and lots of white pepper; for me the side was
housemade potato chips. An okay meal and one that left room
for dessert. Father got the chocolate mousse in a tube -
decent dark mousse and okay white mousse, served in a tube
the size of a cannolo shell made of decent chocolate. Carol
and I split the creme brulee - decent but sided with a nice
melange of fresh berries. Carol told the waiter that I liked
blue food, so he brought a side of blue sauce (supposedly
lychee, but it tasted like raspberry Jell-O). My brother,
being the contrarian always (maybe he learned this from me),
had a second serving of fish and chips for dessert; he
reported that this incarnation had a doughier crust.
Amazingly, my father, mellowed with age, pulled out his AmEx
card and paid for dinner yet again.
But the best part was riding home in the Miata with my
sweetie and the top down.
==
A week or two later, Persimmon, Bethesda, with all of the
above + uncle SY
An interesting pre-meal story. Uncle SY had called Carol,
sounding out whether she'd be around for Saturday dinner.
Apparently he was planning a surprise birthday for me
(ten days early). As I don't like birthdays or surprises
(either good or bad), Carol decided to file off the rough
edges and give me a heads-up on this. Then SY gave me
another heads-up, rendering the surprise completely
unsurpriseful.
As it turns out, Jonathan and my father, having previously
agreed to time, date, location, and purpose, forgot all about
the event, and I was put in the interesting position of
lobbying for a party that I wasn't that enthusiastic about
and that I wasn't supposed to know about in the first place.
The most surprising thing was that the diners were the usual
set of suspects, with none of the neighbors or any of my
other friends, including the ones I was almost certain were
going to be there, in attendance. An appropriate evening
for a bunch of phobics.
It was a perfectly fine meal, once we got there.
The room is pleasant, and though our table was right near
the entrance to the work area, it was reasonably quiet.
Service was good.
You start off with pretty good baguette with quite good pate
instead of butter (I think they should give both). Free
water (not a given these days).
The menu is well thought out, with a fair amount of variety
despite being relatively short.
SY ordered the arugula salad with shaved dry ricotta, which
he enjoyed very much, followed by Atlantic bouillabaisse,
a riff on the classic stew but with salmon, rockfish, and
cod for the finfish; it looked a bit suspect to me, but he
managed to polish off the sizable serving.
Carol had a Caesar (pretty classic with a pleasant surprise
garnish of a Parmesan wafer) and the crab cakes, which were
just average.
Both my father and brother started with an atypical choice -
chickpea and roasted garlic soup with tasso ratatouille;
this received approbation despite that my brother eats
chickpeas only because he thinks they're healthful and that
he's never before willingly eaten anything with eggplant.
The "tasso ratatouille" turned out to be a teaspoon or so of
reddish blob in a plate of khaki soup.
Jonathan continued with the filet medium-rare, which was a good
portion of excellent meat: I got a slice, which he pointed
out was a large slice, so I gave up two slices of my modest
serving of duck in return.
My father had the steamed mussels appetizer as his main
course; this turned out to be more than he could eat, so I
helped with a half dozen or so; they were fresh and pretty
good, the sauce creamy but not very concentrated, and some
of the mussels still possessed of their beards.
The short rib appetizer with parsnip puree is justly
acclaimed, the meat braised then crisped, so the surface
offers a delightful resistance before the unctuousness of
the interior; the parsnip puree was enriched suitably with
butter and cream. A promised truffle demi was good enough
for me to want to mop up with my finger, although it didn't
taste very truffly.
The Robinson Merlot 02 (South Africa) was a little dusky
tasting but had good spice and cherries and went well with
the beef; I carried it over to my next course as well.
This was duck magret ordered rare and served with a duck-
confit-sweet-potato hash: the magret was somewhat tough
despite its rareness; robust enough, though, to fool my
brother into thinking it tasted like beef (it didn't).
The hash, quite a pleasant sweet-winy-salty contrast, was
just part of an assemblage that included a latke-like
juicecatcher (reviews claim this to be a celery-root cake,
but any celery root in it escaped me) and a small mound of
perfectly sauteed spinach. The Merlot was good with the
duck but wretched with the rest, so I altered my eating
order to compensate.
Pierre Sparr Gewurztraminer 05 was nice and fruity but
balanced way toward the sweet end of the sweet-acid
continuum. It went fine with the crab cakes and the sweet
potato hash, and I didn't ask how it went with the
bouillabaisse (but SY is not a fussy drinker).
An assortment of sorbets and ice creams completed the meal,
but instead I had a tasting of Eisweins, which came in the
wrong order, but that was easily sorted out:
1. Serringer Riesling 04 - fruit cocktail - pears and
peaches in syrup, not very complex
2. Joseph Phelps Eisrebe 05 - pretty decent: citrus and
stone fruits, apparent botrytis, which of course isn't
standard, in fact quite surprising for a cryoextracted
wine; quite syrupy sweet of course
3. Cave Springs Riesling 04 - pineapple estery; rather
acidic; off flavor I thought (WS gives it 90, I'd say 85).
The very best part of the evening was getting taken home by
Carol in the Miata with the top down.
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