Text 29714, 76 rader
Skriven 2012-09-18 21:57:06 av Michael Loo (1:261/1466.0)
Ärende: meals with Benita 264
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Two interesting meals with Benita.

The Pig is the newest enterprise of one of the fashionable
entertainment companies, I am not sure which one, I think
the one that owns Grillfish, more about that later. Benita
warned me that although I wouldn't leave hungry, I would
not be served a huge amount, either. It was Labor Day
afternoon, and I was dismayed to find that the Sunday
brunch menu was what was on offer. After a moment's thought
of escaping, I ordered what was listed as a "main" of fried
green tomatoes and rabbit confit with a side of house-made
sausage patties - after determining that the house made its
own sausage and ham but, oddly, not its own bacon, which
would have been my first choice. To drink, Pork Slap Ale,
which despite its name is a quite clean brew of no character
whatever. What came: two 1-oz slices of fried green tomatoes
in cornmeal, nowhere near so good as what I make; the grease
wilting about 1 oz of arugula underneath, the greens becoming
the best part of my rather lackluster meal. A pair of 3/4-1
oz blobs of shredded bunny meat, pleasantly seasoned but not
fatted at all. This a main course? The sausage patties were
two lonely 1-oz balls of underspiced salty pork. Portion
control is one thing; portion control leaving the customer
hungry is yet another. Benita's banh mi sandwich was twice
as big as my dish for less money. It was modernized and
urbanized, its assortment of meats not very Vietnamese and
its dressing sort of like horsey sauce or tiger sauce
rather than the normal vinaigrette. Pretty good, with a
good amount of filling and an 8" baguette so there was food
to spare, and spare she did, thank goodness. Decent food in
a retro-chic setting; the prices weren't too bad, but the
value proposition quite poor at least in my case.

Great Wall Szechwan House. Benita took me here despite the
fact that she is not heavily into hot food - she likes well-
flavored but not incendiary, which is quite sensible. We
ordered one for her, one to share, and one mostly for me.

Hot and sour soup was standard. I don't think this is the kind
of place that has the stuff delivered in 55-gallon drums, so
the guess is that there must be a standard recipe entitled
What White Folks Like in the Way of Hot and Sour Soup.

Dan dan noodles (aka dun dun mein) had some Szechuan pepper
but very little chile, so it was kind of flat. The noodles
themselves were tender if a little gummy, their sauce red and
oily as expected but with not much flavor. For some reason I
got the idea in my head that the properly scanty crumbs of
meat were not of any standard or acceptable origin - once 
I ate this dish either in Asia or its most famous outpost,
Cambridge, Mass., and it had a verifiable rodent vertebra
in it, which if the food had had the standard disclaimer of
"not so much rat in it," I would have perhaps been okay with.
Despite this neurotic flashback, I ate pretty heartily.

Twice-cooked pork belly - pretty much what I expected, but not
spicy at all (I ordered it really really hot) but rather with
an extra dose of salted black beans (dou sze, dow see). Also,
and I don't know if this was a good thing or not, the crisp-
tender cabbage triangles that I associate with the dish were
absent, not a flavor component so not a big deal.

Aside from all the flavors needing hetting up, for which the
establishment provided a mildish hot chile paste, the food
was better than acceptable but not up to the high estimations
of the Washington food community.

I opined afterwards that there wasn't a Szechwanese in the
kitchen and probably never had been. I suspect Taiwan or
Hong Kong people in the front of house and maybe Central
Americans in the kitchen.

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