The Rare Post

Maybe you’ve noticed (if there is a you; if so, thanks for reading!) that I haven’t been posting here much.  At all.  Mostly, I blame it on not eating out a ton, which seems to be a natural result of having a two-year-old.  Not that I don’t eat out, I just don’t as frequently as I used to.  And when I do eat out, it takes all of my spare time to do that, so I’m a lot less likely to write about it.  So if there’s anyone who reads this, I’m sorry.  I really do plan on posting here again—it just might be a while.

Restaurant Eve

We ate at Restaurant Eve once before, maybe two months after moving to Virginia.  It was our first fine dining experience after the move, and it had been long enough since we’d eaten at a quality restaurant that we wondered if it was really that good, or if we’d just been deprived of good food for too long.

 

Monday night we found out:

TV Wasteland

Jamie was watching some Kevin Bacon as a stockbroker-turned-bike-messenger-turned-stockbroker-again movie from the 80s when I got down from putting Jane in her crib.  Maybe watching is the wrong word—the TV was on for noise as she folded clothes.  But there’s nothing on at 1:30 on a Saturday, which may be why Kevin Bacon was on.

Fast Food Nation

Once in a blue moon I’ll eat fried fish.  Trying to eat authentic Southern food, I had fried catfish in
South Carolina a couple years ago.  I had the fish and chips at Norma’s (fried lobster and Chilean sea bass before I knew Chilean sea bass was in danger of being overfished).  And I always remember, when the fishiness and batter overwhelms what should be a light and flaky treat, and when I feel that heaviness inside my stomach, that I really don’t like fried fish.

Placeholder: Evening Star Café

It’s probably not fair to review a restaurant more than two weeks after I ate there—by now I’ve forgotten the subtleties that made it what it was.  So consider this a broad-brush painting, a placeholder until I eat there again.

Motor Supply Company Bistro

After several hours at the EdVenture Children’s Museum in Columbia, SC, we were hungry. (A side note, not relevant to food, but does an Ernst Hemingway-themed Cuban Cigar night seem like the fund-raised you’d choose for a children’s museum? Me either.) We’d played on a toddler-sized boat, gone down a slide in a giant person, played in Africa and India, milked a plastic cow, slid down a slide in the bubble-snow room, and played a keyboard and musical hopscotch. What we didn’t do was eat lunch. No wonder, around 2:00 pm, it wasn’t just the 15-month-old ready to melt down.

Archives — Trattoria Dell’Arte

Okay, so it turns out I’d only done two restaurant reviews before starting omnivorous.  Here’s the second.  (Note that, as much as we liked it at the time, we’ve since eaten at Babbo.

Archives — Gramercy Tavern

Before there was omnivorous (long before there was omnivorous), there was LapDog, my first attempt at food-, etc.-, blogging.  I thought, given the new digs, that I’d move those posts over here as archival material.  This post–“I Like Food”–was my first ever foray into the world of food writing.

Valentine’s Day on King Street

Jamie and I were going to the temple on Valentine’s Day, a too-rare treat now that we have a daughter and have to face Beltway traffic.  Roy and Michelle had celebrated a couple days earlier, and had offered to watch Jane for us.

 

And then it snowed.  Just a couple inches—New York would have barely noticed, but it was enough to make the federal government open two hours late Valentine’s Day.  And to close the temple.  So Wednesday morning I searched OpenTable.com to see if anybody had a table open for 7:00 that night.  And, wouldn’t you know it, 100 King had room.

American, French, and African

We got off to a bad start.  Not just a bad start—an I’m never going to speak to you again and hope you go down in flames start.  Seriously, I was beyond unhappy.  But, after a couple weeks without any contact, I thought I’d try again, just one more time.

Thank goodness I did.

Our story begins, as stories are wont to begin, during Restaurant Week.