Restaurant Week Forever!

 Saturday, February 9, 2013 – Restaurant Week Forever!

If Washington area restaurant owners were smart, they’d declare every week Restaurant Week.  Last December, I started checking daily for information about Winter 2013 Restaurant Week.  As soon as the dates were announced, I rushed to make reservations. First, I had to choose a restaurant for a lunch date with Elliott, who’s not a big fan of ethnic cuisines.  His idea of foreign food is French.  In other words, he likes food that seems familiar.  So the restaurant couldn’t be associated with any particular ethnicity, but it also had to be interesting enough to satisfy my desire for new culinary experiences.  Willow, located in the Ballston section of Arlington, seemed to fit the bill.  It is an elegant but unpretentious restaurant that serves what might be called modern American cuisine, i.e. innovative but recognizable food.  We certainly were not disappointed.  Elliott started off with a mushroom and white truffle bisque that was creamy and flavorful.  My roasted beet and goat cheese salad was a delight for the eyes as well as the palate.  

 Our happiness continued with the main courses.  Elliott satisfied his red meat craving with filet mignon Stroganoff while I enjoyed skewered salmon.  For dessert, we shared passion fruit cheesecake with raspberry sauce and brought home a package of house-made cherry chocolate oatmeal cookies.  What an inspired idea! 

For my second restaurant outing, I could be more adventurous.  Oyamel is a Mexican restaurant that has long intrigued me.  It’s part of the José Andres group, which includes several restaurants that I love, such as Zaytinya and the now-shuttered Café Atlantico.  My friend Kathy was as excited as I was when we set out for DC on a cold but sunny Saturday.  Thoughts of warm and sunny Mexico were dancing through our heads as we made our way through the windy streets.  The decor of Oyamel is a profusion of folk art and cheerful colors.  We immediately started gobbling up the still-warm tortilla chips as we pondered the possibilities on the special 4-course menu.  With so many delicious choices, it took a while to make our decisions. 

For a first course, Kathy zeroed in on the tortilla soup garnished with crispy tortilla strips, avocado, and queso fresco, and I finally settled on gazpacho-inspired salad from the historic city of Morelia.  It was a colorful sweet and sour mixture of jicama, pineapple, mango, cucumber, queso fresco, and sour orange. 
 

My second course was shrimp sautéed with shallots, arbol chiles, problano peppers, lime and sweet aged black garlic.  Kathy opted for a vegetarian dish of sautéed Brussels sprouts, arbol chiles, pumpkin seeds, peanuts and lime. 
 

Next came the taco course.  Mine had a vegetable-based filling that featured Swiss chard, potatoes, onions, tomatoes and chipotle salsa, while Kathy’s taco norteño was stuffed with shredded beef in an ancho chile and cumin sauce.  Both were wonderful and those warm house-made corn tortillas tasted a whole lot better than the low-carb ones I’ve been buying at Trader Joe’s. 
 
Finally, our dessert arrived.  We’d both ordered the sweet potato flan with Honeycrisp apple sorbet and tamarind sauce.  What a revelation of flavors and textures – pure genius.  That made two great new restaurant discoveries in a week.  More Restaurant Week, please.