The dish: Pork and cheese pupusa

The location: Sabor Carry Out, 8484 Piney Branch Road, Silver Spring, (301) 495-5755

The price: $1.55

The skinny: Several women are standing in the kitchen at Sabor Carry Out, rolling masa dough in their hands and patiently patting each ball into thin, round pancakes. Once pounded out, the rounds are carefully placed on a griddle, where they cover the entire cooking surface, their rows as straight and aligned as an Army division on review. Why so many tortillas for such a small operation? Well, for starters, they kick ass, and what’s more, everyone seems to want them—at least among the local Latin groceries, which buy thousands of them every day from Sabor. The same dough used for the tortillas goes into the eatery’s hand-made pupusas. I’ve eaten a lot of pupusas over the years in the D.C. region—that home away from home for thousands of Salvadoran expats—but these are by far the best. Unlike a lot of thick, gummy pupusas, which can leave you feeling like Diamond Jim Brady after his seventh lobster, Sabor’s revueltas pancake is patted thin as a crepe and stuffed with a fine layer of shredded pork and three cheeses, including quesillo and a Salvadoran hard white cheese comparable to Parmesan. Once grilled and brought to your table in a compact woven platter, the pupusa immediately starts working your senses. The smell of sweet corn is so intense, you can almost get high from the aroma. The taste is even better. The pupusa has both sweetness and savor; it’s so packed with flavor, you don’t even need to sprinkle it with Sabor’s celery seed-spiked slaw or drench it with watery salsa. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the area’s best pupusas come from this kitchen—and these women. The place is co-owned by Jorge Chicas, part of José Andrés’ special projects team at THINKfoodGROUP.

The Dish: Picadillo a la Criolla

The Location: Tropicana Majahual Restaurant, 8638 Flower Ave.,
Silver Spring, (301) 565-2036

The Price: $8.95

The Skinny: The woman at the bar talking on her cell phone—clearly to some faceless phone operator for a corporate behemoth—couldn’t take anymore bullshit and finally blurts out to no one in particular, “Sometimes I really fucking hate American culture.” She’s definitely in the right place to lose herself in another world. Tropicana Majahual may sit on Flower Avenue, just south of University Boulevard, but it feels as if it’s been airlifted from a dingy beach in Puerto Rico. A group of regulars are huddled at one end of the bar, ignoring the soccer match overhead in favor of their own private world of inside jokes and macho comfort. A bulky dude sits at the table across from mine, angrily pounding down as many Amstel Lights as he can while waiting on his to-go order. You wait a lot at Tropicana—for everything. For the menu. For the food. For the check. For the check to be picked up. For the change. I spend some of my time examining the mural that covers almost an entire wall: It’s a beach scene with two kids frolicking in the foreground, horses wandering in the background, and a group of folks (including a shapely woman in a thong) huddled over a red car that has inexplicably stalled at the water line. With its mix of nature, family, sex, and auto maintenance, the artwork seems more mystifying to me than anything on Tropicana’s menu, which melds Cuban, Peruvian, and other Latin cuisines. I order the picadillo a la Criolla, a Cuban Creole dish that’s supposed to come with ground beef, green peppers, onions, raisins, and green olives. Mine arrives with what looks like a pair of raisins in a tomatoey sea of ground beef, corn, peas, and diced carrots. All the complex flavors I had been expecting have been lost in this hash of savory vegetable sweetness. I frankly don’t care. Tropicana adds its own spice to whatever comes out of the kitchen; it also asks—no, demands—that you do something that no modern, type-A restaurant would: chill the fuck out. Don’t look at the clock. Don’t worry about your next appointment. Don’t stare down the waitress so she’ll bring your check faster (guilty as charged!). This is easier said than done for some modern, type-A Americans.

The Dish: New England-style lobster roll

The Location: Zola, 800 F St. NW, (202) 654-0999

The Price: $21

The Skinny: The bartender places the lobster roll before me, and I immediately laugh at the sight of this scrawny, 90-pound weakling of a sandwich. If I had ordered this from a beach-side shack in Maine, I’d be forced to kick sand in its face. The picture here distorts its size, but I’d guess the roll is the approximate length and width of a Hostess Twinkie. A hungry man could swallow it in four bites. Best I can figure, Zola’s New England-style lobster roll wouldn’t pass muster with those Bugs Bunny talkers up there, either. Instead of a classic Pepperidge Farm hot dog bun, Chef Bryan Moscatello (who now oversees both Indigo Landing and Zola in the wake of Frank Morales‘ defection to Rustico) employs a dwarfish loaf of baked bread, which he cuts into thick slices and stuffs with lobster meat mixed with aioli and diced Roma tomatoes. I have to admit that for a pint-size, two-bit twerp of a sandwich, this one’s pretty fine. The tail, knuckle, and claw meat, which Zola processes from live Maine lobsters, is poached in court bouillon, and chopped into sweet, toothsome, and creamy pieces. The problem, of course, is that the sandwich is more tease than tart. It reminds me of the line from Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, in which Everett refuses Delmar’s invitation to gobble down a rotisserie-fired varmint: “One-third of a gopher,” Everett deadpans, “would only arouse my appetite without bedding it down.”

The Dish: Hunan “fish”

The Location: Yuan Fu Vegetarian Restaurant, 798 Rockville Pike, Rockville, (301) 762-5937

The Price: $12.95

The Skinny: Right or wrong, vegetarians and vegans have a reputation for demanding that every sentient being convert to their way of eating. They, in other words, want folks to start butchering millions of innocent plants, which, after all, aren’t bothering anyone and, in fact, are enriching our lives with all that precious oxygen that we breathe into our ungrateful lungs every second of every day. Hey, just because a plant can’t scream doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel pain! Okay, I’m teasing. I actually love vegetarians and vegans for being brave enough to sacrifice many of the pleasures of eating for the sake of animal welfare and other worthy causes. What I don’t love is the culinary brainwashing that some veg-heads try to use on those of who continue to indulge our palates with the rich, sinful, we’re-going-to-hell joys of dead-animal products. I’m sorry, but soybean protein is no substitute, tastewise, for anything that used to swim, cluck, fly, or stand around in a freaking feed lot. It just isn’t. And let’s not even get into the subject of cheese alternatives, which I believe are produced by tire manufacturers in Akron. Now with that off my chest, I have to say that Yuan Fu Vegetarian Restaurant in Rockville turns out a respectable Hunan “fish” dish, which offers up generic, TV-dinner-like slabs of fake flesh molded from soybean protein and seaweed. You’re never going to mistake the mouth-feel of these soybean bars for any scaly creature caught in a trawler’s net, but the seaweed does give the dish a certain oceanic taste, and the crunchy exterior works hard to imitate a pan-fried fish (even as the sweet sauce doesn’t try hard enough to mimic the more fiery tastes of Hunan). After a few bites, you practically forget that the dish is soybeans and seaweed in fish finery, and you accept it on its own meatless terms. Which, I think, is what vegans have been trying to tell me for years.

The Dish: panna cotta

The Location: Vapiano, 1800 M St. NW, (202) 640-1868

The Price: $4.50

The Skinny: Dining at Vapiano is a little odd. The restaurant emits an almost-too-cool ambiance, but it’s also the sort of place where you can use a tray to carry your order to your table. And there’s a card-reading system that keeps track of what you’ve eaten, meaning that when you’re done, you settle up with a cashier up front. Put it all together, and it feels like you’re chowing down in a gentrified cafeteria. Pizza and pasta, both of which Vapiano offers, are caf staples. But what about panna cotta? It’s not something I recall having eaten in any cafeteria I’ve cooled my heels in. Or anywhere else, for that matter. But between its sweet strawberry-sauce topping and the not-too-sweet vanilla aftertaste, Vapiano’s smooth, creamy version made for a worthy introduction. It’s also the best thing I’ve eaten out of a jar in a good long while.

The Dish: Mac ’n’ cheese pizza

The Location: Red Dog Café, 8301-A Grubb Road, Silver Spring, (301) 588-6300

The Price: $14.95

The Skinny: A friend had suggested I try the mac-and-cheese entree at Red Dog Café in Silver Spring, a neighborhood eatery that somehow exudes both comfort and pretension in one cramped space. The pasta dish did sound attractive—giant ribbed penne instead of elbow mac and lots of sharp, aged cheddar cheese baked, as the menu promised, “to perfection.” But plenty of other plates were whispering my name, too: the pulled pork “ripieghi” sandwich, the muffuletta, the “brown pie” pizza. It’s only when I spotted the specials menu hiding on the table that I made up my mind. There, among other things, was a mac-and-cheese pizza. The waitress, making the kind of face usually seen on teenage girls fantasizing about Prince William, assured me the pie was a featured attraction at Red Dog. So why do I feel like lifting a leg on it? Because it takes two different—and apparently tasty—dishes and treats both like mangy strays. The sum, in other words, is far less than its parts. The mac turns the pie into a leaden round with the starch content of, approximately, raw tapioca, which you might forgive if the crust also hadn’t turned to mush. On the flip side, the tomato sauce and mozzarella strip the mac and cheese of its sharpness, turning it instead into a poor man’s baked ziti—a really poor man’s baked ziti. I ate two slices out of sheer hunger, boxed up the reminder out of some strange politeness that overtakes me in restaurants, then threw the box away when I got home. Next time I go to Red Dog, I’m sticking with the mac and cheese.

The Dish: Pho with brisket, flank, fat brisket, soft tendon, and bible tripe

The Location: Pho Vinh Loi Restaurant, 5811 Leesburg Pike, Falls Church, (703) 379-0988

The Price: $6.25

The Skinny: The difference between the interior of Pho Vinh Loi Restaurant and the ingredients of its main dish is sort like the difference between three-chord punk and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. This pho parlor in the Bailey’s Crossroads Shopping Center is little more than a tile floor, a counter, a handful of tables, and some old dining-hall chairs that look onto the vast, unpeopled parking lot. By contrast, the pho here—mostly beef-based with the occasional oddball chicken or seafood version—can only be described as baroque. The aromas, the flavors, and, believe it or not, the textures can be so complicated and so intense, your senses barely know where to begin. I settle on pho No. 4 mostly because it includes so many ingredients that Americans loathe (thin layers of translucent brisket fat, soft tendons, and even ivory-colored strips of bible tripe, the lining from the third compartment of a cow’s stomach) that I figure it has to be the real deal. After loading the noodle soup with mint leaves, bean sprouts, and pepper sauce, I am struck by the heady aroma of it all. When you have a good bowl of pho, it sometimes seems as if you can be satisfied with the smell alone. The version, of course, has more tangible pleasures, too: the many different mouthfeels of the proteins; the tongue-tickling, cough-inducing heat of the jalapeno slices and pepper sauce; and coolness of the thin rice noodles; the lusciousness of the fat, which flavors everything it touches. The best part, however, is the beef-based broth itself. The longer it sits there, absorbing the fat and the beef and everything else in that bowl, the more complicated it becomes, a broth redolent of earthy spices and cool fragrances. By the end of your meal, you feel like you’re sipping little spoonfuls of God’s own ambrosia.

The Dish: tibs

The Location: Expo Restaurant and Nightclub, 1928 9th St. NW, (202) 299-9800

The Price: $9.99

The Skinny: It’s far too easy to walk right past Expo Restaurant and Nightclub in the Little Ethiopia section of Shaw. The ground floor is boarded up, in anticipation of Expo’s new cafe space, and even though there’s a sign that swears the upstairs operation is still open, the invitation seems more like a dare given all the dust and city permits everywhere. After ascending the stairs, though, I’m surprised to find Expo hopping at two in the afternoon. The narrow space is dotted with narrow two-tops, and most of the tables are occupied with men huddled over platters of wat stews or plates of pasta. Expo’s menu goes far beyond standard Ethiopian fare—or even pasta dishes, those ugly reminders of when Italian fascism ruled the country—to include such oddities as wraps. I ask the waitress for help, and she gladly walks me through the kitchen’s best offerings. I settle on a generic platter of tibs, which the waitress says she’ll make extra hot since that’s my preference. When my lunch finally arrives—it takes so long that the server brings me a free plate of salad and crunchy bread—I’m delighted by Expo’s approach to heat. The sauce is at first tart and acidic—no doubt from the diced tomatoes—and the burn only hits you on the back end, after you’ve swallowed. The caramelized onions add another level of complexity, both sweetness and aroma, to the expertly saut�ed tibs, each chunk satisfyingly meaty and firm. It’s easy to understand why folks seek out the place, even if it feels like you have to walk through a construction site to get there.

The Dish: seafood soup

The Location: El Tamarindo, 1785 Florida Ave. NW, (202) 328-3660

The Price: $10.95 (according to the restaurant, price will rise to $12.95 next month)

The Skinny: Think of El Tamarindo’s sopa de mariscos as a brothborne seafood sampler pack. If you don’t want to choose between crab, fish, mussels, or shrimp, this mixture served up by the Adams Morgan stalwart means you don’t have to. Granted, those ingredients (and veggies like pieces of green peppers) don’t always complement each other exactly. It is, after all, difficult to get, say, a shrimp and a mussel on the same spoonful, and fishing out and eating the seafood was a challenge my table manners weren’t always adequate to. But that’s a price worth paying for a little variety. The dish’s overall heartiness may make it a better choice for a miserable winter night than a warm summer day, but messiness and all, the soup works fine when you know you want some seafood, but you can’t quite narrow down your preferences.

The Dish: BBQ pork panini

The Location: EatBar, 2761 Washington Blvd., Arlington, 703-778-9951

The Price: $10

The Skinny: Chef Nathan Anda has a smoker set up in an enclosed space just outside EatBar, but he doesn’t use it for his pulled-pork panini. Why? Apparently in that tight space, the damn thing runs too hot because Anda can’t harness the winds to control temperature, leaving the pork too charred or too dry. Instead, the chef cooks his pork in duck fat, pulls it apart, and mixes it with a barbecue sauce spiked with bacon, which provides the only hint of smoke in the entire sandwich. Sure, purists might scoff at a chef who dares to call pork confit “barbecue.” I would have, too, but then I sampled the dish. The meat is tender and rich, and it’s topped with a red cabbage cole slaw just barely dressed with an apple-cider-laced aioli. The sauce is tart, and the panini bread is thin, crisp, and oh-so-toothsome. This may not be any barbecue sandwich recognizable to Carolinians or Texans­—hell, it’s not even really barbecue­—but it’s a smart, city-savvy interpretation of ’cue. And it tastes a lot better than much of the real stuff for sale in these parts.

The Dish: Kapow pu krob

The Location: Bua Thai, 1635 P St. NW, (202) 265-0828.

The Price: $9.95

The Skinny: The menu at this comfy Thai operation off Dupont Circle is advertising a soft-shell crab special, which I would just normally assume means the blue-crab variety. But for some reason, I decide to ask the waiter where Bua Thai gets its crabs, and he says California. The massive creature sprawled across my colorful plate would seem to confirm that this is no undersized Chesapeake jimmy­—not that I could tell the difference just by tasting the shellfish. The golden, tempura-dipped crab has been not only fried but also covered in a chili-garlic sauce that’s topped with sliced peppers and crispy basil leaves. The composition is exquisite; the sugar-laced soy sauce perfectly balances out the fire of the peppers and the sauce. Even better, the fried basil adds a layer of aromatics over the top of everything, including the jasmine rice. But when I get back to the office, I can’t stop thinking about those California crabs. I call the restaurant to ask if they’re Dungeness or some other kind of crab; a manager can’t say for sure since the kitchen already threw away the boxes. Whatever they are, wherever they come from, those crabs are delicious. They’re also available for the next month only.

The Dish: Petite house-made hot dog and half-smoke

The Location: PS 7’s, 777 I St. NW, (202) 742-8550.

The Price: $10

The Skinny: As I was conducting research for my column on M’Dawg Haute Dogs, a number of folks had made false assumptions about the Adams Morgan eatery, namely that its mission was to serve house-made links and/or regional dogs. A fast-food joint serving house-made sausages would be utter folly, I thought; it would put the price of a lowly link on par with the house-made one at Palena Cafe. That’s no longer fast food. So when I heard that chef Peter Smith was going to start selling a pair of house-made links for $10 on the side patio at PS 7’s, I was intrigued. That’s $5 a pop, right in line with the links at M’Dawg. Well, I got two surprises when I turned up this week at the Chinatown temple of molecular gastronomy: First, the patio was closed because of a threat of a thunderstorm. Second, the links are actually these cute little torpedoes, no bigger than a butcher’s swollen index finger. Both sausages are 100 percent beef, loosely ground and stuffed into natural casings, then grilled and tucked into pastry chef Naomi Gallego’s teeny house-made buns. They drip delicious orange-tinted juices as if they were burgers, not dogs. That would be selling point enough, but Smith tries to take it one step further by creating his own version of the D.C. half-smoke. He mixes the succulent beef with chili flakes and then smokes the sausage with cherry wood in a baby smoker in the kitchen. The dog, while spicy, doesn’t have the heat of a true half-smoke. But, really, what do you expect? PS 7’s is not exactly Ben’s Chili Bowl. Smith clearly knows his audience–­and his dogs.

The Dish: baklava

The Location:Astor Mediterranean, 1829 Columbia Road NW, (202) 745-7495

The Price: $2.50

The Skinny: Astor’s version of the classic dessert hits plenty of grace notes. Arrayed on a fork, a slice starts to look a bit like one of those cross-sections of the Earth you might see in a geology textbook. The upper layers are appropriately flaky and light, and the sweet, comparatively dense filling doesn’t skimp on pistachios and walnuts. Flakiness and all, the whole thing holds together pretty well, and at $2.50, it’s a great quick indulgence in Adams Morgan—especially if you take advantage of Astor’s sidewalk seating or its aptitude for take-out. Best of all, its sweet honey aftertaste tends to linger for a while.

The Dish: beef and mac

The Location: Breakwell’s Coffeehouse and Cafe, 900 M Street NW, (202) 289-4601.

The Price: $6.95

The Skinny: The “beef and mac” dish at Breakwell’s, a subterranean cafe across the street from the Convention Center, sounds like home cooking to me, the sort of thing your mom would throw together quickly to feed a hungry clan of tow-headed mouth-breathers. But the tangerine-toned Breakwell’s doesn’t look like any house I remember—the Sirius hookup blows classic jazz; heady hardbacks and pulpy paperbacks are flopped all over the place, on shelves, windowsills, and tables; paintings are available for sale on just about every available wall space. Despite the post-hippie Berkeley vibe of the place, the beef and mac turns out to be every bit as homey as I thought it would, down to the fact that the pre-made pasta wasn’t reheated all the way through. Once zapped a second time in the microwave, the piping hot squares of elbow macaroni and ground beef–more lasagna than mac-and-cheese with meat—remind me of the meals of my youth. The red sauce is slightly sweet, the pasta toothsome, and the mozzarella layer salty and translucent. The flavor of bell peppers dominates every bite. Who among us hasn’t sat around a dining-room table shoveling down heaping forkfuls of this kind of quasi-Italian-American cooking? Sometimes I think good eating can be as much psychological and physiological; a memory recalled can be as tasty as a flavor savored.

The Location: Bar Pilar, 1833 14th St. NW, (202) 265-1751

The Price: $4

The Skinny: Barton Seaver’s exit from Café Saint-Ex and Bar Pilar actually knocked out two main support pillars at these sister restaurants on 14th Street NW. How so? Because the chef lured his top assistant Joshua Whigham, formerly the guiding light at Bar Pilar, to help him open Hook in Georgetown. Billy Klein, the chef de cuisine under Seaver, has since moved into the top toque position at Saint-Ex, but Pilar, the moody tapas tavern named after Hemingway’s boat, remained rudderless until early April, when principal owner Mike Benson hired Justin Bittner as chef. Fresh from a stint at the respected Elkridge Furnace Inn in Howard County, Maryland, Bittner is still developing his sea legs if several of his new dishes are any indication, notably an underseasoned small plate of wild morels and pappardelle, which tastes mostly of oil and water.

Until Bittner gets the kitchen shipshape, it’s probably best to stick with the reliable delights of pastry chef Lizzy Evelyn. Her frozen agave parfait really caught my attention—partly, as it turns out, for the wrong reasons. The dessert brought to our table had two layers, as if it were an interpretation of that bastardized confection known as American parfait. When I brought this fact to Evelyn’s attention during a phone chat, she almost gasped. The dessert, she says, is supposed to be a classic French-style parfait, a smooth, almost ethereal custard built from a heated syrup of tequila and agave nectar that’s mixed with egg yolks and then folded into whipped organic cream. My parfait apparently had been sitting too long outside the freezer and had started to separate. Truth be told, it didn’t matter a bit. The agave nectar, it seems, acts more as sweetener than flavoring agent; there’s an ever-so-slight smokiness, but that’s perhaps due to the tequila. The dessert’s main feature is this fleeting, impressionistic creaminess. Just when it hits your tongue, it’s gone, leaving you with this sweet, warm feeling that you’re hard-pressed to fully explain.