The Dish: quinotto

The Location: Las Canteras, 2307 18th St. NW, (202) 265-1780

The Price: $11

The Skinny: The music seeping into my ears at Las Canteras is no doubt supposed to be the aural equivalent of movie extras: It fills dead space, but you’re not supposed to pay it any mind. Yet I can’t stop grinding my teeth as one sappy pop instrumental follows another: a toothless version of “The Sounds of Silence” one minute, a bloodless rendition of the Eagles’ “I Can’t Tell You Why” the next. I’m trapped in hell, and it tastes like Peru. My nice-guy waiter, a native of the South American country, is similarly all rounded edges. He apologies for suggesting the lomo saltado after I reject the entree and order the quinotto instead. On first taste, chef Eddy Ancasi’s quinoa dish may seem a little milquetoast, too, but I suspect that’s on purpose. Unlike many rice-based risottos, made overly salty with chicken stocks and the like, Ancasi’s quinoa version goes easy on the sodium chloride. In fact, when I ask the waiter what kind of stock Ancasi uses, he returns with the answer straight from the chef: none. Ancasi apparently boils the quinoa in water until tender, then mixes in a heated mixture of diced red onions, garlic, mushrooms, milk, and parmesan cheese. His approach allows the subtle, nutty flavor of the ivory-colored quinoa—the “mother of all grains” in Ancasi’s native Peru—to take center stage. Even more impressive is the dish’s balance: Each ingredient plays its part—the creaminess of the milk and cheese, the sweet pungency of the onions, the earthiness of the mushrooms—without any one dominating the other. It’s the kind of balance you crave when the background music has you out of sorts.

The Dish: kabob burger

The Location: Hungry Tiger, 4624 Wisconsin Ave. NW, (202) 244-0909

The Price: $7.95

The Skinny: The logo for Hungry Tiger features a big cat doing its best Bobby De Niro stare. The beast licks his lips while holding a fork in one paw and a knife in another. A bib hangs from the animal’s neck. The sign doesn’t exactly say, “Eat here.” More like, “Dude, you look like tiger food to me.” Owner Ali Eshghi says there’s no symbolism behind the tiger or the logo; it’s just the brainchild of his partner’s son. The Iranian-born Eshghi used to own Murasaki, the Japanese restaurant just up the street, but now he’s back on more familiar turf with Hungry Tiger, which opened in March and serves up a kabob-heavy menu. Still, Eshghi’s no fool. He knows Americans love their burgers, and his casual eatery, with the tiger-striped walls, offers its own version. Chef Nima Jaberizadeh’s sandwich is really a burger in name only. Unlike the real thing, you can’t order it rare or medium-rare; the onion-laced kabob meat comes, as always, well done, which arguably is a crappy way to treat 100 percent Angus sirloin. The gyro-like concoction proves to be a monstrous bite, almost untamable by human hands. The pock-marked flatbread, a small landmass of dough baked in a blazing-hot tandoor, engulfs the ingredients, not unlike a masala dosa swamps its potato filling. Even trickier, the flatbread goes from soft and spongy to matzo-crunchy in minutes flat, so you have to eat this thing fast before it starts to crumble. Which is not a problem. Just apply the green-pepper-puree condiment to your desired heat level, and you’re ready to rip. The heat helps to cut through the grassy taste of all that chopped parsley, not to mention the crackerlike quality of the flatbread coffin. It also mixes well with the juicy, savory kabob patty, quickly turning me into one ravenous animal.

The Dish: chicken-and-steak combo sandwich

The Price: $5.50 on the in-store menu; $5.75 (including tax) on my receipt.

The Location: El Pollo Sabroso, 3153 Mount Pleasant St. NW. (202) 299-0374

The Skinny: Chicken or steak? For those without a strict preference, it’s a tough call. But any gastronomical committmentphobe searching for an enabler should check out a two-in-one sandwich offered up by Mount Pleasant’s El Pollo Sabroso. For under $6, you can pick up an amply stuffed sandwich filled with both. Sure, the sandwich features a built-in comfort to anyone concerned about nutrition, thanks to an ample array of veggies that includes lettuce, mushrooms, peppers, and olives. (Since it all can easily tumble out the sandwich, the plastic fork that accompanied my order came in handy.) But, really, the combo is all about flesh. And in that department, there’s a surprise: Given El Pollo Sabroso’s titular devotion to fowl, it’s surprising that the sandwich’s chicken—while tasty—is trumped by the just-about-right saltiness of the steak.

The Dish: koshari

The Location: Cairo Café and Restaurant, 6244 Little River Turnpike, Alexandria, (703) 750-3551.

The Price: $6.50

The Skinny: Fatma Nassef sits alone at a table in the far back of the Cairo Café and Restaurant in Alexandria. She’s staring at a large TV tucked into an even larger entertainment center dotted with miniature Egyptian statuary. Nassef pulls herself away from Egypt’s version of the Oscars to answer a few questions and suggest I try the koshari, a lentils-pasta-rice plate smothered in spicy tomato sauce. It’s a traditional dish found throughout Egyptian society, from homes to street vendors to restaurants. I’m hesitant to order it, though, because it sounds like the culinary equivalent of heavy starch on an Oxford shirt. The pale-yellow plate of rice, lentils, spaghetti strands, and elbow macaroni that Nassef sets before me doesn’t do much to change my mind, but two forkfuls into it and I’m sold. Much like a mixed-greens salad might play mint off basil off arugula, koshari allows you to savor the many different expressions of this broad food group: the earthiness of brown rice, the meatiness of lentils, the chewiness of elbow mac, the eggy-ness of both pastas. Even better, the whole mass is paired with a bowl of fiery tomato sauce swimming with red pepper flakes. You can adjust the heat levels by ladling on more sauce. Nassef suggests you go easy with the spoonings, and I concur—unless, of course, you actually enjoy a bad case of the heat coughs.

The Dish: Yellow mole over chicken with masa dumplings

The Location: Casa Oaxaca, 2106 18th St. NW, (202) 387-2272

The Price: $17

The Skinny: When the waiter brings my main course to the table, I toy with the idea of temporarily changing the name of this blog feature to Half Plate, since the dish looks like an antojito that’s been prematurely promoted to entrée status and slapped with a $17 price tag. Granted, the server warned me—after I had already ordered the mole—that the kitchen couldn’t deliver on the accompanying masa dumplings advertised on the menu because they were out of the corn flour. No biggie, I figured; I’d be satisfied with the chicken-breast meat covered in yellow mole. I didn’t realize my kekas appetizer would make the entrée look like a plate of smothered scraps. Once the dish arrived, I took a deep breath and tried to remember that Casa Oaxaca, the recently opened project from Guajillo owners Rolando Juarez and Karen Barroso, was bound to have problems. My frustrations with the place evaporated as soon as I took the first bite of the mole: It was spectacular, a complex, orange-tinted sauce front-loaded with the subtlest hint of sweetness and finishing with a pleasant, pulsating heat. The shredded breast meat was moist and studded with toasted sesame seeds that added just the right bit of crunchiness. I could have consumed three times the amount provided. Still, I was perplexed: What ingredient was supplying the sweetness? The waitress I stopped offered no help; she seemed surprised that I even suggested the sauce was sweet. Chef Alfio Blangiardo cleared up the matter when he stopped by the table: It’s yellow corn that adds a touch of natural sweetness to the sauce, which also includes seven different peppers, tomato, a number of seeds, and peanuts. They make the stuff from scratch at Casa Oaxaca, and I’d be willing to say it’s worth the price—but only if they have the masa dumplings to help soak up every last drop of that delicious sauce.

The Dish: BLT with truffled frites

The Location: Poste Moderne Brasserie, 555 8th Street NW, (202) 783-6060

The Price: $12

The Skinny: It’s 4:15 on a Tuesday, and I’m caught in that annoying, no man’s land of D.C. dining—the period between lunch and dinner, when just about every restaurant of note regroups for the supper crowd. After getting turned away at IndeBleu, which doesn’t open for dinner until 5 p.m., I walk over to the bar at Poste Moderne Brasserie, which serves up a tidy menu of well-conceived American classics. I order the BLT ($12) and the truffled frites, which are available a la carte for $8. The bartender says that the sandwich already comes with fries, but that he’d be happy to substitute the truffled frites for the regular ones. I’m expecting to pay for the fungal-scented fries since truffles don’t exactly grow on trees. (Well, OK, they grow underground near trees, but you get my drift.) The BLT is precisely what you’d expect from Chef Robert Weland: faithful to the sandwich’s simple tradition but built from ingredients that smack of taste, in both senses of the word. The BLT starts with two slices of slightly over-grilled rustic bread studded with sunflower seeds; the kitchen slathers the toast with a spicy mayo, sprinkles on some arugula, and tops it with thick meaty tomato slices and strips of Nueske applewood-smoked bacon. The flavors are more subtle than a classic diner BLT, mostly because the bacon is lean and the mealy tomatoes are not yet at their summer prime. The sandwich seems to ask that you enjoy its finer pleasures—the smokiness of the bacon, the texture of the toast, the juiciness of the tomatoes—until just a few moments after you swallow. That’s when the heat kicks in. It’s not a scorching burn, but a noticeable pungency that proves to be the sandwich’s charm. Almost as charming: The bartender didn’t charge me for the pricy frites that are tossed in white truffle oil, which tends to dampen the fried spuds’ crunch but amps up the flavor.

The Dish: Great American cheeseburger

The Location: Old Dominion Brewhouse, 1219 9th Street NW, (202) 289-8158.

The Price: $8.99

The Skinny: Everywhere I turn at the Old Dominion Brewhouse, an elegantly cheesy pub tucked into an armpit of the Washington Convention Center, someone is opining about something. But the only person whose opinion I care about right now is Andrew, my server. He’s a warm breeze compared to all the windy blowholes spouting their thoughts on every sports subject under the sun, on one of the many TVs that keeping sucking my attention away from my reading material. Sometimes I really hate the black-hole vacuum of TVs in restaurants and bars. Andrew serves as an anchor, though, preventing me from floating away into the speculative, drama-addicted world of sports TV. He’s happy to talk about the beer on tap, how the sale of the Old Dominion Brewery to a company partially owned by Anheuser-Busch might affect the pub (not at all, he thinks), and the relative merits of the dishes on this eager-to-please, lapdog of a menu. He steers me away from the chili—too tart, he believes—and toward the “Great American cheeseburger,” which he says is a rectangular patty tucked into a toasted submarine roll. Thinking back to the pleasures of my first, savory bite into a square Wendy’s burger all those years ago, I take Andrew’s advice. The sandwich lives up to its patriotic billing, at least in my mind. The grill marks and char on the two rectangles of ground beef—which combine to form my foot-long cheeseburger—remind me of the family backyard “barbecues” of my youth. The mouth feel on this burger, each patty tightly blanketed in American cheese, is thick and lush. The fat unctuous. The roll crusty. The meat seasoned and juicy. I don’t even mind that the patties are cooked differently, one a perfect medium-rare red and the other a pinkish, grayish medium. This, too, takes me back—to when Dad, a beer in hand, would fall asleep at the grill.

The Dish: Fried green tomatoes

The Location: Overwood, 220 N. Lee St., Alexandria, (703) 535-3340

The Price: $6.95

The Skinny: Executive chef B. “Rami” Errami hails from Morocco. He’s studied at the Culinary Institute of America, cooked in Belgium and other spots overseas, and has led the kitchen at Faccia Luna in Clarendon for years. So what the hell is he doing cooking up a Southern staple like fried green tomatoes at Overwood, the latest restaurant from the folks who brought us the Boulevard Woodgrill and Faccia Luna? Who knows, but if his tower of toothsome, golden-fried green tomatoes was any richer, it’d need to start its own charitable foundation. Errami begins with four very green (read: unripe and meaty) green tomato slices. He dips them in a coarse batter, fries ‘em, sandwiches the crispy slices between thick layers of aged Vermont cheddar studded with Spanish piquillo peppers, places the entire leaning tower of tomatoes on a white plane flooded with jalapeno aioli, tops the architectural wonder with a tempura-fried Gulf shrimp, and then drizzles the entire concoction with balsamic vinegar. A clash of cultures never tasted so good; the dish balances tartness with creaminess and heat with enough fat to suffocate any raging fire. The balsamic vinegar lends the appetizer just the right touch of acidic sweetness to tie all the flavors together. And if you can’t find something in that neat tangle of ingredients to satisfy your pampered palate, then perhaps the tempura shrimp will do the trick. It is among the best fried crustaceans I’ve ever eaten—crispy, nutty, firm, and fleshy. It’s a garnish with serious ambition. Perhaps ambition enough to be an entree of its own one day.

The Dish: A sweet to be named later

The Location: Flip It Bakery & Deli, 4532 Georgia Ave. NW, (202) 291-3605

The Price: $.98

The Skinny: Flip It Bakery & Deli is more the former than the latter. The glass display cases inside this sunny, electric-yellow operation are stuffed with Roberto Rodriguez’s sweets: donuts, frosted Mexican breads, miniature cupcakes, Salvadoran turnovers, plain old cookies, and a number of meticulously made cakes, including a tiramisu dusted with chocolate that looks good enough to eat for breakfast. But on this morning stopover, I opt for a treat that Rodriguez just debuted on Wednesday. It has no official name, but I’m dazzled by its Georgia O’Keeffe–like imagery. Rodriguez’s creation borrows from both art and pastry-making. His small round of baked cake batter, which rises into a honeycomb-like consistency, is enrobed in chocolate and finely chopped peanuts then sliced down the middle and injected with a Dairy Queen–like swirl of custard. It gives off the appearance of a flower breaking through soil. It tastes something like an éclair, only crunchier and more cakelike. It’s best to buy this treat while it’s still warm; grab it too late in the morning, and the airy cake will lose moisture. Still, if this is a sign of Rodriguez’s creativity, then I plan to make a lot more stops at this sweet newcomer in Petworth.

The Dish: Hudson Valley duck leg confit

The Location: Rustico, 827 Slaters Lane, Alexandria, (703) 224-5051

The Price: $15

The Skinny: A ruddy-face man has just ordered a flight of beers on the patio at Rustico as the late-afternoon sun fights with a March wind to provide the proper outdoor quaffing climate. Unfortunately, another customer’s old hounds—two fleshy beasts with either a nose for beer or attention—won’t leave the poor guy alone. Between pets and other arm movements to keep the pooches from knocking over his tray of brews, the man barely has a moment to hoist a glass. Meanwhile, inside the bar, I keep turning my attention from the man outside to the college basketball game on the TV screens over the counter. Texas and Kansas are locked in a terrific overtime game. For this classic Sunday afternoon, I have ordered the classic bar food: duck confit. Do I hear you giggling? Perhaps you think Frank Morales has overstepped his mandate in trying to inject a little class into the suds-drenched fare at Rustico? Well, I say the former Zola chef is onto something here: This dish has all the fat requirements of your basic burger and far more flavor, thanks to those producers at Hudson Valley, who turn out one tasty duck. Morales slow cooks that well-seasoned leg until most of the fat is rendered and the meat falls apart at the slightest application of a fork; this richness helps cut a signature Morales flavoring agent—a touch of honey, sourwood in this case, not to mention a scorched, caramelized clementine and a couple of deflated sweet peppers, which add their heady juices to the mixture, not unlike certain sweet-and-piquant condiments you might find in a pub. All these ingredients combine for a meaty, multilayered meal that makes for a fine alternative to the bar burger. In some weird way, it even reminds me of a bar burger. It’s a good thing those hounds are outside, or I’d never keep them away from this delicious dish.

The Dish: A Good Cold Sandwich

The Location: Roy’s Place, 2 E. Diamond Avenue, Gaithersburg, (301) 948-5548

The Price: $1.235 (rounded down to $1.23 on the check)

The Skinny: My server nods and smiles when I ask about ordering the seventh item on the roughly 200-item-long menu at Roy’s Place. But when another server brings it out a short time later, the “Good Cold Sandwich” comes as a surprise. Based on the menu description, “Two stale heels of bread enclosing a freshly-made ice cube,” I was expecting a something unpleasant but manageable: An ice cube fitted snugly between two small pieces of bread. What I get is a grid of about 27 ice cubes that burst out of a hero-sized loaf. What, I wonder, have I gotten myself into?

According to 85-year-old Roy’s Place founder Roy Passin the unique sandwich is at least 30 years old. It came about simply because he “had two pieces of bread and some ice cubes,” he says, though when reminded twice he gives credence to a story reported elsewhere that says the “Good Cold Sandwich” began as a response to a drunken patron who requested, well, “a good cold sandwich.” Whatever the dish’s beginnings, I’m at a loss for how to finish it. I pick at the bread. Definitely not fresh, but not quite what I would call stale. With a knife and fork, I take a futile stab at the ice-cube grid. I pick up the whole thing up and bite off a part of the front, right-hand cube. I work on the more straitlaced dish I’ve ordered—The Eddy Burger (#149), a conventional burger with swiss cheese and the restaurant’s golden sauce. Thinking on the cold sandwich, I contemplate using the classic D.C. snow-removal strategy on it (let it melt), but the bread just gets more and more soggy. Eventually I break off another cube and pop it in my mouth. I’m overwhelmed by coldness, and for a few unpleasant moments I suck and chew it into submission. Two down, about two dozen to go. Passin calls the creation “a joke thing for customers,” though “not a red-hot seller.” No surprise: it’s difficult and, for all but the most masochistic, no fun to eat. It’s still the best ice-cube sandwich I’ve ever tried.

The Dish: trout filet with two sides

The Location: The Majestic by Gwen Restaurant and Lounge, 1368 H St. NE, (202) 388-1204

The Price: $7.15

The Skinny: The guy in the black suit and blazing-red shirt, unbuttoned around the collar, is toting speakers and other equipment onto the corner stage at the Majestic by Gwen, one of the few legit sit-down restaurants on H Street NE. I assume he’s with the band, but a few minutes later, his partner asks me if I’m going to stick around for karaoke. “I wish, but I have to head out soon,” I say, and both statements are true. I love listening to folks butcher pop songs, and I do have to leave. But before the karaoke begins, the promoters pop in some vintage tunes; Bonnie Raitt starts wrapping her voice around one of the saddest songs I know: “‘Cause I can’t make you love me if you don’t / You can’t make your heart feel something it won’t.” It’s not even 6 p.m., and there’s only a few people in the restaurant-—-including Gwen Reese herself, in a tan sweat suit——but they all start singing along to the bluesy ballad. Somebody stops to give Bonnie her props: “That girl can sing!” And just like that, I’m transported back to some of my happiest dining memories at Texas juke joints, washing down fresh fried catfish with a cold bottle of Miller High Life. Gwen’s fried trout filet——a day too old, perhaps, and overfried——can’t compare to memory, but her collards are piquant and her mac-and-cheese toothsome. But, frankly, the food is almost beside the point. This place makes me feel good, down to my blues-loving soul.

The Dish: Jessica’s Fried Twinkie Sundae

The Location: Urban Burger Company, 5566 Norbeck Road, Rockville, (301) 460-0050.

The Price: $4

The Skinny: The dudes responsible for Urban Bar-B-Que in Rockville have ditched the convection-oven smoker in favor of the good ol’ American grill with their latest operation, Urban Burger Company in Aspen Hill. What the owners haven’t abandoned is their penchant for piling it on thick. This gut-busting dessert begins with that famous “golden sponge cake,” the star of many a school lunch, except that this one is rolled in panko and quickly fried in Mazola corn oil. The crunchy log is then placed over two scoops of vanilla-bean ice cream and drizzled with thick, gooey caramel, so that the whole thing resembles—and there’s no reason to mince words here—male genitalia at rest. The first taste is as jarring as the presentation. Amid the sugary sauce and the rich, aromatic ice cream, you taste both oil and the savory coating. It’s like a funnel-cake mated with a cream-filled corn dog. Part of me is disgusted by the whole concoction, but I keep shoveling forkful after forkful into my mouth. If this is upscale carny food, then I must have a distant relative who used to train fleas.

The Dish: boeuf à la Provençale

The Location: Napoleon Bistro and Lounge, 1847 Columbia Road NW, (202) 299-9630.

The Price: $18.95

The Skinny: The waiter’s not scoring any points with me. He’s returned to my table with bad news. He stands there in his black pants and shirt, a little patch of facial hair clinging to his chin, and explains that the mussels with creamy leek sauce that I ordered are not available at lunch. Then, with all the dead-eyed enthusiasm of an underwear model, he hands the menu back to me. I’m only mildly miffed that he doesn’t know the menu yet—the owners of Cafe Bonaparte in Georgetown, after all, just recently opened this bistro in the former Mantis space in Adams Morgan—but my annoyance level leaps into the red zone when he brings me the Sancerre I ordered for the mussels. I tell him that I’d like the beef stew instead but that the wine doesn’t exactly pair with it. He puzzles over the comment for a moment or two, then says, “Would you like a different wine?” By the time that the entree arrives, all is forgiven. The dish has the look of a classic daube de boeuf à la Provençale, just without the olives and tomatoes. The first smell to hit your nostrils, somewhat surprisingly, is not braised beef but cured pork. The dish is studded with bits of bacon, not to mention sprinkles of peas, celery, and brunoised carrots. All this meatiness might be too much by half if not for the stewing liquid, which is perfumed with herbs, adding a layer of sweet earthiness to all that beef and pork. This hearty, cold-weather stew, I’m happy to say, does not stomp on the neck of the wine I reordered, a big, spicy Lalande-de-Pomerol from Château Haut-Surget.

The Dish: Southwest egg rolls and a seasonal Baltic bock

The Location: Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant, 900 F St. NW, (202) 783-5454.

The Price: $8.50 for the egg rolls, $5.75 for the beer

The Skinny: It’s a Friday afternoon, and it’s as cold outside as Dick Cheney’s stare. I can take the cold, but then it starts to rain, the kind of rain that penetrates all the layers of your clothing and starts your body to quivering. This is when I like to seek shelter in bars; there’s something about the dark woods and low lighting of a pub that reminds me of hibernation. I shoot into Gordon Biersch in Penn Quarter and curl up with the brew pub’s seasonal Baltic bock, a jet-black brew that smells like molasses on the nose and bitter hops on the finish. The beer is cold, yes, but it warms me like a hearth. My appetizer of Southwest egg rolls is everything I want at the moment: The deep-fried rolls of pulled chicken, black beans, corn, roasted red peppers, and pepper jack cheese are greasy, spicy, and about as subtle as a lap dance. This is what I call real comfort food, not that prissy, high-minded comfort fare peddled by fine-dining restaurants that actually want you to think about the dish. You just shove this stuff in your mouth and let the fat and alcohol do their thing.