This week is Restaurant Week here in DC, so sprite and I have sampled the wares of two local eateries, neither of which we’d visited before.

On Wednesday night, we dined at Zola, located above the International Spy Museum. The restaurant is very modern, with dark lighting and warm wood and burgundy highlights throughout. The service was attentive, and the food was very, very good.

For my appetizer, I enjoyed a tuna tartare, served in with a finely-diced cucumber salad atop the tuna, which was infused with lime juice. Taro chips were used as the serving medium, and the taste was extraordinary. My entrée was a grilled, sugar-glazed monkfish fillet, served over glazed yams and garlic spinach, with applewood-smoked bacon garnish. This was a most unusual melding of tastes, but it worked well. Monkfish is usually served as “poor man’s lobster,” and this dish dispensed of such stigma. My dessert was a “flight” of three homemade butterscotches made with 12-year, 15-year and 21-year-old scotch. It was divine: a lovely flavor that was more intense and succulent as the whisky got older.

sprite enjoyed a roasted beet appetizer, a main course of what can best be summed up as a “polenta cheeseburger”: two spiced polenta cakes that sandwiched a mushroom cap, some eggplant strips and mozzerella cheese. There was also a sauce involved, and it tasted very, very good (the polenta, itself, was a bit bland, but the other ingredients brought it to life). Her dessert was a peanut butter trifle that was most yummy.

After Zola, we were both stuffed, so our post-dinner activities involved a lot of digestion.

Last night, a couple of friends joined us for dinner at the Tabard Inn on N Street. The atmosphere at the Tabard is Old World cozy, with a touch of eclectic (wood-beam ceilings of old, with more modern artwork on the walls). It was definitely more intimate. The food was good, too, though not as good as Zola. I had another tuna appetizer - this time, a seared tuna strip with daikon and cilantro garnish and a ginger-miso dressing. T’was tasty. My entrée was a miso-glazed salmon filét, served over mushrooms, jasmine rice and baby bok choi. It wasn’t quite as good as the Zola meal, but it was quite filling. Dessert was a rum-infused pineapple upside-down cake, served with mango sorbét. The table shared a lovely bottle of shiraz, a Sonoma Valley wine of 2004 vintage.

sprite’s meal consisted of a “Thai chicken soup” that wasn’t quite as expected (there wasn’t much coconut in the broth, so it didn’t seem quite right to me). The entrée was a pasta dish that was a bit small in portion, with more onions than mushrooms (our fellow diner bought the same dish and ended up with the opposite issue). Dessert was a lemon mascarpone cheesecake, garnished with berries that was quite tasty (per sprite’s word).

Our other friend had an entrée of roasted duck that looked most delicious, and had a Godiva chocolate cake that was too wonderful for words.

The service at Tabard Inn was very good, too, and they are noted for their brunch, so we’ll head back sometime in the warmer months to sample their Sunday finest.

As a whole, it’s been a good Restaurant Week: a perfect sampling of restaurants we wouldn’t normally patronize, but will certainly recommend in the future.

As part of DC Restaurant Week, Kirstin and I had dinner at Rasika, a modern Indian restaurant in Penn Quarter. Thanks to a friend, we were able to use her reservations and enjoy some of the best Indian food we've experienced in DC.

Rasika is upscale, part of a group of restaurants that include Ardeo/Bardeo and The Oval Room. Chef Vikram Sunderam certainly has the pedigree, having spent the past 14 years as head chef at Bombay Brasserie (read a review here) in London - a hotbed of high-quality Indian fare. The interior of the restaurant is warm, with rust-colored tile on the walls, wood floors, and bead separators that keep the bar and dining areas apart. There are also two round tables in bay windows for large parties, as well as a private dining area behind the host's podium.

We took advantage of the special $30.06 Restaurant Week menu, which offered a lot of wonderful options for the money - though we noted that the vegetarian tasting menu ran $36, offering one extra dish, though possibly not dessert. The RW menu included an appetizer, a main course, and dessert.

Kirstin chose palak chaat for her appetizer (the signature dish, according to our friendly server), a vegetarian sampler with palak makki, dal makhani and kashmiri vegetable curry, and apple jalebi for dessert. I chose the tawa fish for an appetizer, fish malai curry for an entrée, and anjeer and walnut kulfi for dessert.

Most of the dishes went over well. The palak chaat was a clear winner: a delicate, crispy spinach with lovely, balanced spices. The tawa fish was also well-executed, flaky and mellow with a spice mix that had a subtle zing. While my fish curry was an excellent portion size and had and intricate yet not overpowering flavor, sprite's veggie sampler was both too big and had a lot of building spices, which proved far too potent. The desserts made up for it, for sure, though her jalebi (a fried dumpling) was a bit too greasy and heavy. My kulfi - an ice cream/sorbet - had a wonderful pyramid presentation and tasted great, closing the meal quite well.

All told, Rasika is a winner. I'd like to co back and try one of their prix fixe sampler menus sometime.

Rasika
www.rasikarestaurant.com
633 D Street NW
Washington, DC
(202) 637-1222

Hours:
Lunch:
Mon - Fri: 11:30am - 2:30pm
Dinner:
Mon - Thu: 5:30pm - 10:30pm
Fri and Sat: 5:30pm - 11:00pm

... and its Sunday brunch drag queens.

Yes, in this case, Perry's excellent fare is very much upstaged by its parade of drag queens. It's quite impressive, and if you aren't in on the joke, it can be quite a shock to the system. I, of course, happened to pick the prime position to be part of the show.

But like I said, the food was terrific. Their brunch is an all-you-can eat affair for $22.75 a head - not bad if you come hungry. I give high marks to their sushi (California rolls, tekka maki, Philly rolls, cucumber rolls, and tuna, salmon and shrimp sushi), their sweet potato soup, their marinate mushroom salad, their buckwheat groat salad (which might make me actually buy some Kasha and give it a try - that would erase a childhood food dislike), the seared beef, and the waffles.

But really: everything was tasty, the coffee was hot and strong, the buffet replenished often, and the service most friendly. It's a must-experience for any DC dweller.

A note: this is a very popular brunch, and the line get started before 10:00 am - and the doors open at 10:30, give-or-take. So get there early if you want first seating.

Perry's Restaurant
1811 Columbia Rd NW
Washington, DC 20009
(202) 234-6218

At any rate, I figured I'd give a rundown of my preferences in Coca-Cola brand cola drinks. In this review, I'm steering clear of the flavored versions in the rundown list (though I will visit them at the end of this post).

1. Coca-Cola Classic. This is very closely related to the Coke of my childhood. I'm still convinced that the "Classic" version is not the exact recipe that Coca-Cola tried to retire in the 80s, but it's close enough for now. Perhaps the taste change is due to the switch away from glass bottles to the current polyethyene models. But it's still what I like: the sugar that's not too sweet, the clean aftertaste.
2. Caffeine-Free Coca-Cola Classic. They manage to make this taste remarkably similar to the caffeinated version, though this particular version is often hard to find at most retailers.
3. Diet Coke Sweetened with Splenda. Sam turned me on to this, and it's not bad. The taste comes remarkably close to my beloved Classic Coke, though the sucralose doesn't present the same liquid texture as the "full octane" version. Also, the aftertaste is still odd to me. But it gets the job done: the taste is quite similar to Classic (though it's easier to detect the cinnamon in the recipe than with the sugar-sweetened variants), and it's less sugar in my diet. Also quite hard to find in a lot of retail outlets.
4. Coke C2. This is Coke's "half-and-half" drink: half of the sweeteners are sugars, the other half is aspartame. As such, it's not bad, but there's still a bit of aspartame aftertaste that's unnatural, and the texture is more akin to a sparkling dry wine. The taste is also a bit different than the first three, as it doesn't seem to be purely derived from the Classic formula. If I were a higher-up at Coca-Cola, I'd switch out the aspartame for sucralose for a better taste and texture. This used to be easy to find (summer and fall of 2004), but has since become difficult to find.
5. Diet Coke. This drink is very popular with people at my workplace (2/3 of the slots in the Coke vending machine are reserved for Diet Coke, with the others divided between Classic, Cherry, Diet with Lemon, Diet with Lime, Sprite and Diet Sprite). Sweetened with aspartame, I truly dislike this variation on the Coke formula. Aspartame is so sickeningly sweet and just tastes like a chemical to me. I just can't quite get over it - blech!
6. Caffeine-Free Diet Coke. Why does this exist? First you remove the sugar, then you remove the caffeine? If people drink this for the taste, fine - but it tastes awful.

As I mentioned before, there are flavored variants of the Coca-Cola family. I like Coke with Lime (sugared version) and Cherry Coke (sugared version) quite a bit - they're old standbys, though homemade cherry Coke is much more flavorful and rewarding. Vanilla Coke tastes wrong to me, mainly because the vanilla flavor seems very unnatural. There are diet versions of the Lime, Cherry and Vanilla versions, as well as a Diet Coke with Lemon. All rank really low with me.

As you can probably tell, I'm no fan of artificial sweeteners. Firstly, they're chemicals that have little-to-no long-term exposure facts to review what harm they do to the body. Yes, sugar isn't great for you, either - especially refined sugar - but at least it's naturally derived from a plant. Sucralose is derived from sugar, and actually seems to taste okay, though I'm not about to start substituting it for th real McCoy for things other than soft drinks.

Any thoughts? Please share them in the comments.