Want to take a last minute trip to finish out your summer? Stay in the city and make it a gustatory sojourn with stops throughout Capitol Hill that will take your palate to the bayous of the South, Adriatic port villages, and Italian hill towns. French food figures prominently on this Restaurant Week tour, so be sure to pack your bikini and beret. There are more than 15 restaurants on Capitol Hill participating. The $22 lunch and $35 dinner promotions, sponsored by the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington, will run August 17-23.
The list of participants is varied and includes newbies such as Romeo & Juliet, as well as more celebrated names such as Cafe Belga and Ambar. Filling up your lunch and dinner plates during Restaurant Week is good for your wallet and is the perfect opportunity to sample the menus of less popular spots and those a bit farther from typical neighborhood boundaries.
Explore a little bit of lobbyist Washington near Union Station and you’ll eat well in glamorous Bistro Bis. One sometimes feels self-conscious about ordering seemingly stereotypical food while on vacation in a foreign locale, and really, who could want hot soup in August? Trust me, order the Onion Soup Les Halles, teeming with caramelized onions and gruyère, but make your table mate have the chilled watermelon soup with olive tapenade and feta cheese. You’ll both be happy and ready for your heavier second course.
Venture into Todd Gray’s Watershed at the Garden Hilton and you can sample organic deviled eggs, smoked sweet potato and kale soup, brook trout complete with the hopping john, baby back ribs, and pickled fried green potatoes. With a menu like that, you should probably make sure you have some DEET and a dry shirt on hand. Art & Soul at Liaison Capitol Hill also serves southern fare, offering shrimp & crawfish Étoufée as well as crispy pork shank & smoked sausage, topped off with black eyed peas, stewed tomatoes and okra. Ordering dessert first probably isn’t an option, but save some space for strawberry-rhubarb cobbler with lavender-honey ice cream.
The special menu at Bistro Cacao features its best items from the menu and standards like the grilled hanger steak with caramelized shallots, french fries, red wine sauce and portobello mushroom raviolis with grilled asparagus, shaved parmesan, fresh tomato basil sauce. Start with bottle of a crisp white wine and a red beets salad with fresh mozzarella, golden raisins, pumpkin seeds, and soon you’ll feel the breeze coming down the Sienne.
Back at the end of Barracks Row, the menu of Bistro Zest takes a more American turn on bistro fare. It’s the beer braised beef short ribs with spicy cheese grits, fried kale and shiitake mushrooms that make me salivate. The menu is full of hard choices: seafood risotto shrimp, scallops, calamari, asparagus, lobster cream sauce; the dressed-up chicken piccata with artichoke hearts, capers, shiitake mushrooms, cherry tomatoes and french beens with a white wine lemon sauce; or a lunch-only sandwich of roasted leg of lamb, caramelized onions, feta, pomegranate bbq on grilled flatbread.
Buy your tickets now to your August dining trip: hit Open Table while tables are available. They won’t be soon!