Restaurant Week

[bilrus]

My wife and I went to Corduroy last night and had a great meal and experience.

She started with the "Buffalo Mozzerella Porcupine" which was a good portion of Mozzerella wrapped in Phyllo and fried, served with a tomato coulis. It comes out looking like a cactus or ..a porcupine, hence the name. It was reminicent of the bar food standby - fried cheese, but in the best way, with good ingredients (if that is not too incongruent). I had the lobster salad with a basil oil ($5 upcharge). Very good and almost refreshing. Nothing to take away from the lobster's flavor.

We were both tin the mood for meat, so for my main course, I had the lamb sirloin with goat cheese ravioli. The lamb was prepared to a perfect medium rare and served in a reduction with red wine. The ravioli were not quite as good as I had hoped on their own, but worked well with the sauce. My wife had the Strip steak with gruyere potato pancake (also a $5 upcharge). The beef was also cooked to specifications and served in a red wine pan sauce (thicker and more luxurious than the sauce served with the lamb).

For dessert I had the cheese platter ($4 upcharge), which although the server said it was a small portion was in fact a huge portion of five cheeses. The cheese was ok, but I was surprised it wasn't served with any sort of sweet to balance it. This was probably the low point of the meal. My wife had the Michel's Kit Kat Bar" and it lived up to its advance billing. I am not a big chocolate dessert fan and this might have been the best chocolate dessert I have ever had. It makes me want to go to Citronelle just to try the original (among other reasons).

As for the room itself, I actually liked it. Not fussy or stuffy but also not as spartan as people describe. Lots of room between tables and the noise level was perfect - not somber but not loud. As I posted earlier, we went to Tosca on Tuesday and although it was OK, we felt it was a little stuffy and the tables on the banquette were so close together it felt like a communal table. Nothing like that here. We didn't feel rushed or like second class citizens. The entire menu was the $30.03 prix fixe for the week.

On the long drive home (to Ashburn), we realized that we were smiling and still talking about the meal all the way. I guess that is the sign of a good meal.

Edited August 1, 2003 by bilrus (log)

[Malawry]

That "kitkat" dessert really is lovely. Did you know that Corduroy does not have a pastry chef? Or at least they didn't when I trailed there late last year.

[Ruth]

Restaurant week can be a mixed blessing. Some restaurants go out of their way to develop a menu that is representative of the chef's food. I shall never forget when the program first started in New York and Gray Kunz was hardly known. Lespinasse participated in the program and I had my best restaurant lunch ever. It sent me running back to the restaurant despite its generally high prices. However, on several occasions when I decided to try restaurants that were new to me during restaurant week their offerings were so banal that I never returned. Small servings do not bother me. Nor do I expect foie gras and truffles for $30.00 but I do expect to get a meal that is representative of the chef's style. One would think that that would be the interest of the restaurants too but it does not always seem to be the case.

[bilrus]

That "kitkat" dessert really is lovely. Did you know that Corduroy does not have a pastry chef? Or at least they didn't when I trailed there late last year.

Who does that work then?

Also, have you gotten to Tosca yet? I am interested in a second opinion.

Edited August 1, 2003 by bilrus (log)

[Malawry]

Chef Tom, the exec chef, did most of the pastry himself. His sous-chef, whose name I forget, was interested in learning it so he started doing some of it too. This was late last year that I trailed there so the situation may have changed since then. I don't know what kind of pastry experience Chef Tom had before running Corduroy but I know that the lack of a pastry chef was at the time neither temporary nor unintentional.

I made it to Tosca yesterday. What a machine that place was, they were turning those tables in about an hour at lunchtime when we went. They brought our plates virtually the second a course was cleared. Clearly these guys wanted to make the most out of RW, what with their extended RW menu (there was no other menu offered), the brisk well-coordinated service, and so on. I'd have been irritated by such service at dinner but didn't consider it to be a big issue at lunch. (Actually, if you have to get in and out rapidly but want to eat a nice lunch during the workday, seems like Tosca would be a good choice.)

I visited with Edemuth. We agreed to split everything we ordered. For the starter, we shared a chilled yellow pepper soup with calamari and a duck strudel with mache salad and fava beans. The soup was great, tasted strongly of yellow pepper. Sunny and not very rich. The cold calamari in the middle of the soup was a little lost on me. It didn't seem to add much to the soup's flavor, it was just...cold calamari. The duck strudel really needed a sauce, it was dry and just not that special. Your basic duck in phyllo type starter. It came with a big pile of mache salad with a few bits of pancetta, which I didn't really want to share because it was fresh and tart and salty-bitter. Perfect summery salad.

For our entrees, we shared fettucine with veal ragu and spring peas, and ravioli with ricotta and raisin filling. The fettucine was thinner than any I'd seen before (the ribbons looked more like linguine to me) and came with plenty of meaty sauce. There was a generous shower of the peas on top. This pasta was very satisfying, it's a bunch of my favorite foods put together, each cooked perfectly: slightly bouncy noodles, tender veal, rich tomato, crisp bright fresh peas. The ravioli came in a light butter sauce flavored with sage, and tasted of gentle egg and ricotta flavors. I was a little put off by the sweetness of the raisins, which came close to overwhelming the soft flavors of the pasta and filling.

Dessert, we shared the tomato marmalade tart with basil ice cream and the watermelon granita with melon and blueberries. I would have liked the tomato filling to have been a little less sweet, but it was still scrumptious with that buttery flaky pastry and that rich, slightly herby ricotta-basil ice cream. I think Tosca deserves Restaurant Week bonus points for putting something less mainstream like this on the dessert menu. The granita was all right, just your standard granita with a few canteloupe balls and some superfresh blueberries. Icy and refreshing.

I spied Chef Cesare in the dining room briefly towards the end of lunch. He looked a lot more collected than I'd have anticipated, given the packed dining room. I'd really have liked to have seen the kitchen in the midst of the onslaught, it must have been a remarkable machine considering how efficient they were.

Edited August 1, 2003 by Malawry (log)

[bilrus]

That's interesting. At Tosca for dinner there was a separate RW menu within the Dinner menu. They still were offering tasting menus and the alacarte.

We didn't feel really rushed, so it might have been a downtown lunch thing.

[Malawry]

Yeah, they only offered us the RW menu. There was a note on it saying that the items were also available a la carte, but there were no prices listed for a la carte ordering purposes.

For what it's worth, we made our reservation via OpenTable and I'd placed a note in the reservation about being there for Restaurant Week. Maybe they didn't bother to show us another menu because of this note in our reservation. But I somehow doubt it. I have the feeling they stuck to the RW menu exclusively at lunch so they could turn their tables as quickly as possible. Service like this would be unacceptable at dinner, but for many would be preferable at lunchtime.