Cafe Atlantico

[Fat Guy]

jparrot: one of the things I've fallen into the habit of doing, just from doing a lot of food writing and occasionally finding myself in a situation where a restaurant tries to trick me into thinking it serves stuff that it doesn't, is taking the seat at the table with a good vantage point and watching what's going on everywhere else in the dining room. This time around, I lucked into a balcony seat that allowed a great view of quite a few other tables. I got the impression that the kitchen was pushing out a lot of mix-and-match dishes. I'm no expert on the place, but as far as I can tell, the majority of the brunch items are revised components of dinner dishes served in a single-component tasting-portion format. So the kitchen has a lot of experience working with the flavors and combinations and can produce quite a lot of variation. It's no big deal (easier said than done, though!)-- we're not talking about much more than a couple of daily specials plus the ability to recombine what's already there -- but it effectively enhances the tasting-menu range beyond the printed-menu range. And the tastings are big. There's no more all-you-can-eat option -- it wouldn't be practical given some of what's being offered -- but I can't imagine anybody leaving hungry. The extra tastes we received were purely academic -- we were full just from what any table would have been served.

[Fat Guy]

And the resto certainly hasn't done much of a job publicizing a ramp-up in ingredients/conception on the brunch.

That's what I'm here for. Get ready to hear a lot more about this wildly underappreciated chef.

[jparrott]

I guess the core question I have is "does $35 represent a better-enough value than the old $20 brunch to make it more of a special occasion rather than just a nosh before the Georgetown game?" The only real way to answer that question is get a specific idea about what dishes come out in the new degust, clearly.

Jake

[vengroff]

I've only been to Cafe Atlantico for dinner, but I'm absolutely going to have to give the brunch a try. We have vegetarian guests coming to town this weekend, and this sounds like an ideal brunch option.

As for the difference between CA and Z, I think Z is the kind of place that is best experienced as a free-form experience with a group of 4+, holding onto the menu and ordering several rounds of dishes in sequence, as the mood strikes you, with some good wine. Indeed, the only service complaint I have about Z is that if you order a bunch of dishes up front, they will bring them all at one time, rather than in courses. CA, at dinner at least, offers a more standard progression.

[ajay]

As exciting as the brunch sounds, it doesn't seem to provide the best opportunity for sampling steve's desserts....speaking of which, in a remarkable injustice to sweet seekers the world over, there is no mention of dessert on the website--a travesty!!

[Steve Klc]

Free form for first visit is just fine.

My strategy at Zaytinya now is similar it seems to Vengroff, and after a bunch of meals there I say hold onto the menu--and only order a few dishes at a time from a single station--what I do is work my way through stations, first a round of salads, the Santorini fava and dips--all from the cold station--then flag the server down and order a second wave--say several just from the deep fry station--then several from the saute station, like the shrimp saganaki, the squid with spinach and the Monti dusted with sumac, and so on. That works out better, I think, because even if the place is full as a diner you don't really know how busy the kitchen is and the individual stations on the line are--they could be before or after a slam or one guy could be under; recently I was in a party of three and we ordered like 15 dishes at once--and all 15 were delivered at the same time. Which meant only 5 or 6 were tried at optimal temperature because we simply couldn't taste each one fast enough.

I think the servers handle these approaches very well--and why not take a little more control of how you order your dishes? It also helps to sit near the kitchen. The runners have less ground to cover to whisk something to you.

At Cafe the dim sum brunch can seem just as free form--the food is more creative with more attention, more garnishing, seemingly more visible "application of technique"--and I'll also give you a bit of news: that bar on the third floor is being ripped out and a Latino sushi bar is being installed very shortly. So even dinner might get more free form there.

[Fat Guy]

Rather than give in to the temptation to debate the issue of price -- the obsession with which, as I said in my first post, is exactly what's wrong with the DC dining psychology -- let me refocus this on the value proposition, which begins with quality.

I won't recount every dish we tried -- there were I think 27 in all -- but I'll highlight a few of the ones that really blew me away.

The single best dish of the day was the potato and vanilla mousse with American caviar. This comes in a narrow vodka glass -- cleverly, the spoon is placed in the glass before filling, so as to avoid the problem of reaching into the corners -- and consists of what I assume is a potato foam courtesy of an ISI Profi Whip, some vanilla-infused oil, and a dollop of American sturgeon roe. I notice on the online menu it's listed with salmon roe, which I can interpolate would be equally good and maybe even a bit more dynamic. Obviously, foams are now being done to death at every restaurant, but here's an example of a dish that uses the technique un-self-consciously to great effect: you get all the flavor of the potato but in an ethereal, lighter format that would make as nice a snack at 3:00am as it would at brunch time. The vanilla kick makes the dish transcendent. It would be a great dish without any roe of any kind, by the way. This is the dish where people were asking for seconds (the tasting menu procedure is that if you want another dose of something they'll happily bring it to you; I suppose there's a limit to how much of this they'll indulge but there seemed to be quite a lot of room to maneuver -- it's not technically all-you-can-eat, but it was reported to us that nobody finishes so I guess you'd call it de facto all-you-can-eat as in all-you're-capable-of-eating or all-you'd-ever-actually-want-to-eat-outside-of-an-eating-contest-situation).

But back to the time-of-day issue: when I was eating Jose's food, the thing I kept thinking was that I could eat so many of these dishes at any time of the day or night. The mix of sweet and savory blurs the line between appetizer/entree and dessert courses, but that's really just the surface-level challenge. On a deeper level, I think much of Jose's food rejects all the traditional notions of what you'd eat for breakfast, brunch, dinner, whatever. It's food, unplugged. It keeps bringing me back to the notion of how pathetically underrated this restaurant is. I know Tom Sietsema has given it some play and that lots of people in the food media are dimly aware of Jose (indeed, several of the big-name chefs in New York have been quietly making pilgrimages to DC to sample Jose's food), but if this guy was in New York City he'd be the hottest thing in town.

Very close behind the potato foam -- a three-way for first place, almost -- were two "ravioli" dishes. The scare quotes are on account of the ravioli wrappers being made out mango (in one case) and jicama (in the other case). Probably the better of the two was the jicama-avocado ravioli. The texture of the wrappers (it's pretty much a beggar's purse format) is more interesting than the mango, and the filling is basically the world's creamiest guacamole. The mango anchovy ravioli had a fascinating anchovy foam filling -- it had the same style of aromatics as something smoky might have, but it wasn't smoky. This is probably a function of the foam and how it bursts out of the wrapper and seemingly dissolves into your tongue when you bite down.

Scallops with orange oil weren't interesting by the standards of the rest of the menu. They just happened to be fabulous, big, fat, medium-rare sea scallops. So I enjoyed them, and it was nice every few courses to be hit with something more anchored to the familiar food categories. In the context of this meal, this was one of the comfort-food courses. A few other very effective homey, hearty tastes were in the form of steak with a tamarind sauce (cut into rectangular blocks and stacked like Lincoln Logs); duck confit with passion fruit oil; and some grilled lamb that was unremarkable (the species was somewhat redeemed by another lamb dish -- braised shank -- that was damn flavorful). But probably the most deeply satisfying of the hearty dishes was the quail in Latin spices. Quail is one of those things that so many restaurants overcook or otherwise fuck up. This was good-quality quail, cooked medium, and full of its juices -- skin crisp, meat tender, and overall not the slightest bit chewy. The spices amplified rather than overwhelmed and the whole package was irresistible.

Some of the most fascinating dishes were the vegetarian ones, three in particular: coconut rice with crispy rice, quinoa with cauliflower, and pineapple shavings with plantain powder. These are deceptively simple-seeming dishes yet I imagine they're among the most challenging from a production standpoint what with all the soaking of grains and fine hand-work and such. Each dish had little treasures buried throughout, like little bits of caramelized onion or whatever. The point being, these are dishes that seem a bit like side-orders (I think at least one of them is a veg side at dinner) but actually benefit from being appreciated as stand-alone dishes. There was also a nice dish of asparagus with oranges, but I didn't think it lived up to the others conceptually.

I'm going to cut myself off here. We also had conch fritters, tuna ceviche with coconut, oysters with some sort of fruit juice and oil, seared cigalas (aka big-ass prawns) with vanilla oil, shrimp with tamarind oil, red snapper with avocado, salmon with buttery papaya, a jicama-arugula thing that looked like a sushi roll (this has been featured in Food Arts), portobello and cuitlacoche quesadillas, sea urchin with blood orange (great combo but the sheer quantity of orange knocks out the urchin taste), chocolate cake with avocado and tomato, and some cookies. I think that's all.

Now, to clarify, we were to a certain extent VIPs because Steve Klc is a colleague of Jose. However, we gave less than an hour's notice so there was no special preparation made for our arrival. We probably got 10% more service and food-quantity than you would if you walked in off the street, and we probably got exactly the treatment you would get if you were eating there for the fourth or fifth time and you were recognized as a regular. As I mentioned, all the "off-menu" stuff we got was going out to other tables as well -- just not all of it to any one table -- and actually I think almost all of the best dishes we ate were on-menu anyway.

We sat on the top floor, and next time I'd probably choose to sit one floor down (third floor) in order to look into the open kitchen. The other people in my group raved about the mojitos and consumed them with vigor -- I can report vicariously that the thing to do is suck on the sugar cane skewer. There are some nice, fresh squeezed watermelon and cantaloupe juices that I tasted. The wine list is broad-based and creative. The Lurton pinot gris from Argentina was versatile and was a dead ringer for a Pacific Northwest specimen. And the 2000 Montes "Alpha" Cabernet from Chile was just delicious with the final round of meat dishes. The restaurant's wine list is on the Web site, with prices.

[hjshorter]

Well, based on Fat Guy's review CA is a lock for brunch before our next round of theater tickets at the end of April. I'm not even sure I want to wait that long to try it.

[hjshorter]

My strategy at Zaytinya now is similar it seems to Vengroff, and after a bunch of meals there I say hold onto the menu--and only order a few dishes at a time from a single station--what I do is work my way through stations...

Steve, that's approximately what we did last night at Zaytinya - would a similar approach be appropriate for CA also?

[Fat Guy]

As exciting as the brunch sounds, it doesn't seem to provide the best opportunity for sampling steve's desserts....speaking of which, in a remarkable injustice to sweet seekers the world over, there is no mention of dessert on the website--a travesty!!

Ajay, at present no meal at Cafe Atlantico provides the full opportunity to sample Steve Klc's desserts. Thus far he has only implemented a full menu of his desserts at Zaytinya. Cafe and Jaleo are next on his list -- he's working on the desserts now, you might see an experimental one come out here and there (as we did with the chocolate-avocado-tomato dessert), but the big push comes later. He can tell you exact dates, I'm sure. But I think it's safe to say that within a couple of months you'll be seeing Klc desserts at all of Jose's restaurants. Right now, though, Zayt. is the place to sample them. Of course, you can always wander by Zayt. for dessert after you eat at Cafe -- if you have room.

[Steve Klc]

No Heather, at Cafe my strong recommendation is to just give yourself over to the chef, especially for the dim sum, especially for a first time. Maybe mention some things you just know you have to try, mention a few things you might be averse to, that kind of thing, but just sit back and allow the waves of intriguing dishes to roll over you. It's really a very different restaurant experience--smaller, more focused and attentive, more "creative"--that just happens to exist within what usually is this completely different, hip, sexy environment when it's dark.

And I'll tell you what--if you're there at 9 or 10PM on a weekend watching these beautiful dreamy people walk up the stairs you'll know what I mean. You won't remember that the building could use a little facelift.

Shaw started to get into this but say you are or you're with some of Washington DC's more typical conservative military/civil service/politico types when it comes to food--kind of unadventurous, possibly even nervous about stepping outside their box of safely defined food--well the success of so many of Jose's and Kat's dishes here is they're creative but not too strange and inaccessible. They're also just good. Foams aren't necessarily done well elsewhere; simple stuff is also not necessarily easy to do well. At Cafe there's this fried egg and bean dish on the dim sum menu. Trust me, it's sooo good. I don't know why but it is. As an "adventurous" diner you might not order this egg--but in the tasting it might just come upon you! And Cafe definitely has this kind of magic rare in this city--where even non-foodies can pick up those seemingly innocuous slices of pineapple--perfectly piled just so--with chopsticks and then proceed to talk about them, to talk about the dish. That doesn't happen so often in DC.

That said--I do think it is possible to tailor how you order and what you order to your schedule--but I suspect if you made it clear to your server what you wanted, how much time you had, if you had to catch an event, etc. it would really be a non-issue. That's part of what I mean by the difference between 230 seats and 120 seats and a higher price point--with that higher price point legitimately comes higher expectation. Anyway you ordered a la carte you should be fine. Also, how this might be affected when the new Latino sushi bar is installed remains to be seen.

[vengroff]

So what's the time frame for the sushi bar? And (hopefully not showing too much ignorance here) what exactly is Latino sushi? Ceviche? Sashimi with jicama in place of daikon? Perhaps something along the lines of Nobu's new-style sashimi, but using a hot oil infused with Latin spices? Something based on a creation of the Japanese population of Peru?

[Fat Guy]

Speaking more generally, the two trends I'm seeing are 1) the ceviche bar ala what Douglas Rodriguez has been doing and 2) the Nuevo Latino-style sushi-type creations being served at Sushi Samba.

[Steve Klc]

My answers would be "Soon" and "you'll find out soon enough." Though the jicama roll with tuna ceviche dish on the dim sum menu might give you a hint. That's not my department, though.

And I do have two new desserts at Cafe--they debuted just after New Years and you can order them anytime: a chocolate-banana-lime dessert and a coconut cream with a mango-vanilla salad and lime gelee. There's a hint of the wonderful Montes Late Harvest dessert wine in the mango salad. The rest will debut soon.

[ajay]

And I do have two new desserts at Cafe--they debuted just after New Years and you can order them anytime:  a chocolate-banana-lime dessert and a coconut cream with a mango-vanilla salad and lime gelee.  There's a hint of the wonderful Montes Late Harvest dessert wine in the mango salad. The rest will debut soon.

Hopefully, Steve will have rolled out more desserts by early April for someone of such incredibley vip status as myself!! Seriously, though, as and when new things are created and/or offered, a note on the board would be much appreciated

The coconut cream sounds fascinating, though my acceptance of coconut as an dessert item is only recent.

On a completleey deifferent note, Steve, you're involved with Jaleo too? Man you and Jose have your fingers in almost all of the interesting dinning I've been getting rumblings about in DC!! Congrats. I trust at the appropriate time you'll fill us in on what you're conceiving there also.

[Fat Guy]

Ajay, I'm getting the same feedback from the very few food-knowledgeable people I know in DC. I don't think it's really possible for the local media to come right out and say that there's one guy standing head and shoulders above everybody else in town. It's not an interesting story. And it's not possible for me to say it with authority because I haven't proven the negative by dining recently at all the overrated competitors. But I strongly suspect the real story in DC is that Jose is so far out ahead of the pack that nobody can even grasp the full significance of the differential. I'm telling you, if you look past all the externalities -- I mean, none of Jose's restaurants has Jean Georges's dining room or the staff-to-customer ratio of a Ducasse -- what you've got is a chef who, if not the best chef I've encountered in America, has got to be the best of his generation, at least in the arena of forward-thinking, creative cuisine.

[vengroff]

The other chef in the DC area who I think is working at the top of his game, although it is a different game than Jose's, is Fabio Trabocchi at Maestro. To be fair, though, I have only had one meal of his, whereas I have now had a total six at Jose's three restaurants.

[Chazzy]

what you've got is a chef who, if not the best chef I've encountered in America, has got to be the best of his generation, at least in the arena of forward-thinking, creative cuisine.

That's definitely high praise, especially since Steve Klc has written on this board that Jose "saves his best stuff for magazine work, consulting, charity chef events, Beard dinners and friends that impose and ask to get married in his restaurant". It'll be interesting to see if he decides to open a truly high end place in the future. My completely uneducated guess/hope would be that if he sees Grant Achatz at Trio and/or Wylie Dufresne at WD50 have success in this arena he will give it a go himself. If Fat Guy's already proclaiming him one of the best and he's not even offering his best stuff yet we hopefully have a lot to look forward to. Also, if you haven't already I'd reccomend checking out joseandres.com, there's not that much there but the bites section gives a glimpse of what he might be capable of at his most creative.

[Michael Laiskonis]

Also, if you haven't already I'd recommend checking out www.joseandres.com...

Beautiful site!

I've had an eye on Jose for quite some time. I've only dined at Jaleo (Bethesda); when I was last in DC (Fall 2001), I was under the impression that he had left CA, and therefore I chose Citronelle for the 'big meal.' Looks like I need an excuse to return...

[Fat Guy]

Chazzy, in Tom Sietsema's review of Zaytinya he says much the same thing: that Jose is still working towards his true fantasy restaurant, and that what we're seeing now is just the warm-up. Now, of course, just about every chef in the world can attain a higher level of cuisine if given more money, more staff, and more everything to work with . . . plus fewer seats. Only at the upper end of the Michelin three-star spectrum do you start to see everything max out -- and even those guys have a few tricks up their sleeves that they save for "friends that impose and ask to get married" in their restaurants. So I'm certainly looking at Jose's work in context, taking into account what he's charging for what he's giving, the size of the staff, the level of luxury, the quality of ingredients, etc. I'm assuming that, given what Jose is doing for $34, if you gave the guy what Thomas Keller or Charlie Trotter has to work with, he would be able to run circles around them. Of course I could be wrong -- the theory has never been tested and some promising chefs choke when they get to the show. But I doubt it would happen in this case. At the same time, I get the strong impression -- having not dined at Cafe before, so this is just based on what I'm hearing, reading, and seeing -- that what we're seeing now is a push for more seriousness at Cafe. No, Cafe is probably not being made into Jose's ultimate fantasy restaurant. But I think he's moving it more in that direction than before.

[chefette]

Everyone may not fantasize about providing the ultimate high end experience ala Ducasse. Not everyone is interested in New York.

Maybe some people fantasize-- like Conticni -- about freedom from rules. Doing fun creative food at a price point to open the doors of appreciation for a wider audience.

being a zebra in a herd just doesn't look all that glamorous to some. After all, its just a matter of time until you are the slow one at the edge of the herd and get picked off by some lion.

[Steve Klc]

Well, don't you also think one of interesting positive developments on the national food scene is there are more and more creative chefs making big names for themselves outside of New York and by reading eGullet closely, I at least sense that some of the more experienced NY residents feel a little left out of some of that process--that NY presents so many obstacles and hurdles, financial and media-wise, that these chefs are no longer rushing to get thee to NYC? They're just doing their thing wherever they are and the NY media is covering them anyway!

Responding to Marian Burros, Tom Sietsema actually said something a bit defensive but I wonder if there isn't more than a few grains of truth to it:

"And just for the record, my trips to New York over the past few years have been less and less delicious. With few exceptions (Atelier comes to mind), the Big Apple could use a Big Jolt of energy.”

[Fat Guy]

New York has long represented a serious challenge to the conscientious middle market chef who wants to bring a sophisticated but value-oriented experience to the customer. The only real option tends to be a 30-60 seat boutique, hands-on restaurant, and we have plenty of those -- and they're excellent. But I simply can't see a place like Zaytinya existing here. Cafe Atlantico I can easily see, but it would have to be substantially more expensive. Obviously, what Douglas Rodriguez has done is not far off the axis of Jose's concepts -- I assume both have borrowed ideas from one another -- but Jose is clearly the better chef/executive of the two, and his creativity level is extremely high. The problem with a failure in the middle market is that, eventually, it affects the high end. There is effectively no minor league in which an aspiring chef can play. When is the last time a Colin Alevras or a Michael Anthony got fingered to do a Jean Georges-level restaurant? It's not like these guys don't have the talent. Back in the day, in France, you might hope to take a one-star place and build it into two, and then make a push for a third. That just doesn't happen anymore. Part of the problem is that the farm system for the four-star restaurants is exclusively the other four-star restaurants (and the three-stars in Europe, and French Laundry and Trotter's and a few other high-end places, of course). So it's all sous-chefs moving up through the same system and that's a recipe for stagnation. Whereas if Jose opened a four-star-level place, it would be Earth-shattering. And I do think he must have that ambition. My sense is that anybody with that kind of raw talent is highly likely to want to acquire a forum to show it off at its best. I'm hoping that Jose plans to use Cafe to "train" his clientele and get the city ready for what could easily be one of the most important restaurants in the country.

[chefette]

Maybe you are right, but personally, I don't think so. And, I don't want to presume on Jose's dreams and desires, but if what he is actively doing is any indication, those dreams do not run to the traditional 4-star really expensive high and mighty. I think that the competition that drives him is from within and is not as run of the mill.

You are thinking of one model, but what is the 'dream' of most would-be restauranteurs? Is it not a tidy little place of their own where they cook their heart's desire simply because they love it and life is like an endless series of dinner parties?

Of course, I am veering way off base from this thread I suppose.

[Fat Guy]

what is the 'dream' of most would-be restauranteurs?  Is it not a tidy little place of their own where they cook their heart's desire simply because they love it and life is like an endless series of dinner parties?

Many chef/restaurateurs have that fantasy, but the reality is that in order to maximize freedom of expression you need money: money to buy the best ingredients, money to hire enough and well-enough-trained staff to execute your dishes for however many people you're serving, money to hire a front-of-the-house staff that can communicate your vision to the customers, etc. What I've seen in my limited encounter with Jose's food is, on the one hand, brilliance, and on the other hand, that same brilliance capped by practical limitations. Maybe I'm not everybody, but if I had that kind of culinary talent I would eventually lose patience with working under those restrictions. I'd want to make a big mark on the international dining scene, and the way to do that is with an international destination restaurant that competes with the best in the world. It doesn't have to be stuffy or overly formal. But it does have to be expensive.