After the Deluge

It's not often I can help bring the median age of a room down.

But when a friend suggested Tastebuds, a northside restaurant I'd never been to, for dinner, I was game.

First we had to make a stop at the Brook Road post office so one of us could mail a Father's Day card.

For the record, it wasn't me.

Somehow I had never noticed Tastebuds on that little strip before, but given how many tables were already taken, I must have been in the minority on that.

I was inclined to think that a lot of the customers were neighborhood dwellers and I noticed that the overall hair color definitely slanted white, although to be fair, we were eating dinner mighty early.

All at once we were greeted by a familiar handsome face, a former Carytown business owner we both knew, who asked us where we'd been when the thunderstorm hit.

Friend had been stuck in the Carytown Kroger shopping to kill time while I'd watched it from the safety of my Jackson Ward apartment, the trees out back almost horizontal in that incredible wind.

Even better, he shared how as a server at Bistro Bobette, he'd recently waited on our current movie star-in-residence, Rob Lowe.

Nice, polite, slight tan, very fit and overall incredibly handsome in person.

Well, a girl's gotta ask.

We started with a bottle of Rose and fried crab dumplings after our server's recommendation that he could eat them every day.

I'd have liked a little more crab, but then, I grew up in Maryland where we think everything could use more crab.

A spinach and red onion salad with goat cheese and a lemon-parsley dressing followed while we discussed restaurants worth driving an hour east or west for.

My thinking is that an hour is just about the perfect amount of road trip to reach a dining destination when you want to feel like you're getting away without the full commitment of, say, driving to D.C.

Friend had the chicken medallions in a mushroom ragout while I went with something more porcine: pork adobo-filled corn crepe with avocado crema and jicama/radish slaw.

You really can't go wrong with crunchy slaw on pig.

By that time, the white hairs were on their way out so we no longer helped the average age in the restaurant as a younger crowd began coming in.

Just like that, we became the room's elder diners.

Dessert was a chocolate mousse-filled crepe which interested my friend not at all, the better for those of us who can eat an entire sweet course unaided.

That said, when Friend suggested a post-meal walkabout in the neighborhood to help settle dinner, I was more than happy to oblige and help work some of that mousse down.

Everything was still pretty damp from the thunderstorm earlier, but the area is picaresque, if completely quiet and shut down by that (early) point, so unlike my own neighborhood.

Fortunately, Jackson Ward was the next stop for me, the woman who returned home knowing she's now got one degree of separation from Rob Lowe.

Not a bad takeaway after an evening's meal.