How much activity can I fit into one Wednesday in my hometown? Let me count the ways.
By noon, I can be at the quaint Bistrot du Coin on Dupont Circle - having already waved to my former homes on N Street and on 21st Street - sipping Piper Heidsieck and slurping Mussels Marinieres oozing onions, shallots and garlic in a white wine broth delivered by our dimpled server.
"You have them, too!" she cried when I paid her a compliment about them. Takes one to know one, or else why would my companion have missed them entirely?
After lapping up the last of my chocolate mousse, we walk down the sidewalk, past two neatly-dressed, suburban-looking, high-school age guys. When one stops in front of Bethesda Bagel (a lame name for so many reasons) and points at it hopefully, the others dashes his hopes, saying, "Dude, we have bagels all the time!"
They trudge on, presumably in search of new experiences.
By 1:30, I can be at the Phillips Collection to see "People on the Movie: Beauty and Struggle in Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series," where we are among a too-small group of gallery-goers, as if it weren't a huge deal that the 60 panels (normally divided equally between MoMA and the Phillips) are all together in one place for a change.
Lawrence's paintings are masterful storyboards depicting history. Each panel displays a different aspect of the mass movement of southern blacks to northern industrial jobs and fresh new forms of discrimination.
At home, a wooden wall extended all the way to the bar to divide a juke joint's black and white patrons, while up north, it was a rope strung through the center of the room that accomplished the same.
Early on, hope radiates from all their faces. Panels of blacks leaving the rural south show masses of smiling, hatted figures next to luggage, while later ones show tenement buildings and manual laborers.
So much for the American dream.
Lawrence's show segued seamlessly into Whitfield Lovell's "The Kin Series," in which the artist had drawn beautiful black faces on worn pieces of wood flooring, doors and walls, and then attached some well-worn object - a knife, a silver canteen, chains, a scarred leather satchel - to the piece.
Lovell, I read, sometimes took months to find exactly the right object to affix to the portrait he'd created.
The vividness of the people depicted, along with the thoughtfully-chosen objects would have been more than enough to draw me into the exhibit, but there was an even bigger surprise awaiting me.
"Restoreth" was a large piece (probably a door originally) depicting a dignified older black woman with a shelf of 33 variously sized bottles - Herbex, an Old Granddad whiskey miniature, a beef, iron and wine tonic - attached at the bottom and forming a separation between her and the viewer.
I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw that it was an attempt by the artist to bridge the abyss between the slavery era and the height of booming black entrepreneurship in Jackson Ward. That's right, Jackson Ward, RVA.
I'd traveled two hours to see a brilliant piece of art that was a tribute to the neighborhood I've called home for the past decade. Mind blown.
In another gallery, one wall featured stacks of three dozen or so small portable radios, the kind from the '40s and '50s, many wood, some plastic in colors of aqua, red or white, with old-timey music emanating from behind them. In another room was a 1941 album entitled, "Southern Exposure: An Album of Jim Crow Blues."
Ouch. There's the understatement of the past 150 years.
Before we left, we meandered through the music room with its cherry-picked selection of exquisite Impressionistic and Cubist paintings, the grand piano covered and closed. And since I consider it a requirement while at the Phillips, I made sure to be one of the eight people allowed in the Rothko Room before heading outside.
By 4:30, we were looking for a place to have a drink in Shaw, only to be defeated at every turn.
Each place we considered trying - Beau Thai (clever, right?), even Dacha Beer Garden - or hopefully stuck our heads into - wine bar La Jambe, cocktail mecca the Passenger- didn't open until 5 or was closed up tight.
Thank you, Chaplin's, for being the kind of place (a Japanese restaurant set in the 1920s silent film era, hence the Chaplin mural on the wall) that opens after lunch hours as soon as the first customer wants a drink.
I have to say that a hip 'hood like Shaw is the last place I thought it might be tough to find day drinking spots, but there you have it.
By 5:40, we were at Convivial to meet our dinner group, taking in the subdued palette and twinkling lights up front as we were led to our banquette in the back, facing a horizontal mirror gussied up with Christmas bows of all colors, patterns and sizes.
Among the menus placed on the table was a smaller sheet, a "food lexicon," the better to help navigate the menu with explanations of terms such as "tartiflette" and "poutargue."
Let me be the first to admit that I love eating almost as much as learning.
The beauty of being a party of five was how much of the menu we managed to cover over the next few hours, although I did ask our waiter for a "non-eating period" after the first two courses, just so everyone could make a little room.
Unlikely and to die for, escargots in a blanket were gobbled up toute suite, while latkes with celery root and dry cured lamb easily qualified as the best latkes of my life ("At the end, it's like the best tater tot you ever had," a potato enthusiast noted). Brandade croquettes and tartiflette fritters satisfied fried needs.
One of the finest scores of the evening was French-smoked herring with warm potato salad, a dish satisfying on multiple levels.
The cauliflower hater at the table embraced the hated veggie with a cauliflower panna cotta under tabbouleh, almonds, grapefruit and a salad of fresh herbs that had to have been picked earlier in the day given the brightness of their flavors.
The only reason pickled rockfish with green papaya, avocado, passionfruit and watermelon radishes didn't get more oohs and ahs was because of how fabulous everything so far had been and that the more petite among us were already approaching fullness.
Multiple paper envelopes of herby pretzel-like bread may have also played a role.
During the non-eating period I'd requested, gifts of all variety were opened, from musical toilet seats to three figure pepper grinders to smart-ass t-shirts.
But you can only delay main courses for so long and eventually, we had to take up forks again for braised lamb osso bucco, fried chicken coq au vin, grilled daurade with sauteed squid and, for two of us - one of whom who'd never had it - skate wing over octopus and crab bisque, a decadent dish that made him the skate wing lover I already was.
By 8:00, we were looking at a dessert menu, although I was one of only two who showed any interest. He opted for apple bread pudding with vanilla ice cream and salted caramel, but I went all the way, ordering the celebration cake with chocolate and hazelnut dacquoise.
"That comes with sparklers, unless you don't want them," our very hip-looking server told me, leaning down to give me fair warning. Ah, that would be the "celebration" part.
No, I want them, I told him.
The multi-layered cake came out with a silver tube embedded in it, which he then lighted as we watched the equivalent of 3 or 4 sparklers burning like a firework centerpiece while the people at the next table looked on.
"Should we be singing happy birthday?" they asked. Nope, just celebrating a Wednesday in December, no need to sing anything, thanks.
When our server came to check on our progress, we inquired about the fireworks (somebody compared it to a bottle rocket) and he explained that it did require a "sturdy" cake to make it fire-safe. As far as I could tell, sturdy meant deep (three layers) and with a thick ganache on top to cement it in place.
Since it wasn't possible to top fireworks for dessert (although gifting a gardener with caulk came close), we said our goodnights and scattered to the winds.
By shortly after 9, we were at the State Theater to see the Weepies doing an all acoustic show, only we'd missed the first half hour, a shame given how gorgeous the married couple's music and harmonies are.
For that matter, so is their devotion to each other, which came through in most of their between-song banter.
We walked in to a full house crowd just as husband Steve was sharing his surprise to have discovered that one of their songs had gotten 3.2 million listens on Spotify's end of the year list.
"My theory is that it's one guy," Steve joked. "Or maybe the entire military. I don't think that are even that many people in Sweden."
The strength of the show was that it was just two people, each with an acoustic guitar and a gorgeous voice, sitting onstage telling stories and singing songs because the devoted crowd required nothing more.
Many sang along to every word on songs like "Be My Thrill." Yes, would you, please?
"I wrote this song and then Deb rewrote it," Steve said about a song originally intended as an angry song until his wife turned it into a love song. "It's way better now."
Having come to the show with only a limited amount of Weepies listening to my credit, I could have listened to anything they'd been willing to sing for as long as they were willing.
Far too quickly for late arrivals, the show ended, but the audience insisted on one last song after their final goodbye and onstage hug, so they returned and the room issued a collective sigh when they started on "Painting by Chagall."
And everybody says, "You can't, you can't, you can't, don't try"
Still, everybody says that if they had the chance, they'd fly
Like we do
Sometimes rain that's needed falls
We float like two lovers in a painting by Chagall
What self-respecting woman wouldn't swoon over a man writing her lyrics like that? Some of us are grateful just to hear them.
By 10:30, I'd done everything I needed to do in my hometown in one day.
Dude, I don't get to do that all the time.
Showing posts with label phillips collection. Show all posts
Showing posts with label phillips collection. Show all posts
Friday, December 16, 2016
Sunday, August 21, 2016
So Many Pleasant Memories
I have tonight & Friday night plans, but all other nights are wide open for drinks somewhere cool. That's the first date request. The second is a DC art date to see William Merritt Chase AND Romaine Brooks. PLEASE!
Can't wait to hear from you, sweetheart.
And I couldn't wait to say yes to a DC art date soon enough, so it was barely after 9 a.m. when my date collected me and we headed north.
Once inside the city limits of my birth place on a breezy, sunny day, good native vibrations found us a parking space a block away from the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Waiting at a corner, an 89-year old woman got out of a car to join us in crossing the street, explaining that her husband dropped her off because he wouldn't enjoy the museum like she would. Given that she was an artist and a former docent at the museum, she was probably right.
Turns out he was her second husband anyway, the first having left her in the late '70s when that was the thing to do ("I had three friends whose husbands also just walked out"). She'd made the best of it, but it hadn't been easy and it had necessitated her compromising how much time she could devote to art.
She wished us a good visit and we took off for the third floor. Walking across a brilliantly colorful floor mosaic, a guard approached us asking where we were from. When we said Richmond, he inquired if we knew the state's three names. We didn't.
"Virginia, the Commonwealth and the white boys' state," he said unexpectedly. We were still processing that when he leaned in and said, "Now someone's coming up from Arkansas to rule us." Was this some kind of crazy Trump supporter?
"What just happened?" my date asked, as confused as I was as we scurried away. Why would a security guard be talking to us about such things? Had we crossed into the Twilight Zone and not known it?
All was right with the world the moment we stepped into "The Art of Romaine Brooks" exhibit, full of Whistler-indebted canvases in muted shades of black, white and gray portraying androgynous-looking women and well-dressed upper class lesbians of the early 20th century by an American ex-pat.
"White Azaleas" from 1910 showed a pale nude reclining on a huge couch, much like Manet's "Olympia," but bolder because it was done by a woman at a time when it was unheard of for women to assert non-traditional views of their role.
And these women depicted were completely non-traditional, I can assure you.
The show made a case for Brooks' fashionable and daring portraits of androgyny being associated with the so-called "new woman" during a time when sexually independent women projecting new and visible lesbian identities post-World War I was becoming more commonplace.
Drawings filled one gallery, all done for Brooks' unpublished memoir, to be called "No Pleasant Memories," surely the most miserable and accusatory memoir title ever, although the drawings were fascinating, often done in a single line.
There was so much estrogen in that show that you could almost feel it pulsating off the walls. We both loved it, although probably for different reasons.
Leaving the cocoon of the museum behind, we walked a few blocks to the colorful Bantam King - sibling to Daikaya - for lunch. Black and white Japanese comics on front walls, bright blue and green plastic trays on back wall and bathrooms that read, "WC: Kings, Queens, Errbody."
Best bathroom sign ever.
Our server was eager to share his spiel (and the fact that he's a finance major), disappointing us only when we learned that it was too early for fried chicken.
Not to worry, we dove into a killer starter, meatydumplings with chili oil, followed by bowls of chicken ramen. I chose miso broth loaded with dandelion greens, white onions, chili threads, soft-boiled egg and then added fresh corn while my date went with shoyu ramen, creamy with garlic and ginger.
All that was missing was a plate of fried chicken, but that's what future art dates are for, no?
From there, we motored to my old 'hood, Dupont Circle, and the William Merritt Chase retrospective at the Philips Collection in honor of the 100 year anniversary of the man's death.
Words aren't nearly good enough for the 40+ years of artistry we saw today, but I'll try.
First off, I learned that Chase and I are kindred souls on the subject of home decor. His philosophy was to think of walls as a canvas, with real life objects taking the place of color on them, something I've done for years.
With the darker palette of Frans Hals, Velazquez and Manet, Chase demonstrated his indebtedness to both Whistler and Singer Sargent in canvas after canvas as we swooned.
His portrait of Whistler as a fop had caused a rift in the men's friendship, but Edward Steichen's sumptuous sepia-toned photograph of Chase showed him to be just as big a one with a top hat, fur-trimmed overcoat, cigar and walking stick.
In a case were some of Chase's family albums, full of circa 1900s blue-tinged cynotypes of his children on the lawn and house details such as a staircase and candlelit outdoor dining table.
Behind me, a man spotted the albums and said, "These photo books look like my Mom's," and I knew before I turned around that he had to be an old duffer.
Hands down, my favorite was "The End of the Season," showing a lone woman sitting at a small wooden table on the beach near other tables, all with the chairs leaning in on the tables to signify that summer business had ceased. Down on the shore, a few people gathered.
You could almost feel her wistfulness about the change in season, a feeling I echo.
"Sunlight to Shadow" showed a well-dressed man staring into his teacup while nearby, a woman lounged in an elaborate hammock, looking away from him, the two clearly not speaking, supporting the notion that the canvas' original title had been "The Tiff."
Absolutely delightful was "Washing Day," a backyard scene of four lines covered in wet clothing with a laundry servant in a bonnet hanging more.
You could almost hear the sheets flapping in the breeze.
One of the most unique features of Chase's paintings were their unusual titles, such as "I Think I'm Ready Now," a portrait of a young woman from the back, facing a mirror. Left hip thrust out, hairbrush in hand, the train of her pink dress gathered behind her, it was obvious she rushed for no man.
Another, "May I Come In?" showed a woman in hat and muff entering from behind a door, the back of which was covered in paintings. He face reads as curious and sociable, so why wouldn't he let her come in?
Chase, we learned, was a devotee of still life paintings and considered unsurpassed in his portraits of fish, which he managed to make look believably shiny, wet and slick. The subject matter of "Just Onions" may have been lowly, but the rendering was so realistic you could almost smell them.
By the time we finished admiring and studying the 70+ works, we were both totally enthralled with what we'd seen. My only regret was that we didn't have enough time to look at it all again.
We compromised by stopping at Teaism for ginger lemonades (they'd just sold out so I tried iced mint tea while my date went with today's iced tisane, an African berry blend), along with the house specialty cookies, chunky chocolate pecan salty oat cookies, each weighing about a pound each.
"I'll never be able to finish the whole thing," my date insisted, but we sat there chatting and watching the street theater of R Street long enough that never became history.
I don't travel with those who can resist big flakes of sea salt on top of chocolate cookies.
Driving up M Street, my date pointed to 2400 and shared a story about a couple whose first apartment had been in that building. "All they had was a mattress on the floor, but the first night they were there, they laid on that mattress and watched a storm roll in through the big window."
I can see such an experience boding well for the future of the relationship.
Further down in front of the State Department, we passed Navy types - sailors in white bell bottoms and officers in tan summer uniforms - marching and chanting behind their leader up 23rd Street.
It was only once we got on 395 that we opened up the floor to new topics and my date shared a story of recently finding out that a friend and his wife had a decidedly poly-amorous bent.
The wife wanted to have an affair with a woman (who also had a wife, not to mention two other girlfriends), so husband agreed because he knew it would make her happy. That they sometimes had three ways didn't seem to bother him at all.
As you might imagine, opening a can of worms like poly-amorous relationships made for non-stop conversational fodder all the way down 95 and almost too soon, we were home, our art date a rousing success.
Now, about those drinks someplace cool...I have a few ideas.
Can't wait to hear from you, sweetheart.
And I couldn't wait to say yes to a DC art date soon enough, so it was barely after 9 a.m. when my date collected me and we headed north.
Once inside the city limits of my birth place on a breezy, sunny day, good native vibrations found us a parking space a block away from the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Waiting at a corner, an 89-year old woman got out of a car to join us in crossing the street, explaining that her husband dropped her off because he wouldn't enjoy the museum like she would. Given that she was an artist and a former docent at the museum, she was probably right.
Turns out he was her second husband anyway, the first having left her in the late '70s when that was the thing to do ("I had three friends whose husbands also just walked out"). She'd made the best of it, but it hadn't been easy and it had necessitated her compromising how much time she could devote to art.
She wished us a good visit and we took off for the third floor. Walking across a brilliantly colorful floor mosaic, a guard approached us asking where we were from. When we said Richmond, he inquired if we knew the state's three names. We didn't.
"Virginia, the Commonwealth and the white boys' state," he said unexpectedly. We were still processing that when he leaned in and said, "Now someone's coming up from Arkansas to rule us." Was this some kind of crazy Trump supporter?
"What just happened?" my date asked, as confused as I was as we scurried away. Why would a security guard be talking to us about such things? Had we crossed into the Twilight Zone and not known it?
All was right with the world the moment we stepped into "The Art of Romaine Brooks" exhibit, full of Whistler-indebted canvases in muted shades of black, white and gray portraying androgynous-looking women and well-dressed upper class lesbians of the early 20th century by an American ex-pat.
"White Azaleas" from 1910 showed a pale nude reclining on a huge couch, much like Manet's "Olympia," but bolder because it was done by a woman at a time when it was unheard of for women to assert non-traditional views of their role.
And these women depicted were completely non-traditional, I can assure you.
The show made a case for Brooks' fashionable and daring portraits of androgyny being associated with the so-called "new woman" during a time when sexually independent women projecting new and visible lesbian identities post-World War I was becoming more commonplace.
Drawings filled one gallery, all done for Brooks' unpublished memoir, to be called "No Pleasant Memories," surely the most miserable and accusatory memoir title ever, although the drawings were fascinating, often done in a single line.
There was so much estrogen in that show that you could almost feel it pulsating off the walls. We both loved it, although probably for different reasons.
Leaving the cocoon of the museum behind, we walked a few blocks to the colorful Bantam King - sibling to Daikaya - for lunch. Black and white Japanese comics on front walls, bright blue and green plastic trays on back wall and bathrooms that read, "WC: Kings, Queens, Errbody."
Best bathroom sign ever.
Our server was eager to share his spiel (and the fact that he's a finance major), disappointing us only when we learned that it was too early for fried chicken.
Not to worry, we dove into a killer starter, meatydumplings with chili oil, followed by bowls of chicken ramen. I chose miso broth loaded with dandelion greens, white onions, chili threads, soft-boiled egg and then added fresh corn while my date went with shoyu ramen, creamy with garlic and ginger.
All that was missing was a plate of fried chicken, but that's what future art dates are for, no?
From there, we motored to my old 'hood, Dupont Circle, and the William Merritt Chase retrospective at the Philips Collection in honor of the 100 year anniversary of the man's death.
Words aren't nearly good enough for the 40+ years of artistry we saw today, but I'll try.
First off, I learned that Chase and I are kindred souls on the subject of home decor. His philosophy was to think of walls as a canvas, with real life objects taking the place of color on them, something I've done for years.
With the darker palette of Frans Hals, Velazquez and Manet, Chase demonstrated his indebtedness to both Whistler and Singer Sargent in canvas after canvas as we swooned.
His portrait of Whistler as a fop had caused a rift in the men's friendship, but Edward Steichen's sumptuous sepia-toned photograph of Chase showed him to be just as big a one with a top hat, fur-trimmed overcoat, cigar and walking stick.
In a case were some of Chase's family albums, full of circa 1900s blue-tinged cynotypes of his children on the lawn and house details such as a staircase and candlelit outdoor dining table.
Behind me, a man spotted the albums and said, "These photo books look like my Mom's," and I knew before I turned around that he had to be an old duffer.
Hands down, my favorite was "The End of the Season," showing a lone woman sitting at a small wooden table on the beach near other tables, all with the chairs leaning in on the tables to signify that summer business had ceased. Down on the shore, a few people gathered.
You could almost feel her wistfulness about the change in season, a feeling I echo.
"Sunlight to Shadow" showed a well-dressed man staring into his teacup while nearby, a woman lounged in an elaborate hammock, looking away from him, the two clearly not speaking, supporting the notion that the canvas' original title had been "The Tiff."
Absolutely delightful was "Washing Day," a backyard scene of four lines covered in wet clothing with a laundry servant in a bonnet hanging more.
You could almost hear the sheets flapping in the breeze.
One of the most unique features of Chase's paintings were their unusual titles, such as "I Think I'm Ready Now," a portrait of a young woman from the back, facing a mirror. Left hip thrust out, hairbrush in hand, the train of her pink dress gathered behind her, it was obvious she rushed for no man.
Another, "May I Come In?" showed a woman in hat and muff entering from behind a door, the back of which was covered in paintings. He face reads as curious and sociable, so why wouldn't he let her come in?
Chase, we learned, was a devotee of still life paintings and considered unsurpassed in his portraits of fish, which he managed to make look believably shiny, wet and slick. The subject matter of "Just Onions" may have been lowly, but the rendering was so realistic you could almost smell them.
By the time we finished admiring and studying the 70+ works, we were both totally enthralled with what we'd seen. My only regret was that we didn't have enough time to look at it all again.
We compromised by stopping at Teaism for ginger lemonades (they'd just sold out so I tried iced mint tea while my date went with today's iced tisane, an African berry blend), along with the house specialty cookies, chunky chocolate pecan salty oat cookies, each weighing about a pound each.
"I'll never be able to finish the whole thing," my date insisted, but we sat there chatting and watching the street theater of R Street long enough that never became history.
I don't travel with those who can resist big flakes of sea salt on top of chocolate cookies.
Driving up M Street, my date pointed to 2400 and shared a story about a couple whose first apartment had been in that building. "All they had was a mattress on the floor, but the first night they were there, they laid on that mattress and watched a storm roll in through the big window."
I can see such an experience boding well for the future of the relationship.
Further down in front of the State Department, we passed Navy types - sailors in white bell bottoms and officers in tan summer uniforms - marching and chanting behind their leader up 23rd Street.
It was only once we got on 395 that we opened up the floor to new topics and my date shared a story of recently finding out that a friend and his wife had a decidedly poly-amorous bent.
The wife wanted to have an affair with a woman (who also had a wife, not to mention two other girlfriends), so husband agreed because he knew it would make her happy. That they sometimes had three ways didn't seem to bother him at all.
As you might imagine, opening a can of worms like poly-amorous relationships made for non-stop conversational fodder all the way down 95 and almost too soon, we were home, our art date a rousing success.
Now, about those drinks someplace cool...I have a few ideas.
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Modern Love
Best kind of away weekend possible.
Hometown: eat, art, eat, sleep, eat, art, art, eat, sleep. And the latter, only because I had to.
With a mere 37 1/2 hours in Washington, the itinerary was tight, albeit good tight.
First stop: Bistrot du Coin in Dupont Circle, my old neighborhood to meet a trio of strangers for champagne and mussels.
Our French server moved around the table, asking who wanted bubbles but when he got to me, just poured without asking. Why, I asked him, hadn't he checked first?
"You look like fun," he said, as if it were obvious.
An auspicious start.
My choice to go with the Piper Heidsieck Brut champagne was the moules au Pistou (mussels with pig two ways), a savory combination of pesto, prosciutto and French ham with enough crusty bread to sop up broth until I got near exploding.
Thus fortified, my companion and I did a walk through my old neighborhood, with me looking in the windows of my former apartment on 21st Street and then the condo my ex and I bought on N Street.
My imaginary soundtrack was David Bowie's "Let's Dance," which the guy who lived under us on N Street played endlessly when it came out.
And by endlessly, I mean for hours every day for about two months.
Let's sway
You could look into my eyes
Let's sway under the moonlight
The serious moonlight
You have no idea how that album came back to me in a rush when I looked into the front window of the brownstone that used to be ours.
After the walk down Memory Lane, we walked to the Phillips Collection to see "van Gogh: Repetitions."
The downside: it was timed entry and mobbed. The upside: many of the works in the exhibit came from private collections and I will probably never see them again.
Life is a balancing act and sometimes you share space with people who were raised by wolves as you all jostle to see incomparable art.
Le sigh.
Dinner was at Del Campo, a restaurant where meat reigns no doubt due to the chef's Cuban father and Peruvian mother.
The tailored-looking restaurant is a place where smoke reigns supreme, starting with both the olive oil and sea salt imparting smoky and delicious flavors.
Because there were six of us, we got to try all kinds of things: buttery ceviche of tuna, grilled avocado, olives, burnt shallots and pistachios; decadently rich Roseda farm beef heart anticucho, tartare and quail egg on grilled polenta; to-die-for charred beets, boucheron goat cheese, beet greens, burnt onion and balsamic; empanadas of wagyu skirt steak, caramelized onions and romesco; and my least favorite (but only because I'm not especially a salmon fan unless it's smoked) ceviche of grilled salmon, rapini, citrus, pork rinds and aioli.
Throughout the evening, we would get whiffs of meat on the grill or herbs being roasted, making for a delightful smell-o-vision experience.
Since we had enough people to mitigate the guilt, we followed that with a 48-ounce dry-aged Piedmont ridge tomahawk ribeye, an obscenely large chunk o' meat that arrived with bone marrow and two sauces, chimichurri and rosemary salsa verde.
Then there were the three kinds of chorizo - house, a rustic Argentianian and blood sausage- plus micro brussels sprouts with bacon and honey, executed so beautifully the green vegetable hater liked them. Yum all around.
Our accented server also talked us into grilled jumbo head-on prawns and we proceeded to bite the head and suck the tail the traditional way.
My favorite moment came when the pickiest eater in the group ate one of my beef hearts and raved about how rich and good it tasted, proving my theory that you can't dislike something if you don't know what it is.
All in all, a most enjoyable evening that morphed into an unexpectedly late night gab fest with a guy named Matt, bowls of popcorn and a '70s soundtrack at Harry's.
Then we got up and did it all over again.
Today began with another meal, this one at Graffiatio, TV chef Mike Isabella's Italian and Jersey-inspired joint.
Going at lunch was inspired so we didn't have to deal with crowds, instead taking bar seats right in front of the wood-burning oven and ordering Prosecco on tap to start the meal.
An appetizer of broccolini with red peppers, feta and walnuts was a beautiful marriage of flavors served at room temperature, a surefire way to start the day feeling somewhat virtuous.
While we listened to a soundtrack of Passion Pit, Two Door Cinema Club and Phoenix (and agreed that the kitchen staff looked like mechanics in their grey shirts), we watched our two pizzas being exactingly placed in the carefully-tended oven.
Porky's Revenge (soprassatta, pepperoni, sausage) spoke to my morning-after need for pig while the White House (Tallegio, prosciutto, ricotta and black pepper honey) had a delicate sweetness that was habit-forming after one bite.
After lunch, we walked barely a block to the National Building museum because I wanted to see "Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future 1940-1990," but got waylaid.
A docent was offering a tour of the building itself, the former Pension Bureau, and we joined a couple of strangers to learn about the space that was built to house the administrative offices that served former Civil War soldiers and grew to host inaugural balls and is now a museum.
Our guide was full of information, but also a real slow talker, a repeater and if we hadn't been standing up, probably also capable of putting us to sleep.
After a half hour with him, we politely excused ourselves to go see something more stimulating, like an exhibit about how car culture defined land development in California.
I learned that all that distinctive, colorful and futuristic-looking architecture was designed to draw in people driving by at high speeds.
And how about his: there were even drive-up churches built. You could pray and be on your way.
I found myself fascinated by the contrast in photographs of Wilshire Boulevard in 1935 (mostly fields) and 1955 (a close-together community of houses taking up every available inch).
There were several wildly funny and compelling bits of film to watch including one that advocated how to enjoy fast, safe freeway driving.
I'll warn you right now, the guy who was always changing lanes like a jack rabbit ended up getting a ticket and a stern talking-to from the police officer.
As for all those freeways and speedways built in California, who knew they had 35 mph speed limits in the beginning?
The only way to follow a show about the cultural history of L.A. was with one about Paris, so we walked down to the National Gallery to see "Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris."
Chosen to document the "modernization" of Paris after Napoleon, the galleries of exquisite black and white photographs were an extraordinary look into parts of the venerable city that no longer exist today.
Because the advent of street lights was a game-changer (the nighttime being too dark to venture out into), Marville did a series on streetlights, showing the variety of styles installed, and how they varied from poorer neighborhoods to upscale ones.
There were several photographs of the public urinals installed to improve sanitation; one even had a street light installed above it.
How is it Paris had public bathrooms in the 19th century and we still do not in the 21st, asked the woman who is frequently in need of a bathroom when in public?
The exhibit was as much a cultural lesson as a visual treat since I learned so much about the remapping of Paris to widen boulevards and correct narrow, winding streets to straight ones.
Interestingly enough, when revamping the Bois de Boulogne, a large public park, the planners set about to change the straight paths within it to meandering, curved paths instead.
Sometimes the Parisians need to curve and sometimes not apparently.
But my favorite moment seeing the show came when I read an explanation for why Marville sometimes inserted a figure into his photographs.
Sometimes it was to give a sense of isolation to the setting in order to mirror the feelings many Parisians were having as their old city disappeared.
But sometimes, the figure was meant to represent a flaneur, a person who walks the streets with no purpose other than to collect impressions.
I had learned about flaneurs only yesterday while reading a book review of "Tales of Two Cities: Paris, London and the Birth of the Modern City," a look at how Paris mimicked London to become modern.
In the review, flaneurs were mentioned as having come into existence far sooner in London than in Paris solely because of the improvements there in urban design, meaning gutters, sidewalks and, yes, streetlights.
In other words, all the things that Marville had photographed. It was a delightful overlap in my ongoing cultural history education.
Because we had time, we also looked at "Yes, No, Maybe: Artists Working at Crown Point Press," a show of working proofs and edition prints by artists as varied as Chuck Close and John Cage.
We finished our afternoon at the National Gallery with a new acquisition, Dutch master Gerrit von Honthorst's "The Concert," notable for the painter's Carvaggio influences and because it's just come into the collection.
Asking at the information desk where to find it, I mispronounced "von Honthort" and the man gently corrected me.
I had no excuse except that I wasn't raised in a groot.
Art needs met, we set off for happy hour at Ambar, a Balkan restaurant with a wine list unlike any I'd ever seen.
Full of Moldovan, Serbian, Bulgarian and Slovenian choices, we chose Belje Welschriesling, a Croatian wine that tasted of stone fruits and gave us time to talk about all the art we'd just taken in.
The music varied from pop goodness from the likes of Ivy to what sounded like Balkan trance music as we drank our wine and rested our feet.
We were in no hurry after a non-stop 30 hours.
To finish out a lovely weekend, we walked down the block to Rose's Luxury, securing two stools at the cozy garden bar ("It's my favorite place in the restaurant," the hostess told us) and getting a hip hello from the bartender with the partially shaved head, pale pink sweater and pearls.
I'm not sure when she decided to take a shine to me, maybe when I gave her a hard time, maybe when I called her on a few things, but before long she was my new best friend and we were good-naturedly parrying across the bar.
While giving each other a hard time, we tore into a warm loaf of potato bread with butter topped with chives and baked potato crumbles.
Someone in Richmond needs to do this STAT.
From there, we had Kusshi oysters with a Dark and Stormy granita, but only after I gave our bartender crap about the California oysters.
Yes, I know they're all the rage out there and yes, their small size and buttery flavor were just lovely, but, as my date observed dryly, that's a mighty big footprint for a small plate.
But, yes, they were yummy and the distinctive granita was slurp-worthy.
Because we're both fried chicken devotees, we had to get the pickle-brined fried chicken, which came in a bowl with honey and benne seeds.
We weren't expecting "nuggets" but that's what we got and while they had a perfectly crispy coating, we both agreed that the only way the pickle-brined chicken could have been improved was by cooking it in bacon fat and fortunately we know a place that does just that...and much closer to home.
For our main course, we got a family-style plate of pork schnitzel with baked applesauce, sunchoke salad and fresh greens, a satisfying meal.
By then, our bartender had pointed out which server was hot for her and asked how long my date and I had been seeing each other.
Naturally, we talked about music and which shows she'd been to lately and next thing I knew, she was bringing me a dessert I hadn't asked for.
Celery root mascarpone with poached pear juice and a brown sugar and nut crumble topping was both refreshing and elegant, a lovely and unexpected treat.
Ditto when she handed me a piece of paper with her name and e-mail address on it, making me promise to contact her so we can meet up again here or there.
Until then, she promised to send me pictures of her and the cute server who likes her.
In my quest to be a modern-day flaneur, it will be one more impression to collect.
For now, still full of good food and art, it is time for this observer to sleep.
Hometown: eat, art, eat, sleep, eat, art, art, eat, sleep. And the latter, only because I had to.
With a mere 37 1/2 hours in Washington, the itinerary was tight, albeit good tight.
First stop: Bistrot du Coin in Dupont Circle, my old neighborhood to meet a trio of strangers for champagne and mussels.
Our French server moved around the table, asking who wanted bubbles but when he got to me, just poured without asking. Why, I asked him, hadn't he checked first?
"You look like fun," he said, as if it were obvious.
An auspicious start.
My choice to go with the Piper Heidsieck Brut champagne was the moules au Pistou (mussels with pig two ways), a savory combination of pesto, prosciutto and French ham with enough crusty bread to sop up broth until I got near exploding.
Thus fortified, my companion and I did a walk through my old neighborhood, with me looking in the windows of my former apartment on 21st Street and then the condo my ex and I bought on N Street.
My imaginary soundtrack was David Bowie's "Let's Dance," which the guy who lived under us on N Street played endlessly when it came out.
And by endlessly, I mean for hours every day for about two months.
Let's sway
You could look into my eyes
Let's sway under the moonlight
The serious moonlight
You have no idea how that album came back to me in a rush when I looked into the front window of the brownstone that used to be ours.
After the walk down Memory Lane, we walked to the Phillips Collection to see "van Gogh: Repetitions."
The downside: it was timed entry and mobbed. The upside: many of the works in the exhibit came from private collections and I will probably never see them again.
Life is a balancing act and sometimes you share space with people who were raised by wolves as you all jostle to see incomparable art.
Le sigh.
Dinner was at Del Campo, a restaurant where meat reigns no doubt due to the chef's Cuban father and Peruvian mother.
The tailored-looking restaurant is a place where smoke reigns supreme, starting with both the olive oil and sea salt imparting smoky and delicious flavors.
Because there were six of us, we got to try all kinds of things: buttery ceviche of tuna, grilled avocado, olives, burnt shallots and pistachios; decadently rich Roseda farm beef heart anticucho, tartare and quail egg on grilled polenta; to-die-for charred beets, boucheron goat cheese, beet greens, burnt onion and balsamic; empanadas of wagyu skirt steak, caramelized onions and romesco; and my least favorite (but only because I'm not especially a salmon fan unless it's smoked) ceviche of grilled salmon, rapini, citrus, pork rinds and aioli.
Throughout the evening, we would get whiffs of meat on the grill or herbs being roasted, making for a delightful smell-o-vision experience.
Since we had enough people to mitigate the guilt, we followed that with a 48-ounce dry-aged Piedmont ridge tomahawk ribeye, an obscenely large chunk o' meat that arrived with bone marrow and two sauces, chimichurri and rosemary salsa verde.
Then there were the three kinds of chorizo - house, a rustic Argentianian and blood sausage- plus micro brussels sprouts with bacon and honey, executed so beautifully the green vegetable hater liked them. Yum all around.
Our accented server also talked us into grilled jumbo head-on prawns and we proceeded to bite the head and suck the tail the traditional way.
My favorite moment came when the pickiest eater in the group ate one of my beef hearts and raved about how rich and good it tasted, proving my theory that you can't dislike something if you don't know what it is.
All in all, a most enjoyable evening that morphed into an unexpectedly late night gab fest with a guy named Matt, bowls of popcorn and a '70s soundtrack at Harry's.
Then we got up and did it all over again.
Today began with another meal, this one at Graffiatio, TV chef Mike Isabella's Italian and Jersey-inspired joint.
Going at lunch was inspired so we didn't have to deal with crowds, instead taking bar seats right in front of the wood-burning oven and ordering Prosecco on tap to start the meal.
An appetizer of broccolini with red peppers, feta and walnuts was a beautiful marriage of flavors served at room temperature, a surefire way to start the day feeling somewhat virtuous.
While we listened to a soundtrack of Passion Pit, Two Door Cinema Club and Phoenix (and agreed that the kitchen staff looked like mechanics in their grey shirts), we watched our two pizzas being exactingly placed in the carefully-tended oven.
Porky's Revenge (soprassatta, pepperoni, sausage) spoke to my morning-after need for pig while the White House (Tallegio, prosciutto, ricotta and black pepper honey) had a delicate sweetness that was habit-forming after one bite.
After lunch, we walked barely a block to the National Building museum because I wanted to see "Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future 1940-1990," but got waylaid.
A docent was offering a tour of the building itself, the former Pension Bureau, and we joined a couple of strangers to learn about the space that was built to house the administrative offices that served former Civil War soldiers and grew to host inaugural balls and is now a museum.
Our guide was full of information, but also a real slow talker, a repeater and if we hadn't been standing up, probably also capable of putting us to sleep.
After a half hour with him, we politely excused ourselves to go see something more stimulating, like an exhibit about how car culture defined land development in California.
I learned that all that distinctive, colorful and futuristic-looking architecture was designed to draw in people driving by at high speeds.
And how about his: there were even drive-up churches built. You could pray and be on your way.
I found myself fascinated by the contrast in photographs of Wilshire Boulevard in 1935 (mostly fields) and 1955 (a close-together community of houses taking up every available inch).
There were several wildly funny and compelling bits of film to watch including one that advocated how to enjoy fast, safe freeway driving.
I'll warn you right now, the guy who was always changing lanes like a jack rabbit ended up getting a ticket and a stern talking-to from the police officer.
As for all those freeways and speedways built in California, who knew they had 35 mph speed limits in the beginning?
The only way to follow a show about the cultural history of L.A. was with one about Paris, so we walked down to the National Gallery to see "Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris."
Chosen to document the "modernization" of Paris after Napoleon, the galleries of exquisite black and white photographs were an extraordinary look into parts of the venerable city that no longer exist today.
Because the advent of street lights was a game-changer (the nighttime being too dark to venture out into), Marville did a series on streetlights, showing the variety of styles installed, and how they varied from poorer neighborhoods to upscale ones.
There were several photographs of the public urinals installed to improve sanitation; one even had a street light installed above it.
How is it Paris had public bathrooms in the 19th century and we still do not in the 21st, asked the woman who is frequently in need of a bathroom when in public?
The exhibit was as much a cultural lesson as a visual treat since I learned so much about the remapping of Paris to widen boulevards and correct narrow, winding streets to straight ones.
Interestingly enough, when revamping the Bois de Boulogne, a large public park, the planners set about to change the straight paths within it to meandering, curved paths instead.
Sometimes the Parisians need to curve and sometimes not apparently.
But my favorite moment seeing the show came when I read an explanation for why Marville sometimes inserted a figure into his photographs.
Sometimes it was to give a sense of isolation to the setting in order to mirror the feelings many Parisians were having as their old city disappeared.
But sometimes, the figure was meant to represent a flaneur, a person who walks the streets with no purpose other than to collect impressions.
I had learned about flaneurs only yesterday while reading a book review of "Tales of Two Cities: Paris, London and the Birth of the Modern City," a look at how Paris mimicked London to become modern.
In the review, flaneurs were mentioned as having come into existence far sooner in London than in Paris solely because of the improvements there in urban design, meaning gutters, sidewalks and, yes, streetlights.
In other words, all the things that Marville had photographed. It was a delightful overlap in my ongoing cultural history education.
Because we had time, we also looked at "Yes, No, Maybe: Artists Working at Crown Point Press," a show of working proofs and edition prints by artists as varied as Chuck Close and John Cage.
We finished our afternoon at the National Gallery with a new acquisition, Dutch master Gerrit von Honthorst's "The Concert," notable for the painter's Carvaggio influences and because it's just come into the collection.
Asking at the information desk where to find it, I mispronounced "von Honthort" and the man gently corrected me.
I had no excuse except that I wasn't raised in a groot.
Art needs met, we set off for happy hour at Ambar, a Balkan restaurant with a wine list unlike any I'd ever seen.
Full of Moldovan, Serbian, Bulgarian and Slovenian choices, we chose Belje Welschriesling, a Croatian wine that tasted of stone fruits and gave us time to talk about all the art we'd just taken in.
The music varied from pop goodness from the likes of Ivy to what sounded like Balkan trance music as we drank our wine and rested our feet.
We were in no hurry after a non-stop 30 hours.
To finish out a lovely weekend, we walked down the block to Rose's Luxury, securing two stools at the cozy garden bar ("It's my favorite place in the restaurant," the hostess told us) and getting a hip hello from the bartender with the partially shaved head, pale pink sweater and pearls.
I'm not sure when she decided to take a shine to me, maybe when I gave her a hard time, maybe when I called her on a few things, but before long she was my new best friend and we were good-naturedly parrying across the bar.
While giving each other a hard time, we tore into a warm loaf of potato bread with butter topped with chives and baked potato crumbles.
Someone in Richmond needs to do this STAT.
From there, we had Kusshi oysters with a Dark and Stormy granita, but only after I gave our bartender crap about the California oysters.
Yes, I know they're all the rage out there and yes, their small size and buttery flavor were just lovely, but, as my date observed dryly, that's a mighty big footprint for a small plate.
But, yes, they were yummy and the distinctive granita was slurp-worthy.
Because we're both fried chicken devotees, we had to get the pickle-brined fried chicken, which came in a bowl with honey and benne seeds.
We weren't expecting "nuggets" but that's what we got and while they had a perfectly crispy coating, we both agreed that the only way the pickle-brined chicken could have been improved was by cooking it in bacon fat and fortunately we know a place that does just that...and much closer to home.
For our main course, we got a family-style plate of pork schnitzel with baked applesauce, sunchoke salad and fresh greens, a satisfying meal.
By then, our bartender had pointed out which server was hot for her and asked how long my date and I had been seeing each other.
Naturally, we talked about music and which shows she'd been to lately and next thing I knew, she was bringing me a dessert I hadn't asked for.
Celery root mascarpone with poached pear juice and a brown sugar and nut crumble topping was both refreshing and elegant, a lovely and unexpected treat.
Ditto when she handed me a piece of paper with her name and e-mail address on it, making me promise to contact her so we can meet up again here or there.
Until then, she promised to send me pictures of her and the cute server who likes her.
In my quest to be a modern-day flaneur, it will be one more impression to collect.
For now, still full of good food and art, it is time for this observer to sleep.
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