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.