On Saturday night, Larry, Amy and I tried out David Craig for Bethesda Restaurant Week. Ever since it opened, I have been dying to go here, but every time we have tried to make a reservation they were already booked. So I was happily surprised when I called last week and got a table for 7 p.m. What’s more, when we arrived, the host actually gave us our choice of tables! That doesn’t happen often in restaurants, does it? (Although the host was not American—he had an unidentifiable British/Australian accent—so maybe he thought that Larry was the Larry King Live.)
The restaurant week menu featured a limited selection of items on their regular menu. But when I asked what the up-charge would be for the butter lettuce, fried green tomatoes, applewood smoked bacon, gorgonzola, pecans, and brown sugar brown butter vinaigrette salad, I was informed by the server that if I wanted that salad I would have to pay full price for it, since it wasn’t on the restaurant week menu. That seemed odd to me.
So for the first course, I ordered the classic Caesar salad (with a giant anchovy! Yay!), choosing not to pay an extra $12 for the other salad. Larry ordered the P.E.I mussels with onion, garlic, hot pepper and a sherry cream sauce, and Amy got the arugula and frisee salad with apple, red beet, goat cheese and roasted beet vinaigrette. All the first courses were excellent. I loved the crispy parmesan wafer on my salad.
For the second course, I ordered the hand cut fettuccine with meat and wild mushroom ragu and cream. It was cooked al dente, and the ragu was flavorful and not too rich. Larry ordered the braised veal cheeks served with parmesan semolina gnocchi, Swiss chard, golden raisins, pinenuts and orange gremolata enriched veal reduction. The meat was very tender, and the parmesan gnocchi was amazing—just like gnocchi should be, little light pillows. However, I thought that the orange reduction just slightly overpowered the delicate flavor of the gnocchi. Amy ordered the wild mushroom and ricotta ravioli—another amazing dish.
For dessert, I ordered the apple crisp with vanilla ice cream. It was delicious, but not spectacular. Amy ordered the vanilla crème brulee, and it although was “ordinary crème brulee”, it was perfectly executed. Larry’s dessert was the best of the three—blood orange pudding cake with blood orange sorbet. This seasonal dessert had amazing flavor and an interesting duality of textures, and it reminded Larry of something he made in his former life as a chef. He has the recipe if anyone is interested.
I will most definitely go back to David Craig. Everything we had was done very well. The only qualms I have were that we seemed a bit rushed—we were done with the three course meal in one hour. But I’m willing to chalk that up to it being restaurant week. And the service seemed a tad below par of what I’d expect, but once again, it could just be a restaurant week. (For instance, they served the main course while one of us had stepped away from the table—they should have waited until we were all seated. And they didn’t clear the bowl of discarded mussel shells from Larry’s first course until after the second course.) I didn’t take any pictures of the food this time, because the lighting was just too dark.
Besides just the great dinner, we had a great time with Amy yesterday. She was the star in our creative projects—she was my model for a little photography shoot, and she and Larry worked for several hours on a top secret project. More details to come later…