Offbeat Eats

(Closed) I’ve always been a great fan of gelato. The Italian cousin to ice cream, gelato is a more subtler variation on the same idea. milk, cream, sugar, and flavoring. But just like the idea that while hash browns and french fries are both the same thing (fried potatoes), it’s the difference in execution that makes gelato such a great product. More milk than in ice cream, less air, gentle churning, and a warming serving temperature always make for a pleasant bowl of rich, creamy gelato. Unfortunately, while ice cream shops are plentiful (indeed, soft serve places are a dime a dozen around here in the summer months), good gelato places are fairly rare in the US. And, until 2010, nonexistent around here. Until Morano Gelato opened up shop.

After completing my business trip in Arlington, I had a few hours to kill before I needed to head over to DC for my next meeting. Perusing the normal rating sites on my iPhone, I noticed that one place in Arlington in particular was getting consistently top marks: El Chilango. The interesting thing here is the El Chilango isn’t in a part of Arlington particularly well known for good food. Located in a residential area at approximately the corner of 14th St N and Quinn Street, approximately equidistant from both the Courthouse and Rosslyn Metro stations, just off of Arlington Boulevard (and a stone’s toss from my brother’s old apartment on Oak St, uphill from the Iwo Jima memorial), El Chilango is a taco truck. Yes, Arlington now has a decent taco truck!

While I may have mentioned this before, one of the things I generally don’t like when I’m traveling is free breakfast in hotels. I have several reasons for this, but the big reasons are that (a) hotel breakfasts generally suck, especially for the price, and (b) one of the perks of the otherwise dismal life of the business traveler is the ability to try new places to eat. So, like most every time my schedule allows me to try a local place for breakfast instead of having bland waffles at the hotel, I try to do so, even if it requires getting up early. This time, I decided to walk several blocks from the hotel to Northside Social Coffee and Wine in Arlington.

Well, after after a few complications in my travel due to Columbus Day (The Marc trains weren’t running, and the Metro’s Orange line was farked), I made it to Arlington. After a fairly successful meeting the next day, I decided it would be a good opportunity to meet up with some of my DC area friends, and we decided a nice, large gathering at Kabob Bazaar in Clarendon for, well, kabobs, was in order…

It always helps to have, well, peeps. My business travel again had me traveling to Arlington, VA, and in general that leaves me with two options to get there from NH: I can either fly from Manchester to Reagan National Airport for a lot of money and really inconvenient flight times, or I can fly to Baltimore with good flight times and extremely low cost. The downside of the Baltimore route is that it involves planes, trains, and automobiles, since getting from BWI to Arlington generally requires some combination of shuttle bus, train, and Metro. But the useful thing is that I know quite a few people that live near BWI, and have often used this as an opportunity to have them pick me up for a meal before I catch the train to DC. Last time, it was the Paper Moon Diner. This time, my friend Betsy picked me up, and we decided to try G&M for some crabcakes…

(Closed) Every once in a while, I find myself needing to revisit a restaurant I’ve already reviewed. Sometimes it’s because I’ve found, after my visit, that I missed a particularly notable dish. Sometimes, I feel that a visit I has wasn’t representative for some reason. And, quite frankly, a successful restaurant is an evolving entity, and restaurants can, and should, change over time. You can read my original review of Greenhouse Tavern here. While I came away from that visit thoroughly wowed by Greenhouse, I had only basically sampled a few items off of the late night bar menu. Since then, I’ve had almost half a dozen visits, and had a chance to really work through the overall menu, so it was time for a re-review. Also, that first visit, as you can read from the review, involved more than a little direct interaction with the kitchen (they kept bringing out cool things for me to photograph and sample), and I figured another review in which I was just a random customer was in order as well (I wasn’t completely successful in this, one of the staff recognized me this time). And finally, it’s been 2 years since that review, and that’s a long time in the restaurant world. The Greenhouse is still mostly the same, but it’s had a lot of little changes. In 2009 it was only about six months old. Now it’s a seasoned veteran restaurant with a passel of awards, some new paint, and a lot of tinkering with the menu (as an aside, do they still have the bar menu? I’ve always had coworkers in tow the last few visits, so I haven’t actually sat at the bar…) Well, last month’s trip to Cleveland left a free evening, and I decided to revisit Greenhouse Tavern for several of these reasons. I also had two coworkers in tow (one who I had previously brought in 2010, and one that hadn’t been before), and we all agreed that it was worth trying for dinner. And like my previous handful of visits, it took us all only a few seconds to decide that the $44 tasting menu was where the action was at…

Most every trip to Cleveland I try to make it to the West Side to see what’s going on. Well, this time, there was actually some major news: a new brewpub has opened. Market Garden is now open, across the street from one of my other West Side favorites, Bar Cento/Bier Markt. So I decided to walk across the street and give it a try. Market Garden is the latest venture from Sam McNulty, who opened the above-mentioned Bar Cento an Bier Markt across the street. Earlier this year, he teamed up with former Dogfish Head brewer Andy Tveekrem (I’ve since learned that in Cleveland beer circles he’s got quite the following) to open up a new beer garden-styled establishment, focusing on beer and distilled spirits, but also offering a decent menu of, well, upscale pub grub. Bringing on experienced chef Mike Nowak from across the street, they’ve got a decent menu of appetizers, sandwiches, burgers, and lighter dinners…

(Closed) As I’ve mentioned before, I’m often having to travel to Cleveland to meet with clients at NASA Glenn Research Center. As a result, I’ve ended up having a number of Cleveland restaurants that I get to semi-regularly visit and enjoy. I always get a hearty welcome from the folks at Greenhouse Tavern and Bar Cento, both of which I’ve written up in the past (and I visited both this trip as well, I’ll do an update post on Greenhouse Tavern later). But one place I’ve frequented several times, but haven’t yet written up is AMP 150. The AMP in AMP 150 stands for “America’s Modern Palate”, and that’s basically what AMP 150 is about, modern American food. Nestled into the Cleveland Airport Marriott, it’s the sort of place that you’d probably drive by several times wondering “Is that place good?” but never going inside, especially since the Cleveland Airport Marriott isn’t exactly the area’s most photogenic hotel. But inside, they’ve done a great job renovating the restaurant space, making for a ~200 seat restaurant with a nice lively decor. I should mention that I’m always a bit skeptical of restaurants in hotels, since the manager of the restaurant has to play to several crowds: the hotel bar crowd, the people coming for a good dinner, and the people staying at the hotel for which the restaurant is primarily a convenient option (or, if they don’t have a car, probably their only option). So this makes the restauranteur have to cater from everything from bar snacks, to modest dinners, to fancy entrees and tasting menus. And a lot of places can do some of these well, but not all of them. Luckily, AMP 150 seems to pull off the whole menu well…

Well, after a four day weekend in Lower, Slower Delaware, it was time for us to head home. However, heading home meant heading back to the Philadelphia Airport, so we used the opportunity to try a few places on the way back. The first was Helen’s Sausage House in Smyrna, DE, but it turned out they were only open through lunch, and we got there about 15 minutes too late. So we headed on up to the greater Philly area, and decided to check out Victory Brewing Company’s brewpub in Downingtown, PA. I’m always a little hesitant when it comes to brewpubs run by up and coming breweries, because it’s hard to focus on both the brewery and a brewpub and do both right. Most (but not all) of the places I’ve been only manage to have enough focus to keep the brewery going, and what usually seems to happen is that really high ambitions are set for the brewpub, but there’s just not enough effort to make the brewpub as good as the beer. I’ve run into this a lot of times, having experiences some particularly disappointing meals at other brewery brewpubs (like Stone and Harpoon, to name two). There are some exceptions, but mostly those are places like Long Trail in Vermont that don’t really try to be fancy: they set a reasonable goal (“we’re selling burgers and fries”) and do that well, instead of getting fancy. But things started off pretty decently. The first challenge with Victory is getting there in the first place. With our goal being to get there around happy hour, we had quite a bit of traffic facing us coming up from Delaware. Once we got to Downingtown, however, it was relatively easy to find the industrial park where the brewery and brewpub are located. However, the signage in the park isn’t the greatest, so expect to spend a bit of time wandering around the area looking for the brewpub (a note to other seekers: it’s in the southwest corner of the area).

After a nice day at Cape Henlopen swimming at the beach and riding loaner bikes around, we decided that it was time for an early dinner. Since Carol had never experienced Maryland-style crabs before (somehow, our attempts at this on previous visits kept getting thwarted), so this time we made it a point to go find a crab place. Which is actually a bit hard to do, if you were in the situation we were: returning from the beach, looking for some decent crabs and beer without spending a lot of money. After reading a bunch of reviews, we ended up at Lazy Susan’s on the Coastal Highway in Lewes. Well, Lazy Susan’s is definitely a “crab joint”, one of those places that’s primarily decorated with random seashore kitsch, with picnic tables (inside even) covered with paper for the inevitable mess. The beer list isn’t terribly impressive, but the beers were cheap ($2 each), and the waitress quite friendly, so we grabbed a nice table by the window and looked over the offerings…