We don't often go out to dinner on a Saturday night. Too many people, and often a long wait for a table. But this past Saturday our friend Stacy suggested a night out for dinner, so we agreed to enjoy the evening and picked an area near home, within walking distance. Our choice for dinner: The Queen Vic gastropup in the 1200 block of H Street, NE. It lived up to positive expectations.
First, and very important, even though it is a soccer sports bar, in love with Liverpool (for that they can be forgiven from a Mancunian, like John) Football Club, it has a medium sound level. You can actually hear people talk!
And it has a wonderful selection of English ales and bitters. We enjoyed three Newcastle Brown Ales with dinner as we talked about Stacy's upcoming 'round the world trip and a year's leave at Tuft's Fletcher School and her new abode in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The menu itself is quite small, but the specials are what you go to eat. The chef, English, makes lovely gastropup dinners. We started with excellent welsh rarebit, basically an open face grilled cheese sandwich but with the bread dunked in beer. Better than the description. Then we decided on the mains: Ben had hake with a spelt risotto, John had duck breast on puréed cauliflower and beets, and Stacy went for the roast pork belly on fingerling potatoes. Not a peep of disappointment from any of us. In fact, Stacy probably picked the best main course of us all, but that's not saying we didn't enjoy the total experience.
Our waiter, a sports fanatic, had a wonderfully broad Pittsburgh accent, recognizable immediately for his pronunciation of the vowel "a". It turns out that his dad and John knew many of the same sports figures and steelworker union leaders--his dad had been involved with the USW thirty years ago when John had covered the steel industry for WPXI-TV in Pittsburgh. He and Ben and mutual friends from Ben's days at Gateway High in Monroeville. Poor Texan Stacy got left out of that conversation.
When we'd had enough of the sports pub, we headed up the street to a new pastry and pie shop Dangerously Deliciously Pies, the DC outpost of a Baltimore pie shop. Now, Charm City is not one of our more favorite places, but this pie shop is wonderful, and thank you Baltimore for giving them their start. We enjoyed three different kinds, chocolate, pecan and lemon. John's lemon pie was more like English lemon curd, so it fit his Brit evening nicely. Stacy and Ben's pies were excellent. A good place to finish off a Saturday evening, and very busy at 11 PM at night!
An easy walk home.
Monday, April 30, 2012
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Jakuchu at the National Gallery
Where to start with this beautiful presentation? The show, on loan from the Japanese Imperial Household to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Japanese gift of cherry trees to Washington in 1912, is magnificent. Set in one room, the show is a collection of 30 scrolls of animals and birds painted in the 18th century. This is one of them from the National Gallery's website.
Each of them is about eight feet high and two feet wide and the subject matter varies from subjects like schools of local fish, phoenixes, and cockatoos, to beautiful blooming flowers and trees such as peonies, and peach, apple, and cherry trees.
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Itō Jakuchū |
The scrolls are lined up on either side of the room whose far wall houses a triptych of the Buddha and two boddhisattvas. These are easily missable, being copies of Chinese scrolls and painfully ordinary compared to the brilliance of the scrolls.
A warning for those who want to see these beautiful scrolls: The show closes in about ten days (April 29). Another warning: Be prepared for crowds. We went early on a Wednesday morning as the museum opened. By the time we left, at 11, the room was very busy. On a weekend, I would expect it to be very difficult to enjoy Jakuchu's wonders.
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