Restaurant Week at the Oval Room

Because you can never have enough excuses to spend $30 on a three course meal in a restaurant you would otherwise probably never enter. (Unless it was for some sort of fund-raising event for Senator/Congressman GimmemoneysoIcanrunthiscountryintotheground. I am not usually invited to those anyway.) So I made a call to the mother hen and forced her to spend money on a dinner she really did not want. (And she paid for dinner! How does that happen? I invite, pick the place, and force her out into a noisy place filled with mean and unkempt Washingtonians and she pays!) On top of all that, I made reservations, but did not bother for directions. Hell, it’s DC. I know where that is. So, armed with an appetite for American haute cuisine, we made our way into the Nation’s Capital. Where everyone was driving as.slow.as.humanly.possible. ARGH! And once in the city, I only knew it was 800 something. It’s either Constitution or Connecticut. My mother had to use the cell phone to find out the location as I would go to jail, Brother, were I to hold that baby to my ear.
Street parking. Nicely done.
Meany that I am, I won’t even let my mother peruse the real menu. NO! It’s restaurant week. We only look at that menu. (What is wrong with me?)
So anyway, dinner consisted of a 5 asparagus stalk salad, some “gamey” (Her words, not mine) pork with yummy polenta for my mother and a very fishy Caesar salad (ew) and a red snapper entrée for me. Normally this meal would have been over in 15 seconds, as the portions were teeny (which is ideal for me! Yay!), but yappy yapperson over here, could not shut up long enough to shove any food down her throat. Poetic justice served? It was so darn loud, my mother could not hear a thing I was saying anyway. Ha! (But she sure as hell tried to listen. I love that lady, did you guys know that?)
Dessert came and presented itself as 3 mini cotton balls of ice cream. Banana, caramel and vanilla. I took all three and jammed ‘em in my mouth. Yum. Mummy got a bowl of fresh, seasonal berries. This turned out to be a strawberry cut into six pieces, a couple of raspberries, blackberries and blueberries. But the best part was when she held up one of the myriad of maraschino cherries in her bowl and says, “Mm, in season!”
And the coffee was good.