“You’re not very impressive.” A pause punctuated this matter of fact as Joon stumbled into the rest of his thought.
“…But you’re good just to have around, you know?”

I don’t know if I knew or if I’ve ever really known, but being the kind of guy who tends to practice honesty to a fault and awkwardness to the hilt, I took comfort in the motif. For years now Joon, fellow socal->east bay->east coast transplant and author of the wine blog Vinicultured, has been one of my life’s more charming anchors. Whenever I head down to Washington, I can expect our conversations to be equal parts rich and inane (I’d hate to see a spreadsheet of tags on our dialogue that includes the phrase, “That’s what she said”).

I can also expect our meals to be more or less perfect. This guarantee isn’t stamped in the sparse facts of DC’s food scene, though Ben’s Chili Bowl is about as perfect a fact as I can imagine. There’s something more affirming in the mere act of eating with Joon that brings me back from the edge of food and places me firmly in the moment of the meal. I imagine it has something to do with our shared trajectories from home. I imagine it also has something to do with the fact that if we’re ever together after 9:00 p.m., Springsteen will find his way out of our lungs and into the surrounding air. That said, I imagine it has even more to do with the copious amounts of alcohol that accompany our dinners and second dinners – when else do I begin a meal with two fingers of bourbon, accompany it with two bottles of wine, follow it with a glass of scotch and end it with St. Germain?

In any course of imagination, dinner with Joon, be it at a greasy spoon or in the dining room, tends to reconnect and reinforce what it is to eat, drink and be merry. While the catalyst for my bus rides to Washington is almost always board games with the Examiner, the best part of these trips follows our now tried and true steps from Joon’s Foggy Bottom apartment to The Wine Specialist, where we try a glass of whatever’s on the sample table, walk out the door with three bottles of booze, and back up the street for the start of a weekend free of planning, partying and falling behind.

This past weekend fell easily into the intersection of tried and true. Fresh off a trip to Eastern Market, Joon and his roommate prepared a simple three course meal. A few friends and friends of friends rounded out our company, which ate slowly and sensed completely. The appetizer was a blend of chicken, rice, apple and grilled onion, the main course was sauteed catfish served with fresh indigo frisee greens and a fried hunk of scallion peppered goat cheese, and dessert came in the form of summer peaches, sauteed in white wine and consummated by vanilla ice cream. Two refreshing summer wines I’d brought from New York, one a blend of whites and the other a particularly punchy pinot noir, accompanied the meal, which was followed by welcome doses of rose and bourbon. Our brief jaunt afterward to the Brickskeller, where voices clamored against the senses and the joy of one ritual found itself submerged in the predictability of another, was along most lines of comparison a lifeless event, a night cap rendered necessary only by the fact that the beer closet’s jukebox happens to include “Thunder Road.”

The next evening we strolled through an eerily perfected balminess to Founding Farmers, a farm-to-table contemporary American restaurant that is one of the few dining highlights of the Foggy Bottom neighborhood. While places like this typically drown off the scope of my radar, this was no time for me to be digging up a Jamaican hole in the wall or making an hour-long trip in search of the perfect fried chicken wing. In the relaxed spirit of the weekend and on Joon’s hearty recommendation, I unbuckled my wallet and sat down to a fine $40 dinner.

Fresh green tomato, sliced powerfully thick and deep fried in particularly savory southern style, gave our dinner at Founding Farmers a head start on satisfaction. Joon’s roasted chicken salad was a hearty marriage of slow cooked and freshly picked, tucking vibrant forays into the tomato, golden beet, avocado, blueberry and other bounties of the earth under a generous portion of juicy rotisserie chicken. My farmer’s meat loaf, constructed from an undeniably robust cut of ground beef, stuffed with wild mushrooms, crusted dark brown, cooked medium rare and crowned with a mild white gravy, was one of the finest defenses of red meat I’ve ever eaten; it would, however, have been incomplete without the beautifully fresh sauteed green beans and mashed potatoes served alongside it.

We followed all of this with a plate of made-to-order doughnuts drizzled in a dark chocolate glaze. A less yielding me would have objected to the dessert as overpriced, overdressed whitewash. If I had allowed my mind to race between memories of better bites of fried dough, I might have walked away unimpressed. Eating in the moment, though, I felt whole in the way I can only when dining in good company.

We ambled back to Joon’s apartment, debating the finer points of what makes a lady and which lines of personality frame our nation’s capital. I realized that these gently aimed conversations of the lost have been finding their way less and less into my life in New York, and I understood why my weekends in Washington are so valuable. Sadly, I’ve already spent most of my Springsteen capital on another meal.

Founding Farmers
1924 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20006
202.822.8783

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 1:23 am and is filed under District of Columbia, travel.