Café du Parc — Lunch on 17 August 2019

If you’re a regular reader here, you may have noticed a recurring thread running through some of my more recent posts.

Probably because my own surroundings are far from sumptuous these days, I’ve become downright obsessed with the charmed lives of Gerald and Sarah Murphy, close friends of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and partial models for the main characters in Tender Is the Night. I even have a wrist band with WWGaSMD? etched into the leather to remind me to ask myself “What Would Gerald and Sarah Murphy Do?” before I make any major decisions.

So. This day’s lunch was part of my pursuit of Murphyesque elegance.

You can enter the Willard Hotel’s Café du Parc directly from Pennsylvania Avenue, but I prefer taking a slow walk through the interior of the beautiful Beaux-Arts building. The Willard can trace its origin back to six small houses that served as a hotel on this site more than 200 years ago. After repeated cycles of decline and rebirth, the hotel was restored to its current magnificent state during the 1980s and 90s.

Abraham Lincoln stayed here before his inauguration, and six US Vice-Presidents have lived in the Willard during their terms in office. This is where Julia Ward Howe wrote the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in 1861, and where Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote the “I Have a Dream” speech 102 years later.

The entrance to Café du Parc is just off the lobby.

I decided to lunch on the café’s patio instead of inside the café proper. I chose a table bordering the Pennsylvania Avenue sidewalk and, following the old gamblers’ admonition about keeping your back to a wall, I chose a chair facing west. The White House is a six-minute walk in that direction, and I didn’t want to be surprised by some rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching towards the Trump Hotel to be born. Safety First.

French Onion Soup

It seemed a little silly to order French Onion Soup in August, but I like what I like, and there are few things that I like more than that classic combination of caramelized onions, Swiss cheese, beef broth, bread, and a dash of sherry.

My Apilco Lion’s Head soup bowl runneth over with goodness.

Salmon

Chicken or fish? Fish or chicken?

Or, as the  Café du Parc menu put it, “Poitrine de Poulet Rôti au Jus or Pan-Seared Atlantic Salmon”?

Chicken and fish dishes are default main courses on many an RW menu, because they’re cheap, fast, and easy. * Add Salade Niçoise to those choices, and you have the day’s three main options at Café du Parc. A little disappointing—The restaurant is usually more innovative in its offerings.

I had the salmon, with pesto mashed potato, heirloom carrots, and a tomato beurre blanc sauce. It may not have been a life-changing original, but it was damn good.

Dessert

The menu called this “Pot De Crème au Chocolat au Grand Marnier” and describes it as “Baked Valrhona Guanaja 70% Chocolate Custard With Grand Marnier Liquor, Crème Diplomate Orange Confit, Buttery Langue De Chat Cookie”. I

I couldn’t put it better myself. /s

It was one of my favourite desserts of the week.

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* “Cheap, fast, and easy”, btw, was my nickname in college. I guess they called me that because I ate in a lot of fast food joints back in those days.

Visiting F. Scott and Zelda

Tuesday, the 24th of September, was the 123rd anniversary of the birth of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and as I do every few years, I took Metro up to Rockville, MD, to visit his grave. He and Zelda are buried in the little cemetery next to St. Mary’s Catholic Church.

I’m sure Fitzgerald would have made short work of those plastic flowers, but he’d probably have enjoyed the bottle of Hendrick’s Gin that had been left by an earlier visitor.

I thought back to the time, years ago, when two more-than-just-friends and I made a highly chemically enhanced 2 AM visit to the Fitzgeralds’ grave. It was one of the most memorable nights of my life.

“Boats against the current….”

I didn’t stay long this time. I sat on the grass for a while, read the last few pages of Gatsby, and headed back to the city.

Woodward Table — Lunch on 15 August 2019

Summer Restaurant Week is long passed, but I never got around to posting all of my notes and now my OCD has kicked in and won’t let me rest until I finish the project. I’ll be posting some much-belated comments over the next few days.

Woodward Table

I had an unimpressive lunch at Woodward Table years ago, when it first opened. I have no recollection of what I ate, but I do recall that the service was terrible. The servers, who seemed to be involved in some very important business in a back room somewhere, had mastered the art of avoiding eye contact with patrons on those rare occasions when they scurried through the dining area. I briefly considered stringing piano wire between my table and the bar in an attempt to get their attention, but thought better of it. Instead, I just crossed the restaurant off my list.

Last July, Woodward Table announced that it was closing at the end of summer, and I decided I should give it one last try.

That was a mistake.

Mussels

The steamed Blue Bay mussels starter sounded good. It came with the traditional grilled bread, and a sauce made with garlic, shallot, leek, fennel, tomato, tarragon, pernod, and creme fraiche. The mussels were tiny, not unlike the muscles I myself had had in fifth grade. (I chuckled quietly at the cleverness of my simile. I do that a lot.) The server had forgotten to give me a spoon to manipulate the mussel shells, but brought one on request.

Shrimp and Grits

Note to servers: Shrimp and grits is not finger food.

Eventually, I caught the attention of a server at a nearby table and began frantically miming someone carving a turkey. He got the idea, and brought me the missing knife and fork I needed.

Dessert

Dessert was a clever idea. Instead of settling on a single dessert, patrons could order a sampler of nine bite-sized treats. The execution didn’t live up to the concept, though, because many of them tasted the same.

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With all of Washington to choose from, I should have eaten elsewhere. Woodward Table was, once again, a disappointment, with forgettable food and poor service.

PS The Woodward Table location has already been optioned. It’s being taken over by The Cheesecake Factory.

I Don’t Know Who Took Home the Emmy, But Gwendoline Christie Won the Night

Gwendoline Christie

Look on her Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie — New Trailer

The second trailer for El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie dropped Sunday night during the Emmy Awards show. It gives us a shadowy, unnerved Jesse Pinkman sitting in a car shortly after his escape from the neo-Nazi compound, listening to a radio news report about the massacre.

As I write this, it’s 19 days until 11 October 2019, when El Camino will premiere on Netflix and in selected theatres.

Possibly the Dumbest Couple in the World

“Predictor. When you want to be sure.“

They’re shocked and delighted to find that, yes, she is indeed pregnant.

The ad, created in 2011 for the Dutch company Predictor, is once again making the rounds on the Net.

Too bad the happy couple missed this Belgian commercial, which ran a few years earlier. For best results, DO NOT READ THE TITLE until after you’ve seen the ad.

Jojo Rabbit — The Most WTF Trailer of 2019

Jojo Rabbit is a black comedy about a 10-year-old boy and his imaginary friend, Adolph Hitler. And the thing is…it’s apparently really good!

Jojo Rabbit won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival, which is significant because 10 of the last 11 People’s Choice winners went on to get Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, with four of them winning the big prize itself.* According to Vanity Fair, “No film in Hollywood is enjoying more Oscar buzz at this exact moment than Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit.”

Roman Griffin Davis plays the boy, and Taika Waititi himself plays the imaginary Hitler. Also in the cast:  Scarlett Johansson, Sam Rockwell, Alfie Allen, Rebel Wilson, and Stephen Merchant.

Jojo Rabbit is based on the book Caging Skies, by Christine Leunens. Leunens, whose grandfather spent years in a German labour camp during WWII, is an American-born New Zealand-Belgian novelist who has lived one of those amazing lives, jumping from country to country and from career to career, succeeding brilliantly in all of them.

Jojo Rabbit will be released on 18 October 2019.

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And because there’s no such thing as too much David Bowie, here’s the full German-language version of Heroes. Bowie recorded the song in Berlin, in the summer of 1977, during his German phase.

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Obligatory show-stopping scene from Springtime for Hitler

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* Recent People’s Choice Award Winners at the Toronto Film Festival that Went on Receive Academy Award Best Picture Nominations

(Movies that won the Oscar are in boldface)

(2008) Slumdog Millionaire
(2009) Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire
(2010) The King’s Speech
(2012) Silver Linings Playbook
(2013) 12 Years a Slave
(2014) The Imitation Game
(2015) Room
(2016) La La Land
(2017) Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
(2018) Green Book

Geographer — “Summer of My Discontentment”

Geographer is a San Francisco synth-pop band that’s been doing dreamy stuff for more than a decade. The first single from Geographer’s most recent EP seemed like an appropriate song to post on this last day of summer, 2019.

This has certainly been the summer of my discontentment. The issues I wrote about in Going on Hiatus and After The Flood—An Update remain unresolved, which partially accounts for my lack of postings recently. Turns out that my earlier optimism that I was over the worst of things was mistaken, and that my life is basically on hold through (at least) the rest of the year.

Anyhow, I’m back, again, and will be posting more in the days to come.

An Extract from Margaret Atwood’s Sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale

The Guardian has posted a lengthy extract from The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.

“Set more than 15 years after The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood’s Booker Prize-shortlisted sequel revisits her dystopian republic Gilead”

You can read it here.

The official release date for The Testaments is 10 September 2019, but Amazon “accidentally” broke the embargo by shipping 800 copies of the book early. Indy bookstore owners were not amused, and The Guardian has that story as well.