Buena Vida Gastrolounge is a new “Mexican Cuisine with a Twist” restaurant that’s having its grand opening this week, and I’ve been anticipating it since the moment I heard the news.
The reason: It’s owned and operated by the same people who own Ambar, a Balkan restaurant that serves some of the best and most enjoyable meals in DC, at what are for Washington very reasonable prices. It’s also the best restaurant in the city to take out-of-town visitors for a memorable meal, but be warned that after dining at Ambar, they might just want to lie down and take a little nap for an hour or so. That can put a crimp on the rest of your standard monuments-and-museums day plan.
The Ambar group consists of three restaurants: one in Washington, DC, one in Clarendon, Virginia, and one in Belgrade, Serbia, all offering similar tapas-style Balkan dining. Could that format also work with a different cuisine? Like Mexican?
Here’s Buena Vida, directly across the street from the Ambar restaurant in Clarendon, VA. You can reach it by Metro from downtown DC in less than 30 minutes.
Lunch started with the customary serving of dips and chips. No surprises there, right? But then….
Ten minutes later, the table looked like this. Almost everything you see here was served between the time I arrived and the time I placed my first order—it was all part of that standard customer set-up. And I realized that I had overlooked something.
Buena Vida is a tapas restaurant, and in a tapas restaurant, nobody eats alone. Tapas dishes are meant to be passed around and shared, and I simply hadn’t considered the possibility that the restaurant would combine a tapas serving style with the traditional welcoming gesture for a meal in a non-tapas restaurant. I was effectively being served openers for three or four people. Dealing with the occasional single customer is probably one of the bugs management will resolve during this first-week test run.
But my little faux pas of not sending the food back to the kitchen on sight wasn’t so embarrassing that I thought about sneaking out the door to avoid the derision of my fellow customers. I was so eager to sample Buena Vida that I was willing to commit a culinary crime by violating dining protocol for an early look.
We will now have a brief musical interlude. Edith Piaf will sing “Non, je ne regrette rien” while I sample a very few bites of each dish.
OK, let’s get to the food.
The inevitable Brussels sprouts, this time perfectly cooked with peanuts in an orange juice reduction, and served on lemon yogurt.
This is Salpicon Venado, a specialty of the chef. I’d realized early on that I’d have more trouble navigating a Mexican menu than I’d have in making choices from a Balkan one, which is a little ironic, like rain on your wedding day. I got a lot of good advice from the server. She recommended this.
From the menu, Salpicon Venado is an “avocado spread tostada topped with onion cilantro & chilled venison meat tossed in sour orange dressing garnised with cabbage chifonade”.
I almost skipped it because of the avocado spread, since I’m boycotting avocados because Millenials. It was the venison that dragged me in.
OMG, how have I been missing this my entire life? I’ve seen variations of it at every street fair I’ve ever been to, but never tried it before.
I wasn’t sure how to attack the dish, but once again, the server came to my rescue. “They’re called ‘Corn Ribs'”, she explained. “They’re made with Mexican sour cream, tajin and queso fresco, You eat them by hand, the way you’d eat regular ribs.”
(It’s so nice to have a pleasant and helpful person like this at your table instead of someone who intentionally misleads you about which foods are hand-held and which are for knife and fork, and then gets everybody to laugh at you when spill your entire meal all over the floor and then slip in it and fall down and they just point and laugh even more.)
I’m never going back to that Dairy Queen again! Those stuck-up Dairy Queen poseurs may think they’re so cool, but they’re all just big losers.
Now, where was I?
Oh, yeah. These Corn Ribs were phenomenal. One of the two great highlights of the meal.
By process of elimination, this must be the watermelon and jicama salad.
It was the only disappointment of the meal. Despite the interesting-sounding combination of “watermelon, jicama, and baby arugula gently tossed with lemon vinaigrette, garnished with sweet pickled jalapeño and tiny popcorn”, it was bland and largely tasteless. I couldn’t even detect the watermelon.
There were other dishes, but somewhere along the way my notes were damaged by water spillage and sauce drippings and napkin misidentifications, so I won’t describe them here.
But we ended on a high note.
My clear favorite. Shrimp al ajillo, which are wine-sautéed shrimp with guajillo pepper and cilantro-garlic butter. This is what I decided to have for dessert. No, it wasn’t sweet or chocolaty or glazed, but it tasted so perfect and satisfying and correct that eating anything else after this would be a letdown.
So did the concept work? Oooohh, yes. Buena Vida is worthy of the Ambar name. Like the original model, Buena Vida offers the diner beautifully prepared and presented small plates, delivered by a charming and efficient staff. Highest recommendation, and one of my best meals of the year.
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