cafe du parc

After finishing up the cocktail, the librarian and I headed across the lobby to Cafe Du Parc. We pass the empty bar to the hostess table where we are greeted and shown to our table in the dining area upstairs. The open kitchen is the first thing you see with a minimal seating area to the left and right. It was DC restaurant week, so we opted to order off the "limited" menu. Crab and leek salad and pate as appetizers; crispy pork as the entree; and apricot panna cotta and strawberry tart with frommage de blanc for dessert. A thick toast-size slab of pate with globs of aspic on the side arrived in front of me. Oh how appetizing it looked! I barely got through a quarter of it before I passed it along to the librarian who polished it off. The half of the crab salad helped rid of the lingering livery taste in my mouth. Sipping on Cote du Rhone and listening to Chris Sarandon in the next booth flirting with the hostess, our entrees arrived. The best part of the main was the buttery haricot verts that came in individual mini oven casserole tins. If you're looking for a pork fat fix, head over to Restaurant Eve and have their famous house-cured pork belly.

The most memorable part of the evening was seeing the awesome view of DC from Hotel Washington's Sky Terrace and watching a midnight-runner in biker shorts playing catch me if you can with the park sprinklers and daintily running off into the night. Apparently this made the librarian uncomfortable; but I sure had a good laugh.