Restaurant Week

I am participating in DC's Restaurant Week at the moment -- an annual event where the area's best restaurants offer either specific dishes or their entire menu at a special blanket rate for a multiple-course meal.  In DC's case, that rate is $30.  A friend of mine organized a different restaurant every night this week, and I've agreed to join her for 3 of them.  My first was Tuesday, and the next two will be this weekend. 

I overheard people talking on the metro this morning about how you cant get the best dishes a restaurant has during Restaurant Week.  My friend Joe, a renowned foodie, has the same gripe.  This is often true: many restaurants offer a very limited menu consisting of fairly generic dishes like salmon and chicken.  And why bother to go to a nice restaurant when you can't order their best dishes? 

But here's what these criticisms gloss over: every restaurant has different policies, and a Restaurant Week veteran -- like my friend who is organizing our stops -- can separate the wheat from the chaff.  On Tuesday she dropped reservations at a seafood restaurant (D'Acqua) that only offered chicken and salmon as its menu choices, replacing it with Dino, an Italian restaurant in Cleveland Park that is offering Restaurant Week pricing on their entire menu for a whole month. 

Besides, I'm basically doing this because I don't know enough about DC's restaurant scene.  Whenever someone asked me for advice on nice places to eat within the city limits, I could only come up with a couple of places to eat.  So going to sample a few of them during Restaurant Week certainly beats the status quo: not going to any at all, and not adding some places to my list. 

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