Isn't it pretty to think so?

DC Coast
1401 K St NW
Washington, DC 20007
202-216-5988

I very often muse to myself that I should have been alive in other decades, and one of my favourites is the Roaring Twenties. Art Deco and the Jazz Age, the Harlem Renaissance and the Lost Generation – I could go on. Last night I had dinner with the always lovely Laura and Amanda at DC Coast, and at fleeting moments throughout the night I felt transported back to the good old days of modernity and mechanisation. It was a strange feeling. At other times I simply exulted in the company of these two good friends – there is nothing quite so relaxing at the dinner table as familiar faces. And even though Laura did her level best to ruin the night with some inappropriate yet hilarious and, strangely, pertinent conversation concerning certain bodily functions, I had a smashing time anyway.

DC Coast is in the heart of downtown DC, and surrounded by tall, concrete office buildings with setbacks – banks and hotels and whatnot built in the style of modern architecture. It is a Saturday night, so there is little bustle on the streets; and a certain quaint and lazy ease in the air almost in defiance of the craziness of the workweek gone by. I walk into the restaurant with Amanda, and it is hard not to have your breath taken away. The room is sprawling and the ceilings soaring, and there are beautiful Beaux-Arts fixtures and arches punctuating the walls. There is a bar to the left of us that stretches the length of the room, and behind it large oval mirrors hang on the walls, making the room look even more impressive than it already is. I felt like one must have in the Gatsby mansion, and resolved to live out the night with the requisite pomp and circumstance.

My pre-dinner drink of choice is the usual Tanqueray and tonic, and the bartender makes it good and stiff. This sells me on the place almost immediately. The service was prompt and personable, and they do not hurry us one whit as we wait for Laura to show up. In fact, throughout the course of the meal the staff that serve us are wonderfully patient and exceedingly quick to accede to all our requests – including a particularly obnoxious one for larger wine glasses, made by a certain individual who shall remain unnamed. They run a pretty tight ship at DC Coast, and I am impressed.

It appears, too, that the kitchen is as competent as the house. Laura and Amanda both start with soups, and I have a shrimp risotto that fills me with food envy, for while the lightness of the risotto was all well and good I secretly craved the spice and splendour that was Amanda’s lobster bisque. I follow that with the yellowfin tuna, seared and cooked to a beautiful rare, with the inside barely warmed. It was paired with cold calamari ceviche, which gave the dish that citrusy tang that complements seafood so well. I looked up in the middle of my meal, surprised to find Amanda holding out her plate across the table – she had cut out a piece of sea scallop and was offering it to me. She is a sweet, sweet girl, and so much of a better person than I am that it embarrasses me.

Dessert is stellar as well – I had a panna cotta that rekindled my infatuation with the vanilla bean. Then we all closed our palate with espressos and I felt very European. It says something that when we finally left the restaurant and went our separate ways, I had little recollection of the nuances of the evening’s conversation – except for Laura’s interesting aside – and even less idea of how much time had passed. Yet it had been a good two and a half hour dinner, and we had seen a couple at the adjacent table come and go.

As we parted and I walked the dinner off en route to yet more shenanigans, I could not help but think about what I like to call the CAV/Mills debate. CAV and Mills Tavern are respectively my two favourite restaurants in Providence, RI from when I used to live there. I like the former because it is an intimate and personal place, the sort of restaurant that nourishes more than it feeds. But I also love the latter, formal and proper and deferential to the notion that cooking is the highest of arts, and should be performed on a stage that gives it its due.

Funny then, that I was at Nora two nights ago, a place that nurtures, that provides, that makes people happy much in the vein of CAV; and then the following night at DC Coast, majestic and thorough and a similar style of restaurant to Mills Tavern. I cannot decide which of these two types of restaurants I like better, and I hope I never have to choose.