Corduroy

Posted by Edmund in Featured Articles, Fine Dining, Restaurants, Washington, DC | 0 comments

Nov 09, 10

Cuisine: Eclectic.
Location: 1201 K Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20005.
Price: $53 for my 3 courses, w/ no drink.

There’s also a nice bit of a roasted, smoky coffee flavor that comes out right in the end that I found slightly mouth-watering.

Having grown up in LA, I’m not really too used to formal dining. In LA, it’s possible to go to even some of the city’s best restaurants in a pair of nice jeans and a button-down.

The transition to the DC dining scene, then, hasn’t been too easy. DC is, after all, the home of suits, and even an average mid- to upper-range restaurant will tend to boast a jacket-preferred, overly formal dining experience. The problem? Far too often, those same restaurants won’t deliver jacket-preferred food quality, service, or ambience.

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Corduroy is the exception, delivering classy like no other restaurant in the price range can, yet doing so tastefully. Nowhere is that better seen than in the décor, which may at first come off as a bit pretentious. For example, large abstract paintings span the walls. Does anybody really come to see blots?

At the same time, though, somehow I find such quaint little “sophistications” to be nice in this setting. The walls are an austere white, the columns a very polished wood brown, and the dim lighting is nice but not overdone. The abstract paintings are mostly bi-colored, adding just a bit of color but not too much. The seats are all comfy, velvet mini-couches, while the tables themselves are small, but isolated, so that you have a lot of intimacy. In fact, I was given what was easily the best seat in the house—a snug little two-seat nook with a tiny cylindrical lamp hanging in the middle and a view that looks out onto the main dining room on only one side, giving you supreme privacy. I really can’t complain, then. The dining room is simple but sleek, with an oxymoronic cozy formality that is a downright steal for this price point.

The service doesn’t disappoint, either. Corduroy goes to show you that just because you’re not paying an arm and a leg doesn’t mean you can’t get fantastic service. The waiters come arrayed in their own suits, like an army ready for anything. They address you always as “sir,” change your silverware between every course, clean your table of crumbs throughout the meal, remove dishes while disturbing you or the table as little as possible.

I’ll demonstrate. When my waiter came to take away my main course, he found the plate surrounded by dishes, glasses, my phone, and even my small netbook laptop, and yet he somehow managed to snake his arm through all that without touching anything on the table other than the dish. It was entertaining just watching him go. On top of all that, when I was done with all my food, including the dessert, and I was just sitting at my table writing away on my computer (writing this review in fact!), they let me just sit there, without ever asking me if I wanted the check. This is real service, and you pay very little compared to what you would at the vast majority of restaurants of this caliber.

The one disappointment was the food, not so much for being bad per se, but for not living up to the excellence of the ambience and especially the service, though the general quality was well above average. The Red Snapper Bisque stood out as the one special knockout, as the chef tamed the slight fishiness of the snapper with a very elegant richness infused with a refreshing herby quality. I was also pleasantly surprised by my entrée, the lamb loin, where the restaurant presented me with not just a lamb loin but with a beautiful array of sides and meats, combining four huge components onto one plate: lamb loin, lamb sausage, a garlic crepinette, and garlic creamed spinach. Every single component was executed rather nicely, though the salt was too much and the meat could have used some more seasoning or flavoring.

It was the dessert, though, that single-handedly ruined the fantastic food experience, as I received a chocolate tart that was far too bitter, muddy, and lukewarm. That’s just unacceptable, especially for a restaurant of this quality.

Corduroy, though, does deliver in nearly every way. Horrible dessert as I had, it wasn’t enough for me to deny Corduroy a recommendation, especially after its unforgettable service. This is easily one of the classiest dining experiences in town, especially for the price.

What I Tasted

1. Red Snapper Bisque: A delicious combination of salty, bitter, creamy, and herby. What’s really amazing about the soup is that it actually tastes like red snapper, with a very intense fishy undertone to it, so much so that I could just smell the snapper as soon as the dish landed on the table. But that fishiness is very soft, smooth, and elegant because the cream and the herbs just work so well together. It’s a rather rich soup, though not cloyingly so, and that richness really helps to take the edge off the salt. At the same time, it has a bitter, herby undercurrent running throughout that leaves your mouth feeling refreshed with a very strong, long aftertaste. My one big complaint is that the soup could use some more chunks of snapper in it. When I did get a bite of those chunks, they were extremely tender and succulent, but there are very few pieces in the soup, and they’re very small. The soup could also use just a bit more seasoning in general, though it does have some pepper. 4.6/5.0. An extremely elegant, balanced, flavorful start.
2. Lamb Loin with Garlic Crepinette and Garlic Creamed Spinach: An absolute flurry of colors! You have the light brown lamb sauce sandwiched in between the greenish white garlic cream on one side and the lumpy white potatoes on the other. It’s a really nice effect, especially because everything stays in its compartment—i.e. since the garlic cream and the lighter lamb sauce have such different densities, they don’t actually mix together. You thus don’t get a gloppy mess, but rather a beautiful array of ingredients. And I love just how many ingredients this dish incorporates. It’s not just a lamb loin as you’d think, but rather two different kinds of lamb (sausage and loin), potatoes, and spinach. Nor is there any weak link. Everything contributes, everything has a very pronounced taste, and the ingredients work well to balance each other out (how can a combo like mashed potatoes and meat not succeed?). Thus, it’s definitely the type of dish that is greater than the sum of its parts. 3.9/5.0
   • Garlic Creamed Spinach: Very rich—a little too much so. It’s so creamy, in fact, that it comes off as somewhat cheesy—a flavor that’s actually quite nice with the bitterness of the spinach. Still, this component is delicious, with a very, very strong garlic taste that really balances out the heaviness of the cream. Moreover, even with all the cream, you can still taste the spinach, which has a very strong bitterness that picks up gradually. I do have a couple complaints, though: too much salt and again, just too rich. 4.5/5.0
   • Lamb Loin: Cooked perfectly—medium-rare like I asked, with a lot of pink in the center. It’s also very tender and very nicely chewy, offering no resistance when cut. It’s not all that succulent or overly flavorful, but it’s not bland either. I do like that the very strong, gamier lamb aftertaste has been moderated a bit so that this tastes very much like a decent steak. 3.8/5.0
   • Mashed Potatoes:  Another successful side, though a bit less flavorful than the spinach. These potatoes are very smooth but don’t feel extremely whipped, like the kind you’d find at a bistro. Instead, they have a slightly more lumpy texture. Still, I like just how buttery they are, and the infusion of garlic, while not as pronounced as I’d like, really does add a nice undertone. Again, they’re slightly too salty, as is everything else on the dish. 4.0/5.0
   • Homemade Lamb Sausage: A great contrast to the loin’s very balanced taste. This component, of course, has a lot more fat and is a bit more wild in taste, with a very strong savoriness and much more of that gamy, lamb taste I was talking about earlier. I’m in general not a big fan of sausage, but this one largely works for three reasons. First, it’s not too fatty, so you really get to taste the lamb in there. Second, it’s nicely seasoned, with lots of pepper and garlic, balancing out that fattiness. Third, I really like the idea of including it as a contrast for the more refined, more neutral lamb loin. Again, though, it’s just too salty. 3.5/5.0. More for contrast than anything else, but still a nice little addition.
3. Chocolate Tart (Chocolate custard garnished with caramelized bananas and vanilla bean ice cream): This dish is very aromatic, as the intense chocolate just wafts up. Needless to say, I thought this dish would astound, no questions asked. I couldn’t have been more wrong, though. None of the three components are anything special on their own, nor do they synergize well. The ice cream is vanilla bean—a flavor which should be much more concentrated than a normal vanilla. This ice cream, though, is very light on flavor, its taste dissipating almost immediately after you put it in your mouth. It is very smooth and light, but what’s the point if it is just flavorless cream? The caramelized bananas fare much better and actually have some taste. They are soft on one side and hardened on the other with a crust of caramel—a mixed texture that actually works very nicely. They are firm, as they should be, and the sweetness isn’t overdone. Even better, they have a nice undertone of smokiness that adds a lot to the sweetness. The problem? They are served lukewarm, making them just dull, especially if the intention is to eat them with the tart and the ice cream for some contrast. Moreover, they aren’t syrupy at all, so again, it is somewhat difficult blending them with the other ingredients smoothly. Instead, their plainness just stands out. Finally—and this is really where the combo fails—the chocolate tart is just off, with so much bitterness and so little flavor or complexity that it really doesn’t taste like much. It is supposed to be a layer of dark chocolate custard, but custard should have some sugar in it—this one has almost none. The dark chocolate intensity comes through, but the texture is muddy, becoming mush in the mouth. The crust is, moreover, bland, and it adds almost no flavor. 1.5/5.0

Scores

Ambience: 4.4/5.0 (at the price)
Service: 4.8+/5.0 (at this price)
Taste: 3.4+/5.0. Dessert really destroyed the score.
Value: 4.0/5.0
Verdict: 4.2/5.0. The fact that this restaurant gets such a high score really attests to the quality of its service.