Gobble this Obelisk April 24
So, by my count three weeks since I last posted. Good, excellent work. Blog is off to a flying start, clearly. Not that this should come as any kind of surprise, what with our collective business (that does still also mean the state of being busy, yes?) and also (at least for some of us (ME)) our laziness, but still. Two posts in a month. Just exemplary work, me.
But it’s not my fault - oh no, dear reader, I blame, as we all should blame, my parents. Very shortly following post number one, momsy and dadsy came to visit (with younger brother in tow.) Now, I realize that this is a rite of passage for all (or at least) people sometime in their twenties, you move out, you become (basically) independent, perhaps for years you always go home to visit your parents, but eventually you’ve moved far away and it becomes easier for them to visit you. If you’ve yet to experience this for yourself, it’s a delightful time of transition for you as a person, not unlike puberty in its way. Some helpful pointers I picked up during the experience:
1) Your parents are from the midwest and are not used to walking. Explain to them well in advance that this is a city and in a city people walk to get places. Not just around the block for exercise, but as part of their everyday lives - that’s right, I don’t even use the car! Know that despite this warning, you will be expected to get in the car every night to drive to Chili’s for dinner. Which brings me to
2) Your parents are bewildered by ethnic food and the different-ness of the city in general. They yearn for the familiar. Swallow your pride and that chipotle chicken snack wrap, don’t forcibly expand their horizons TOO often. Don’t expect to take them anywhere that is not sanctioned and safe for tourists. Fellow federal district denizens, you know what this means: send them to the spy museum. Cuz fuck it, am I right?
3) You may feel tempted to introduce your family to your friends. In fact, this is a terrible instinct. Allowing these worlds to collide spells disaster for you, because it’s worlds colliding, and a George divided against itself cannot stand. You will attempt to tell your favorite family story of late, about the time at xmas two years ago when everyone else was playing gin rummy and dad was playing home movies and accidentally put in the geriatric porn. Trying to be discreet, you will conveniently forget that your mother was in the other room and has not heard the story, and she, not knowing the exact dirty tape to which you refer (and yes, sadly there are many) will ask for all your assembled peers’ enjoyment whether or not it was “us”. The horror.
4) You may feel lame suggesting that your parents come over and watch tv with you. If you have an enormous hdtv (check) and have been recording planet earth (check), do not feel lame. Your parents will enjoy it, how could they not? Fucking lions vs. elephant, man. That is some epic filmmaking, even your parents know that when they see it.
5) I have to stand my ground on this point: do not under any circumstances bring up Colonial Williamsburg. I know (basically) what you’re thinking - my parents just want to spend time with me, I never take any road trips, they’re a good way to kill a day or two without having to drag their asses all over the city to things they’re not interested in seeing anyway, and I can get away with listening to my ipod for hours. It’s all very sound reasoning. Monticello works just fine for these purposes because Monticello is kind of cool. Thomas Jefferson lived there and he was pretty much a badass, plus the house is on top of a very excellent hill. Colonial Williamsburg is not cool. It’s not cool for kids, it’s not cool for adolescents, it’s not fun for the whole family. What’s amazing is that moms and dads will fake it for the sake of propriety, or some shit. I should have figured out a way to have them get me drunk for those two days, maybe rented a boat or something. Parents like boats, am I right? Williamsburg is a swamp full of elderly losers playing make-believe, and though it’s not quite Disneyland it’s at least as much commerce as education - don’t go. Just… just don’t go.
What you could do, though, apart from sending them to the spy museum (which come on, of course they will enjoy) is take them to a super-fancy-pants restaurant wherein you get to play the knowitall snob (quite a stretch) all the while spending nothing thanks to the fabulous gift certificate provided by your employer some months ago (score.) You could, in my case, take them to Obelisk for the finest Italian dining in the city (or so I read.) I’ve gotta say, it did not disappoint me, and I think even my parents (whose idea of cuisine is much closer to an enormous chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes slathered in gravy) and brother came away pretty impressed. It was the last thing I did after a sometimes harrowing week with my parents, and the meal was basically good enough that we all left on extremely amicable terms - a worthy accomplishment indeed. I’ll hereafter forgo being blatantly ungrateful and mean to my loving family and focus on reviewing my meal at Obelisk (a much more pleasant story to tell, I’m sure.) If you care not for talk of fancy-pants cuisine, you can leave off now.
I apologize for the lack of photography to accompany this, but I already felt really awkward jotting notes in a notebook about all the food, I think taking pictures would probably have been over the line. The room itself (and it’s really just a room) is very small, no more than 40 seats in the place, but it was very low-key and casual inside, and my brother wearing relatively dingy jeans with a rugby didn’t seem any more out of place than the rest of us (wide-eyed midwestern human cattle that we are). Overall, a pleasant-seeming place to dine.
Along with our handwritten (well, ok, photocopied) menus, explained in a very agreeable and satisfactory manner by our server, we were of course asked for drinks - my mom was denied her request of a bloody mary, as they lacked many mixers, she tells us. 2000 grappas leaves little room for fresh fruit. Not wanting to inquire about beers on tap I took a deep breath and asked “what grappa would you recommend.” Now, obviously I’m an idiot, as grappa is a digestif, but she graciously steered me away from that into what she only referred to as an old-style Italian vermouth. Granted, it was probably just Cinzano, but I will say it was damned tasty. Not at all what I anticipated from vermouth (from martini experience - ewww). In addition I ordered a half-bottle of Boscarelli vino nobile de montepulciano 2001, which was delightful, though fuck if I know anything about wine. According to the link there, it has a mellow intensity. I didn’t write that down in my notebook.
We ordered but I’ll save our choices and go by course. The first course, antipasto, we had no choice but an abundance of choices nonetheless, as they brought us five dishes to share. The house cured salami was delightfully spicy and salty, sliced so thinly the fat almost melted on your tongue. Lamb and pork meatballs were served with just a light coating of a simple red peppery sauce (diavolo, perhaps? I do not know.) There was definitely some fairly bland spinach-and-hard-boiled-egg in puff pastry thing that was served cold and was basically unremarkable, and there was some citrus-olive shrimp that was reallly fresh-tasting and delicious (and I’m usually not a huge olive person.) Best of the five, though, was the burrata, which was like a close cousin to fresh mozzerella, but so much more dynamic and delicious. As usual, my philistine family found the most delicious part unappetizing, so I readily chowed the remainder of their amazingly creamy, herbal, fresh delicious cheese smeared over some fantastic pieces of panna rustica (I’m making up Italian now, possibly.)
Course two - I don’t know what the name for the course is, but we got meat. Well, sorta. I guess this is really the pasta course. My brother and I ordered the gargati with lamb ragu, which was thick and hearty and delightful. The gargati was a sort of hand-extruded pasta, like a really thick rigatoni or something, the mouth feel was wonderful, almost as soft as a dumpling, with even better sauce retention (a nice thing, as the lamb ragu was packed with savory flavor.) Mom seemed very satisfied with her grouper raviolini with clams in broth - the bite I had was fairly good, though the whole package was perhaps too subtle for my palate at this point. Dad, however, won this round I felt with his marvelous chitarra with fava beans, artichoke hearts, and pancetta. The pasta was a revelation to me, as I have very little experience with good fresh pasta, but the dressing, with the beans and hearts and pancetta, was unbelievably light and citrus, just fantastically refreshing. I wish I’d been able to trade my heavy bowl of ragu for his tart mediterranean deliciousness, but alas I only managed to steal a few bites. This is a real shame, considering Dad didn’t even seem that into the dish.
Course three is the *actual* meat course. Dad and Brother both went somewhat outside their comfort zones and chose the squab with borlotti beans, which some buzzkilling assholes will tell you are really just the pinto beans you always hated with ham on Sunday nights. Outside their comfort zone, though, because I was able to tell them that it was a baby pigeon and they ate it anyway. I ate some of it too, for the record, and it was quite nice - much more like red meat than white - but such a pain in the ass to eat that there’s no way it won this round. Are you supposed to just pick it up and eat it with your fingers? Because it’s a fucking tiny little bird and if you’re expected to eat it with utensils, well, there’s almost no point in trying. I was highly satisfied with my choice of turbot (apparently you pronounce the T - why are fancy restaurants always fucking with our heads?) with asparagus and guanciale. Remember that word - guanciale - I even like saying it, it sounds like if a Jamaican dude joined the VC - gwaan-CHA-lay. I got this all because of the guanciale, because the gracious server explained that it was a sort of bacon made out of pig jowl. While everyone else seemed grossed out, I was intrigued - pig tastes good in general, after all, and bacon is fucking great. Additionally, in a restaurant like this, surely they wouldn’t be serving a disgusting part of the pig. Good christ was I right - this shit is the most amazing super-bacon ever. If you ever see it on any menu or available anywhere, get it goddammit get it. It was somehow MORE porky and delicious than bacon, with this sublime texture - fully crispy throughout the entire morsel (served to me in painfully small chunks no larger than the tip of your pinky finger) but dissolving, nay exploding into this salty greasy (forgive me) orgasm in my mouth. Jesus it’s tremendous. I highly recommend it. Guanciale. Mom, though, wins this round with her very solid order of lamb chops with rapini. I don’t know what to say except that I am a person who very often orders lamb chops and these were the best I’ve ever had. The meat itself was perfect, marbled with luxurious fat and glazed with… something I could not identify but, well, it was good. My turbot and asparagus were nothing without the guanciale, which as mentioned came in vexingly small quantities, so this round goes to mom (though with a heavy sampling of all the dishes, I think I’m the real winner.)
No choice in course four, the cheese course. A palate cleanser. I felt all three were fine - the taleggio, creamy and nutty, and the pecorino stagianato, like a more complex, slightly softer parmesan, did nothing to offend. Oddly, some fresh goat cheese, which I thought was the mildest of the three, put off the rest of the family with its telltale gaminess. Oh well, more for me. We all agreed the homemade fig jam was the best part of this course anyway. Like the inside of a fig newton - yum.
Dessert, though - goddamn did dessert win us over, unite us all in appreciation. Dad made the damn fool move of ordering some mint chocolate ice cream that I’d have mistaken for store bought if it didn’t taste creepily familiar to me. Not pointing fingers, staff of Obelisk, just calling it like I, er, tasted it. Mom and I made the much saner call of an amazing panna cotta with apricot and an almond biscotti. The panna cotta was basically the creamiest thing I’ve ever tasted, and I’m quite a dairy fan. They told me it’s the Greek yogurt they use, and, well, I gotta try that shit, because especially with the apricot preserves and almost biscotti to add contrasting textures and complementary flavors, it made for a sublime dessert, worthy of my highest praise. However, it was not the winner of the dessert round. My brother won that with something identified on the menu only as “Sicilian Breakfast”- the picture doesn’t really do this one justice - a small piece of sweet brioche topped with a wonderfully tangy tangerine granita and creme anglaise. The brother was reluctant to give away bites, but pry we did. We all found it delightful, but particularly satisfied was my father, who upon eating his first bite exclaimed, “Oh AWESOME! It’s like a push pop!” Perhaps it was the three or four scotches and water, but Dad was in a good mood, and this fancy-schmancy place he’d never choose to eat on his own had just connected with him on a personal level, which was pretty rewarding to make happen. So, kudos to Obelisk for treating essentially a family of tourists like real human beings and for making damn near the best meal I’ve ever had the pleasure of eating. Remember: get the guanciale.
