First Bite - Medium Rare

Medium Rare is a rarity, in both concept and execution. How many other restaurants in D.C. can you think of that not only exude a fine-dining confidence while offering a single item on the menu? None come to my mind. And so it is the brain trust behind behind the new bistro, opened up shop in Cleveland Park.

The premise is simple: once seated, diners are served bread, a mixed-green salad, and slices of sirloin cap steak paired with frites. Half of your serving of the steak and frites arrives immediately after you've finished your salad, while the latter half delivered to the table later to ensure you're always eating hot food. This alone is a brilliant touch.

But the prix fixe menu is tremendously liberating. You walk in with really only two decisions to make: how you'd like your meat cooked and whether or not you'd like additional items like wine or dessert. Because the restaurant is called Medium Rare, it seems like that first question is off the table. Therefore, you're free to enjoy the evening without all the self-doubt inherent in selecting from an over-packed menu. By deciding to dine at Medium Rare in the first place, all of the pressure's relieved.

Beyond that? The food rocks. Everything's incredibly delicious. Even in the restaurant's first week of operation, the recipes are delicious. Utterly perfect, even. I guess that's another benefit of only providing a handful of dishes. The bread was right out of the oven, crispy and delicious. The salad wasn't drowning in vinaigrette. The frites were everything that frites ought to be. And then there was the meat. Dear God, what a delicious steak. Cooked perfectly, topped with an amazing house sauce, and so tender I barely needed a knife. Elyse looked at me midway through the meal and asked, "Is this your new favorite restaurant?" And it just might be.

As much as I love the D.C. restaurant scene, and as much as I've grown as a foodie (both in waist size and in scope of taste), the one thing I've really been missing is simplicity. This restaurant is a temple of simplicity. It recognizes that no restaurant can be everything to you every day; no establishment can carry the full arsenal of whatever any person might want to eat at any given moment, even though some misguided operations try. Medium Rare is the confident operation that says, "You're not always going to be in the mood for steak, and that's ok. When you are, come visit us, and we'll take care of you." At $19.50, it's hard to argue with the menu, and if you want to splurge on the dessert or alcohol, those are dandy to0. I nearly went into a coma after eating the chocolate cake; one of the managers told us he found a nearby bakery that makes a tw0-layer chocolate fudge cake and simply asked if they could double the number of layers. You gotta love that kind of imagination, don't you?

In the end, it's hard to oversell the quality of this place. The wait staff was stellar, the ambiance was chill and inviting, and the food was fantastic. What more can you ask for just over twenty bucks? So head up (or down, depending on your geography) and give this place a shot. You'll be glad you did. And if you're not, that's fine. More for me.

Down By The River

When I tell people I live in the Northeast quadrant of the District, I have been known to get some funny looks. Yes, Northwest is the best known and considered to be the "safest" part of the city, but I am mere blocks from the capitol building and I feel plenty safe.

Michael Landrum of Ray's Hell Burger fame wants to help shatter that misconception, and he decided not to just talk the talk but to also walk the walk. After going through many concepts, Landrum opened Ray’s the Steaks at East River in Ward 7, with the hope of employing people from the community and feeding good, honest, well-priced food to everyone else.
Although Ray’s bills itself as a steak house, this isn’t your senator’s Capital Grille. The prices are extremely modest, with the most expensive item topping out at $22. A party of 4 can easily eat here for well under $100 (with drinks, tax and tip) and I can pretty much guarantee that you will have days upon days of leftovers.

The menu isn’t huge, but it is also large enough that just about everybody can find something that tempts their taste buds. My eyes (and stomach) immediately gravitated toward the crab bisque. The soup came out of the kitchen piping hot with bits of crab meat floating on the top. My boyfriend pretty much died over the concept of chili mac. He says that is undeniably delicious and unbelievable balanced. The creaminess of the mac tempers the heat of the chili and complements it beautifully.

Each entrée is served with your choice of a salad and 2 sides, and all of them could have come right out of your southern grandmother’s kitchen. They include sweet potato fries, cole slaw, baked potato and the fresh vegetable of the day. Each side and entree comes on its own plate, allowing the flavors of each individual dish to be showcased. All of the main dishes could be considered a home run. Each prime rib slice was oozing with juices that capture all of the delicious flavors that were already in the meat, but waiting to be discovered. Each steak that comes out of the kitchen will make you wonder why anyone ever paid over $20 for a good piece of meat that is over 5 oz. The portions served at Ray's are HUGE, giving you yet another reason to think that Granny is back in the kitchen and scheming to fatten you up before you leave her house.

I had few complaints about our evening or our service (especially knowing that this was the first restaurant job that many of the servers have had), but the number of extra serving plates does prevent an issue when it comes to room on the table. Ketchup bottles and water glasses are shoved to the windowsill and quickly forgotten, especially when there is food on the plates to be devoured.

View Larger Map