In a word (or two), pretty well...
I suppose the Twitter version would go: Cool place, excellent food, decent drinks, meh service, fun experience.
But let's get into a more detailed write up.
The Venue: The dinner took place in the Carnegie Library in Mt. Vernon Square. The building, formerly the Central Public Library for the District of Columbia, was built through funding from Andrew Carnegie and opened in 1903. It was one of many libraries Carnegie funded across the country and served as the Central Library until 1970. It also was the home of the City Museum of Washington DC for its brief existence and today is run by the Washington Events and Sports Authority.
It's a stately old library building with the typical marble staircase, cool looking research rooms, soaring ceilings and, because it's now run by Events DC, lots of event space. All-in-all an impressive space to have a dining event like this.
The Crowd: I'm happy to report that we were neither the oldest nor the youngest there -- the crowd was a pretty good cross-section of ages, races and dress codes (my blazer and khakis were just about right, though I was definitely on the higher end of the dress code). It seemed like a lot of groups more than couples, which made for big clusters of conversation and groups at the tables. One of the staff who seemed to be running the show recognized us, however -- she previously worked in Cathal Armstrong's empire in Alexandria and remembered us from Restaurant Eve and Society Fair, which made us feel a little bit at home. But the large groups did make us as just our own little couple feel a bit isolated.
The Drinks: They had a decent, albeit nondescript selection of wine, and a couple good craft beers (I want to say a Brooklyn and a DC Brau, but my memory may be a little faulty). They also had a full bar with the basic brands, enough for a decent opening cocktail reception.
Which is good, because we spent quite a while in that reception. We were the second seating (the first started at 7:00, while ours was at 8:00), and the reception dragged on a bit while they got rolling on the first seating. We ended up hanging out upstairs from the main dining action for probably more than an hour. But they did keep pouring the whole time and thus honored the first commandment of (slow) service, which is "Keep the drinks flowing!"
Chef Kwame eventually came up to greet us and we were all herded into a quieter room where he could address us and tell his story. He was charming and had clearly done this before, walking through his story of cooking in his mother's kitchen and where his career went from there. And then, at long last, we marched downstairs for dinner. Starving!!! And just a little drunk.
The Food: The food was quite phenomenal -- a six course tasting menu that featured three seafood courses, including a catfish tempura with a southwestern flair (tempura notwithstanding), an excellent salmon tartare that came in a little jar with yuzu and was probably Patti's favorite part of the meal, and a monkfish, clam and tomato ragu that gestured in the cioppino direction. All of them were very tasty, with bold flavors and creative (especially for group service) presentation and plating. They were accompanied by a cucumber capirihina that was way too small and finished by me way too quickly. Luckily, they were still pouring wine.
The remaining courses included very Texas-oriented smoked short rib with corn bread, candied bacon and grits and two dessert courses -- an egg cream type dish and the aforementioned housemade Butterfinger that put some punctuation on the meal. Oh, and more wine.
The Service: Here's where things fell down a bit. I already mentioned the endless (but lubricating) reception upstairs and the pacing didn't get much better once we were down there. We got settled in and may have made a strategic blunder by sitting in the middle of one of the long dining tables (each seating was two long tables, banquet style). I thought it would be good for social and keep us from getting isolated at the end, but we ended up on our own little island between two groups, which meant we didn't really get to meet other folks until way later in the evening, and some of the passed appetizer snacks got waylaid by the groups and didn't make their way down to us (which, since I was starving, really made me a bit cranky). It also meant that when they were pouring wine, they'd pour for the big group next to us, empty a bottle, go off to get another bottle, and then end up waylaid somewhere else.
We finally got our first course and then the second course came out almost immediately afterwards. Not bad. But after that, we didn't get another course for quite a while -- probably 45 minutes. Luckily the wine continued to be ubiquitous.
All-in-all, I get it -- it's hard to do a dinner like this in a strange non-restaurant venue. When we got the follow up survey, we provided feedback on the pacing and got a note back from them saying, "Yep. We're working on it. Thanks for your patience." And it didn't really ruin the evening for us. It just would've been a little better if the food would've come out at a little steadier pace. And I could've lived without the super late night Metro ride that resulted from such a long evening.
All that said -- it was unique and fun, which is what we signed up for. They've sent us some invitations for additional dinners that look really cool, but our schedule is a little packed as we gear up for our vacation to the Cape. It's a good value. When you consider that we got a six-course very creative meal with plenty to drink for roughly $50 a head, that's not bad. Seems like you can't get out of the neighborhood pizza joint for that these days.
I look forward to our next Dinner Lab event, and I think we can say that this experiment was definitely a success.
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