Spicy. It has to be spicy.

Jen’s words that had us searching for food. Urban foraging, armed with a smartphones and a front desk manager.

Spicy is abundance in Chelsea, more so if you really know what you’re looking for. However, Jen and I were only looking for dinner. We ended up at Rocking Horse Cafe, a modern Mexican restaurant with forward thinking menus.  Galleons of tortilla chips float at the bar, flanked by margaritas and pools of fresh made salsa, just barely making their mark on the scoville scale.

The guacamole is served fresh and extremely fast, almost unexpectedly so. The Quesadillas de Hongos are a delight, with the crisp texture of the tortilla giving way to the fragrant roasted wild mushrooms griddled with warm, melted manchego cheese.

Jen’s Chile Relleno de Hongos was just what she needed. A half foot roasted poblano, split lengthwise, and overstuffed with sauteed wild mushrooms, topped with a charred tomato-smoked chile cream sauce. A smoldering dish of burn your face off hot, topped with flames on a brimstone plate.

My entree, the Cordero Enchipotlado arrived with angel horns blaring. A war hammer sized chipotle braised lamb shank, with a bone that you can take home and mount as a trophy on your desk if you manage to finish the damn thing. Succulent chipotle braised lamb, accompanied by caramelized onions, roasted tomatoes, and epazote atop a generous nest of creamy cotija polenta. I wanted to wave the shank bone wildly in the air, but Jen backhanded me as I started to started to rise from the table with a crazed look in my eyes, narrowly avoiding disaster and bringing me back to my senses. Like you’ve never need a good bitch slapping before.

I recommend passing on the yuca and goat cheese cake as a side- not for any reason of it being bad, but for the fact that it’s lacking in flavor. It did serve as a nice, spongy cake to sop up our respective sauces, but with a plate of fresh tortilla chips, it seems a bit unnecessary.

Prices are extremely reasonable for the city, and I was eternally grateful that we weren’t subjected to tapas portions for our meal. Highly recommended.

See Rocking Horse Cafe on a map here.

Sonoma Restaurant & Wine Bar sits in the same block as a number of other restaurants on the edge of Capitol Hill that are leading the effort to revitalize the area as a gastro destination for DC, and lends itself as one of the finer places to enjoy a classed up date, a girl’s night out, or as a perfect destination for a quiet, client dinner.

Food portions are much more substantial than what you’d find in similar restaurants downtown, but the quality remains high, as evidenced with a large dollop of the Pipe Dreams Chevre served to our table, which we highly recommend. That is, unless you’re a true paleohead and refute the existence of dairy in your life. In that case, I’d also recommend the mountain of sliced prosciutto, served with several warm logs of focaccia for those who which to indulge in a bit of bread.

There’s a plethora of options to choose from on the menu, none likely to disappoint, but make sure you lend your waiter your ear for the special offers. I was lucky enough to enjoy the red snapper crudite along with a pork sausage stuffed inside of a crispy suckling pig, which couldn’t have been much more of a pork lover’s wet dream.

Well, there’s always room to add bacon.

Service is top notch, prices are consistent with what you’d see downtown, but again, the plate sizes do not disappoint. Lighting, however, is not the most favorable for nom photography.

See Sonoma on a map here.

Feel free to contact Sonoma to host your next wine mixer.

I never grew up thinking salad as being a satisfying meal until I became an adult. Maybe it’s because we’re served such crap salads when we were kids. Iceberg lettuce, shredded carrots, maybe half a tomato. In fact, airlines do their best to keep the tradition alive on long flights, serving you the exact same salad on long flights.

Well, screw that.

Chop’t is a salad company that’s recently celebrate their 10 year anniversary, with several locations spread throughout NYC and DC. Their salads are a bit on the expensive side, but they don’t skimp one bit on the ingredients or portion size. My favorite part? The recent switch to antibiotic free, hormone free, free range chicken in all their locations. I find myself drawn to getting a salad at least once a week as a treat, building it from the ground up with ingredients such as ancho chile chicken, goat cheese, fresh cherry tomatoes, spinach, arugula, and a regularly rotation selection of dressings that only ever use honey or agave nectar for sweetners.

The owners swap in seasonal ingredients and pre-selected salad combinations for the indecisive types, but I highly recommend experimenting and making up something that’s all your own.

And the best part about the salads? They’re hysterial.

Find a Chop’t near you here.

Of course, for all of you salad haters, you could make your salad DOUBLY paleo by adding your own meat.

Café Asia could almost be considered a DC institution of restaurants, with a location in Arlington (Rosslyn) and one in DC, of which this writeup focuses on the latter of the two. I’ve been to the restaurant on a couple of occasions, and while it didn’t break any new ground in dining experiences, it was modern, exuded a sleek, club like persona, and had been a reasonable pleasure to dine at both during lunch and dinner.

Jen and I headed over on a Friday night, and immediately upon entering the front doors, it was evident that something was quite different. The dimly lit ambiance was replaced with the lighting scheme of something that’d be more appropriately found in a study hall or a library. I ordered a selection of rolls from the sushi bar for the two of us, an appetizer for myself, and an entree for the each of us. To the credit of the restaurant, our sushi rolls came out to our table within 10 minutes of our order. To our dismay, the rest of our dishes arrive not more than five minutes later. It was quite possibly the first time I really gave thought to the fact that a good server will pay attention to when you dishes come out and control the cadence of delivery, an absolute shit server will let everything come to your table at once.

As for the food, the fried calamari is a good value and the various sushi rolls are slightly above average. The noodle bowls here display a decent array of noodles, but these tend to be disproportionately light on ingredients aside from the noodles and very heavy on the sugary sauce. Jen’s Pad Thai arrived with minced chicken, and despite the menu clearly stating this fact, we had overlooked it in hunger. Jen asked him for a vegetarian version, to which he blankly stated was impossible with the Pad Thai due to the sauce being pre-made, likely stewing in a giant vat from the start of the day. We asked the server to take it back, and did so begrudgingly.

While I wouldn’t call Café Asia the best of restaurants, I can’t say I’ve had a complete disaster of a meal like this before, so bad that I’m willing to say I’ll never eat here again. As it turns out, both restaurants have changed ownership in the past year, a change that is clearly not for the better. The restaurant has all the personality of an ironing board, the service of a half star Parisienne restaurant, and the much needed updating of an appropriately descriptive name, like Cafeteria Asia. Hey guys, don’t forget to bring your algebra books, we’re gonna cram before midterms over here before we go streaking across the quad.

Map? Your money could possibly be better spent buying $40 of scratch-off lottery tickets and huffing a plastic tub filled with gasoline for an hour while you engage in a political debate against a half dressed mannequin on the merits of electing a white-faced saki monkey in a tie and a diaper to Congress.

Indian food isn’t the first thing I think about when I think of Easter. I tend to think of rabbits and eggs, and wonder how this German tradition beat out the resurrection of Jebus in popularity. Easter is also the first real holiday that the ladies can step out in sundresses and ridiculous hats, and boys posing as men can walk around in pants with tiny embroidered animals all over them, paired with a seersucker jacket and consider themselves fashionably prep.

Speaking as someone who doesn’t currently own a screaming child of my own (I’m worried the layaway payments will kill me), it’s hard to find an Easter brunch, and a buffet at that, that doesn’t come chock full of screaming toddlers at every adjacent table. Bombay Club, one of the finer dining Indian cuisine restaurants, does so beautifully.  The restaurant serves a hard to beat price for their buffet brunch ($25 a person at the time of this writing), with an option to upgrade to a bottomless champagne brunch ($35 a person at the time of this writing), and a 80 year old man banging out the best in classical music on the piano to boot.

The selection is high quality, but options are limited to two tables, with each table hosting about 8-10 choices of food and dessert. For the price, atmosphere, and childless crowds, this is a deal that’s nearly impossible to beat on any Easter or Mother’s Day Brunch.

See Bombay Club on a map here.

Jen and I have been kicking around the idea of having a quick write-up format to cover our dining adventures. These short reviews and commentaries might not have the same photo coverage or talk about dishes as much in depth, but rather a concise summarization of a place we’ve stuffed ourselves silly with food, or at least tried to do as much as possible in a single sitting.

Well, I’m always trying to stuff my maw, she’s just trying to have a meal. They come with the same subjective writing, and are of course, wholly based on delicious, pasture raised, organic opinion. Look for these coming to omnomnivores soon!

Bon apetit!