The rich bass heavy sounds of dub pour out into the streets from this dimly lit restaurant, with vibrations so deep, you can feel ‘dem in Jamaica. Spur Tree Lounge emphasizes its Jamaican roots both in music and cuisine, of which the latter is paired with typical Asian fare for a mix that actually turns it out rather nicely.

Jen’s Fried Vegetable Dumplings with Scallion Aioli were good, but nothing extraordinary. That being said, it’s certainly difficult to outdo the dumplings you could have at a number of restaurants in Chinatown not more than a few blocks away.

I ordered the Grilled Jamaican Jerk Wings with the Spicy Balsamic Sauce. I’m not sure if it’s been a long while since I’ve had chicken wings, but these were about as good of an order of them as I can remember. Just thinking about the perfectly seared, tender wings with just a hint of spiciness has me watering at the mouth all over again. It’s nice that the wings are no skimp on the proportion of meat here, either.

Jen’s main course, Organic Veggie Burger, fell a little flat both in presentation and taste. The patty seems lilliputian in comparison to it’s bun, something that’s a disappointment in knowing that the organic cheese comes as an extra. The spicy coco bread bun does live up to its name, giving a slight tingle to your tongue with every bite. The two spoons and small side salad are a nice touch to raise the bar of this order to something that’s just barely respectable. The portion size was just about right for Jen, but if it were me eating this, I’d be pretty upset with the burger to bun ratio here.

The June Plum Glazed Baby Back Pork Ribs, thankfully, take the table to a turn for the better. Succulent, thick cut baby back ribs coated in a deliciously sweet and sticky sauce and then thoughtfully topped with chopped fresh green onions that will have tearing through each piece after you’re eaten them all in search for another bite. I considered ordering another plate for myself and getting a cab to cart my fat, belly-filled ass home, but thought better of it. What good is NYC if you can’t pound out a couple of miles on foot? Served with a side salad, this is a good for either just one person or shared between two.

Desserts here are, graciously, no slouch either. The Warm Banana Bread Pudding is topped with a generous scoop of vanilla ice cream, covered with a rum mango caramel sauce and sprinkled with fresh blueberries. The ice cream melts fast, so your spoonwork will just have to be a bit faster in devouring this plate before it turns into a bowl of soup over the warm bread pudding.

The food here isn’t exactly consistent. There are some very well thought out dishes that excel for a casual meal out, and then there are some that are in some serious rework to balance out the available offerings. The restaurant does take extra steps to distinguish itself through higher quality ingredients and thoughtful preparation, which did not go unnoticed by either Jen or me.

The service here is by and far some of the best service we experienced all weekend, at any restaurant. My water glass was never once completely drained, and Sean John, the restaurateur, is a gregarious tall fellow who’ll come by and chat with you to talk about your day’s travels and city exploits. The staff is very friendly and we were served by a number of people, despite the table space being at a premium at this smaller establishment. The lights are turned down low, and the dub plays high throughout your meal, so if you’re a fan of kicking back with a bottle of Red Stripe and getting down with the riddims, you’ll feel right at home here at Spur Tree Lounge on any given night of the year.

See Spur Tree Lounge on a map here.

Recommended For:

• Drinks ‘n’ Dub
• Dreadlock Rastafasians
• Lowkey Lunches & Brunches
• Spliff Politics

Not Recommended For:

• Your Baby’s Sixth Berfday
• Broadway Dinners
• Karma Karma Chameleons
• Voracious Vegans

Cafe Atlantico holds a Latino Dim Sum brunch every Sunday morning up until 1:30 in the afternoon, and after reading a glowing review, I decided to get a few people together for their tasting menu. The tasting menu consists of 14 dishes for $35, or a 12 dish vegetarian tasting menu for $25, which was great for Jen. The restaurant is painted in bright, cheerful colors with large abstract paintings hanging from the walls. It’s a bit odd to have separate hostesses on both the first and second floors, but I didn’t really question their policies. We were seated quickly, and just barely catching the tail end of the tasting menu offering in the early afternoon.

We were first treated with a canape style dish of cherry tomatoes paired with cantaloupe and heavy hits of parsley, which really weren’t too impressive, and actually had me slightly worried with such a weak starting dish. Not to say that it was bad, but it wasn’t particularly flavorful, and seemed like an odd dish to serve as a palette cleanser.

Tomato and Cantaloupe

Then the flurry of dishes began. We were served with raw oysters with a mango lime oil, mango-anchovy ravioli, and tuna ceviche with coconut. The server was clearly not very confident in his English speaking abilities, and trailed off in his announcement of the mango-anchovy ravioli, so we were all under the impression that it was just a mango cream ravioli.

Including Jen.

She took a bite, and almost threw up on the spot. Think of bringing a glass of water to your mouth and taking a deep gulp, only to find as it burns your esophagus to lava that you’re drinking a glass of straight Kentucky Moonshine. I don’t blame her, and actually felt really bad, because anchovies aren’t exactly a mild flavor. In fact, I actually enjoy anchovies, and even I found these things pretty disgusting.

From top left, clockwise: Oysters, Mango-Anchovy Ravioli, Tuna ceviche

The oysters and tuna ceviche were decent, but didn’t really stand out at all. The flavors were bland and uninspired, and there was nothing particularly intriguing about the textures of any of these three dishes.

Oysters with Mango-Lime Oil

Tuna Ceviche with Coconut

This wasn’t heading in a good direction.

The next dish was a vegetarian dish, plantain chips with shaved slices of pineapple. The plaintain chips weren’t particularly remarkable, but the shaved pineapple was definitely something different and worth crediting to the chefs preparing our food. The dishes were a huge step up from the previous three, but only because the three seafood dishes were so disappointing did it really make the pineapple and plantain chips shine.

The next round of dishes were little shooters of potato and vanilla mousse with caviar (sans caviar for Jen). This turned out to be one of my two favorite dishes of the meal, with a great smooth texture and taste. The other shooter glasses were filled with a hot and cold foie gras with corn soup, but these had no substantial taste to them, and seemed to be little more than cups of slightly flavored foam. If there was supposed to be a sublime enjoyment of this as a Picasso of edible delicacies, it was completely missed by me.

Potoato Vanilla Mousse and Hot/Cold Foie Gras Corn Soup

The other dish that turned out to be a solid dish were the conch fritters with a liquid center. Deep fried and slightly crispy on the outside, with a molten hot center, these were fantastic.

Conch Fritters with a Liquid Center

Jen was treated with a jicama-avocado ravioli, which turned out pretty well, but again, seemed odd with the soft ravioli skin on the outside and a creamy avocado inside, with little crunch or texture to offset the flavors. She enjoyed them, but I felt like it was another poorly executed dish, although it did have a very nice aesthetic.

Jicama Avocado Ravioli

The mushroom with egg 63, a sauteed mushroom dish topped with a poached egg, was definitely interesting, but there was almost no way to get all of the poached egg into your mouth with just the mushrooms it was served with. I felt like the dish could have used some sort of bread or absorbent vegetable to help sop up the egg without having it all go to waste. What does the 63 stand for? Probably the number of iterations it took the restaurant to get this dish to even this crappy level of ‘perfection’.

Mushrooms with Egg 63

I feel like at this point, I should really stop going into each and every single dish. Overall, the Latino Dim Sum was a huge disappointment. There are definitely some choice dishes that stand out and salvage the meal from being a complete disaster, but overall, the experience is a giant FAIL. When you are one dish away from the finale, you are allowed to order any of your sampled dishes again, so we had another round of the jicama-avocado raviolis, the mushroom vanilla mousse, and the conch fritters, which helped bring up the enjoyment of the meal a notch. The guacamole isn’t included in the meal, but I put in an order for the table prepped green cream just so we’d have something else that couldn’t be screwed up. In truth, their guacamole is actually very good, and another solid dish that helps balance the army of bad dishes from the tasting menu.

Tableside guacamole

In Paris, they call it L'Avocado Cream de Fattique

The last dish, a dessert, is best described as a crustless french toast with queso cheese and maple syrup. It’s an interesting dish that works, but isn’t richly satisfying as you would expect.

Pan dulce with cinnamon syrup

Jen actually didn’t really care for this dish, but I couldn’t get enough of it. Mostly because I was still drowning out the anchovy flavors from earlier.

While this foray of flavors could be touted as a great value, in the end, I wouldn’t recommend this place to anyone as a destination. There are some standouts that don’t make it a complete outrage, but I could be served up with four cold pizzas from the night before, and be exponentially happier. If anything, I think this place really highlights the fact that it does take an adventurous kitchen to create fine foods that are unique and look amazing, but you simply can’t neglect the most fundamental point, that it has to taste good, too.

minibar, a small six seat section of the restaurant, stands as its own entity from Cafe Atlantico, and the two only share the same space, but not the same chefs or menus. I won’t hold Cafe Atlantico’s poor food against minibar, and still hope to one day give it it’s fair day in court.

View a map of Cafe Atlantico here.

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My parents were coming in for a visit to make the most of some time off, so I figured it’d be a perfect opportunity to introduce them to Jen and catch the last of Restaurant Week in DC at the same time at indebleu. The restaurant sits near the corner of 7th and G St in NW, just opposite the throbbing display of the jumbotron of the Verizon Center. I’ve eaten at indebleu for Restaurant Week when the doors first opened a few years ago, and my initial impression of the food served was less satisfactory. The memory of dry chunks of chicken in a creamy, oily sauce that had little indication of anything other than a mass produced vat of the stuff waiting to be served to Restaurant Week customers has kept me from visiting again, but a friend had mentioned that the chef had changed since my last visit (closer examination on the Googles has actually proved that there have been several chef changes, including spare change, a tire change, and a sex change, but none of that really matters in the discussion of food) with Chef Michael Hartzer currently at the helm (having created previous culinary impressions at both Ray’s the Classics and Citronelle).

We went up to the 2nd floor (the first floor houses a room full of monkeys seated at typewriters and some sort of bar) and were quickly whisked away to our table by the hostess. The décor is much more subdued with rich, dark tones, contrasting starkly to the minimalist white and blue theme that had been initially in place a few years back. The ambient noise is a bit higher than conversational, probably to compensate for the untz-untz-untz-disco-untz-untz-untz of the lounge downstairs. There were several times that we had to ask one another to repeat what we just said because the din of the other patrons droned out our own conversation.

Service here is, without hyperbole, probably the most uber attentive of any restaurant I’ve ever visited. Within 60 seconds, we were asked on whether we would prefer sparking, flat, or Potomac water at the table. Within the next two minutes, we were asked the same question again by two completely different waiters. A woman elegantly dressed in gold hues smiled and greeted us, as if her only duty at indebleu was to walk around as a professional greeter (isn’t that what a hostess is?) and make sure that you haven’t somehow become disgruntled with how the seating process was handled, or if you were to make the request that the clamor around you wasn’t loud enough, and that you wanted an accordion-sitar-trombone-standup-bass quartet to come and play your favorite Journey hits for you.

I was slightly miffed at the fact that you can only order from the price-fixe Restaurant Week setup, with no a la carte options available, because I know both Jen and my mom are fairly light eaters. I also remembered that the portions tend to be a bit on the small side (don’t let this discourage you, they are rich enough to keep you content) so I figured everything would work itself out…and it did.

Bay Scallop in Green Thai Curry

My dad and I both ordered the Bay Scallop Green Curry to start. Two medium sized, seared scallops, divided by a border of Thai green curry ratatouille, served with a simple but well thought out presentation. My mom ordered the Tuna Tartare Spring Roll with a curried cognac remoulade, and Jen opted for the Thai Style Vichyssoise, a chilled potato and Kaffir lime soup. Everyone seemed pleased with their order, and already the restaurant was overturning my previously set impressions.

Wild Mushroom Pasta

For the main course, Jen went with the Wild Mushroom Pasta, which she commented tasting more like a delicious Vegetarian Stroganoff. My Dad went for the Slow Cooked Beef Short Ribs, although the meat that came out looked more slices of flank steak rather than short ribs. My Mom ordered the Masala Seared Salmon, but commented that the accompanying lentils were flavorless, lifeless, and had the soul of a Tupperware container (She didn’t really say that. She said the soul of a plastic bag. (She didn’t really say that either.)) I had the Peruvian Style Roast Chicken, and was very pleased that the chicken didn’t come out dry but actually tender, moist, and just about close to perfection, although I’ve yet to try Nando’s Peri-Peri. I’m sure the Peruvian chicken from there is on an altogether different level being more of a casual dining meal whereas indebleu is a more elegant experience, but I always try to keep in mind that good food is still good food, and it’s out there just begging to be eaten!

Peruvian Style Roast Chicken

The desserts were pretty good with lots of opportunity for creativity, and the kitchen definitely poured that into these dishes. Jen and my Dad ordered L’Opera- A layered cake with almond biscuits, almond ice cream, chocolate ganache, and served with a scoop of pistachio ice cream. My mom and I ordered the Creamsicle – orange mousse and honey mascarpone, served with ice cream on top of a mango suzette. I didn’t particularly think the suzette really fit into the textures of the rest of the dessert, and was entirely too difficult to break apart without loudly driving the spoon into the table like a cro-magnon (you get one guess as to who did that, and it wasn’t my Mom).

L'Opera

Overall, the dishes seemed to try and incorporate the fusion idea that a lot of places seem to cling to when they can’t nail down a consistent theme, but it does offer an opportunity for lots of creativity with their dishes, and that’s definitely something indebleu has one. As for the lady in gold? Apparently she’s the co-owner of indebleu with her husband, making sure that every customer is getting their money’s worth from their visit. Indebleu might not make it as one of my favorite places to go, but it’s definitely a good leap up from the place I had dinner at several years ago, and worth spending a few dollars to eat at if you’re looking for something different during Restaurant Week next year.