Monday, January 2, 2012.
Bobby Flay Burgers. Dining And Sleeping In A Trash Incinerator.
The cold wave finally arrived at The Homestead overnight, sending the temperatures into the teens, and turning last night's drizzle into enough snow to form inch-high drifts. For Mary Ann and the kids, this is both exciting and frustrating. The whole point of coming here for New Year's was to cavort in the snow that these mountains almost always have this time of year. Now it comes, and it's time to leave. Not a moment too soon: I have been dreading the prospect of driving the mountain highway with snow falling. Mary Ann pooh-poohed my wimpiness and said she would drive. Which only increased the fear.
A young man helping people with their luggage in front of the hotel stepped up. "Excuse me, but are you Tom Fitzmorris?" he asked. "I saw the Louisiana plates on your car. I knew you were here, because I'm from New Orleans and read NOMenu.com!"
I was astonished. This was the first non-family person in our four days at The Homestead who knew me. The total loss of my minor celebrity doesn't happen to me much in my travels. And I must admit I don't like it. I feel like a superhero who's lost his special powers.
That probably seems laughable. But I recall Johnny Carson talking about a long sojourn he made to the South of France one summer. For the first couple of weeks, he relished being able to walk around in public without having hundreds of people wanting to meet him and get his autograph. "But you know," he said, "after awhile I started missing the celebrity. I started telling people in cafes what I did for a living. Of course, nobody in France had ever seen The Tonight Show. To them, I was just another American tourist. It felt strange, even a little insecure."
This probably explains why, as the 75-percenters in my family were having a great time, I found The Homestead humdrum and uninteresting.
The snow kept falling, but too lightly to be concerned about. We stopped at an overlook on the twisting highway, to take pictures with the waterfall in the background. We were in a hurry to get here, but reluctant to leave the last bits of what makes these environs special. I'll bet it's nice here in the summer. Jude and I could resume the golfing we did together until Katrina split our mutual world into two.
Our destination was Washington, D.C. Our only stop was for coffee and bathrooms near Front Royal. I didn't recognize the place, but I'd been here before, in October 1983, heading home by way of the Blue Ridge Parkway (which sort of starts here) after two weeks of wandering around New England.
As I feared, Mary Ann's minimum requirements for hotels have clicked up a couple of notches since last week. That's a result of her new disdain for the Westin, where we slept in Atlanta last Tuesday. She didn't tell me until we arrived in Georgetown that our reservations were at the Ritz-Carlton. I worry about her. What will she do after she decides, as she surely will, that the Ritz isn't good enough? I know she will not accept an invitation to spend the night at the White House as long as Obama lives there.
The Ritz-Carlton in Georgetown is a unique property. Much smaller than most in the chain, this one was built in what had been a large city trash incinerator. The layout was very strange. To get to the rooms from the lobby, you walk through a long tube made of brick, with a low, curved brick ceiling. The tall smokestack has a private dining room in its base--right where the refuse used to be burned. The names of the restaurant and lounge and the art on the wall all make references to fire. It was all equal parts cool and mildly disturbing.
We checked in, then headed right back out in search of lunch and shopping. Since we left New Orleans, Mary Ann has called every Nordstrom's on our route in search for some boots she saw on sale at one of them. The calls were astonishingly uniform. First she was transferred from the just-plain shoe department to some special designer section. Then she explained the boot style in tremendous detail, after which the salesperson suddenly remembered the very boot. It was never available. Nothing was doing here, either, even though Nordstrom's is very big in D.C.
As we entered the financial district on K Street, I saw a sign for a place called Bobby's Burger Palace on the ground floor of one of the office buildings. It didn't look like anything special. But when the Marys saw it they shrieked the name with glee.
Bobby's Burger Palace is the downscale arm of television star chef Bobby Flay's restaurant collection. The Marys love Bobby Flay, probably for his looks. I don't think much of him, because on numerous occasions he has disparaged the food of New Orleans. That shows a poor sense of taste as far as I'm concerned.
The girls are wild about hamburgers, too. This was a must-stop.
If there were something really special about Bobby's hamburgers here, it eluded me. They were certainly tremendously better than fast food. The burgers were cooked to order on grills hot enough to make them crusty. The dressings were fresh and interesting, with a wider range of vegetables, sauces, and cheeses. But a burger can only be so good, and few hamburgers deserve special marking on my mental map of the world of eating. These don't.
In addition to the burgers we had onion rings (thick, soggy, and terrible) and the fresh-cut fries. One order of those was hot and nice; the other was cool and stick-like.
Since the 75-percenters all had hamburgers, I got a grilled cheese and bacon sandwich. Good, but once again: just how high can such a thing rise?
Back to the hotel. Mary Ann began patronizing me by suggesting all the interesting restaurants she saw on a stroll around the place. The Ritz-Carlton is in the middle of Georgetown, where ethnic restaurants abound. She didn't really want to eat Ethiopian food, I knew. But she felt a need for me to do so while she sat and watched, to balance out the karma vis-a-vis the Ritz.
I told her I'd decide later, and went downstairs to the lobby to get out a newsletter. Meanwhile, Jude met up with Trevor Barnett, a fellow Jesuit Blue Jay who, like Jude, was taken in by Georgetown Prep after the hurricane and never left. He's still in the area, going to college in Baltimore. Jude and Trevor picked up their friendship right where they left off three years ago, and went out carousing, eating, and looking for skirts in Georgetown until the wee hours.
When I awoke from a nap, Mary Ann pressed me for a dinner plan. I told her that, frankly, since it was really cold and windy out there, we'd driven 250 miles today, and my energy level was low, what appealed to me most was just dining in the hotel. The days when you could count on the Ritz-Carlton to have one of the best restaurants in town are now over, but I checked the menu and it seemed well above standard hotel food.
"I'm so glad to hear you say that!" she said.
I went down first and had a Negroni in the part of the dining room shared with the bar. It reminded me of the similar space in the Zea in Covington. When the Marys showed up, we started with hummus and tomato-topped bruschetti. Mary Ann stopped there. A pair of crab cakes came for me, and Mary Leigh had her seventh consecutive filet mignon dinner. Creme brulee for my dessert. None of this was either deficient or memorable. The servers were attentive and friendly. We were guests in the hotel made to feel at home, and that was good enough for me in the mood we were in.
Bobby's Burger Palace. Washington, DC: 2121 K Street, NW. 202-974-6260.
Ritz-Carlton Georgetown. Washington, DC: 3100 South St, N.W., 202-912-4100.
It's over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
