Hours:
Our Bar opens at 5:30pm nightly
We Open:
Monday ~ Friday: 6
Saturday: 5.30
Our Last Table:
Monday ~ Thursday: 9:30
Friday & Saturday: 10:30
Sundays 11 am 'til 8:30 {brunch 11 'til 3} kitchen closes 30 minutes after last table seated.
Dino, including our patio, is non smoking!
New & Good on the Menu
As you probably know by now, we are focused on the local bounty available to us living in the middle of such great food resources in the Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland Virginia and North Carolina area. The Chesapeake is one of the great seafood resources in the world, yet most associate it with crab, rock fish, and oysters. We have offered in the past year local fish like summer flounder, Spanish mackerel and {on tonight's menu} wild blue catfish to resounding success. While these fish are lesser known, they offer great eating and are sustainable.
Our latest find, thanks to the tireless efforts of Steve Vilnit of the Maryland Department of Fish & Game, is the Yellow Perch. We are one of the few restaurants in DC to offer this local delicacy that has been virtually unknown commercially. Yellow Perch is a small fish, served whole. The real treat isn't simply the sweet, meaty and mild flesh, but the roe sack that each fish contains. Much like with the shad, the eggs are the best part of the fish!. The roe is firm, moist and not fishy in any way, and flesh of the fish is superb. We wrap the roe sack in bacon and pan fry the roe along with the whole fish, til crisp. We offer a lemon and sage condimento on the side. Short season and limited availability! AMAZING!!!
Our Wild Mushroom Soup is super simple. This week, we have wild hedgehogs and yellowfoot chanterelle mushrooms from the Pacific Northwest. We sauté them with green garlic in a bit of Trickling Springs small batch churned butter {amazingly wonderful stuff we just recently started using} and then cook in a blend of veggie stock & heavy cream. We finish the soup with our array of exotic spices. The result is a decadently rich soup that isn’t made heavy by the addition of flour or from the over reduction of the cream. It’s just chucks of ‘shrooms in a light cream broth.
Peposo is a famous old recipe from the town of Imprunetta south of Florence. It might have remained a local dish had it not been for the building of the Duomo in Florence, overseen by Brunelleschi in the 1400s. The great architect built an oven for baking the bricks for the dome right next to the cathedral. So at night, he had the peppery stew cooked in this oven in the banked embers of the fire. The hot earthenware pots of stew were taken up to the workers where they not only warmed their insides, but the pots themselves acted as heaters high above Florence. {I would never even mention the story that he chose the peppery stew so he could use spoiled beef to save money!}
Our Peposo is a traditional one {without tomato: remember that the tomato was only introduced to Italy AFTER Colombo’s voyages and not used in cooking ‘til much later} and non traditional as we se Short Rib instead of the more typical shank. We use our local farms beef shortrib {dry aged Maryland or Virginia beef: no feedlots, hormones, growth stimulant, steroids ever, raised on small farms in Maryland & Virginia.} After long slow oven braising in red wine, garlic, herbs and tons of fresh cracked black pepper, we place it on a bed of horseradish spiked mashed celeriac & potatoes.
We really believe in the foods we offer, both on a taste basis, but just as importantly, on the basis of how they are farmed, made or fished. Where you spend your food dollars really tells our economy what kind of world you want to live in. We hope you appreciate what we do in this regard.
