Turning Over

Hotel Monaco | Chinatown 

3510 O Street NW | Georgetown 

Cashion's Eat Place | Adam's Morgan 

room with a view, 14th Street NW 

In a town known more for it's lack of speed and efficiency than anything else, Washington's bars and restaurants turn over with surprising regularity. Prevailing winds from election cycles determine what's in and what's out, so it was no shock to see all the changes that've come about since we left just four years ago: Georgetown stock is down while U Street and Chinatown are up; Foggy Bottom seems to have added entire city blocks out of nowhere; and Adam's Morgan is still Adam's Morgan, crowded and hot and too young - or I'm too old... and always will be.  

Friday night was the final night of a long week spent re-tracing my steps through some old haunts and enjoying some new ones in the process. We started at the Hotel Monaco for a happy hour that turned into happy hours. Hordes of Assistant U.S. Attorneys on hand; I had no idea one man could have so many assistants. But there they were, some of our best and brightest, drinking as though they were fresh off forty years in the desert.

Afterwards, one of those wanderers and his wife and I grabbed dinner at Graffiato, which inhabits an old space where years ago I watched countless college football games, drowning sorrows under cover of a windowless space that served cold stale beer from corroded tubes. Now there's a kitchen dishing up black truffle pizza with fontina and a "farm soft egg"... cracked and smothered by farm-soft hands, presumably. I stayed away from anything on draft.

Dinner ended and we went back to my buddy's house and relived some more memories of youth... a thirteen year old video of a road trip our junior year through the South: Austin to Dallas, then to Memphis, Savannah, and Charleston. It's a wonder the shit we used to pull, yet somehow figuring a way to emerge both unscathed and un-indicted. Though judging by the actions of the litigators I spent time with earlier in the evening, maybe there really wasn't all that much to worry about.