Holiday foods

I'm back from a nice long stay with my folks in D.C.  and ready to write!  While in Washington I was able to visit the Carlyle a bustling and comforting if unspectacular restaurant.  If you've never been to Shirlington, its basically a row of restaurants surrounded by hotels and office buildings.  We usually stop off there after doing the tourist thing in DC or the shopping thing at Pentagon City. 

We had been to the Carlyle before and it's  a good place, the food was nice and the desserts were really good. But the whole time  we were there I was thinking that  we should have gone to Bistro Bistro, another restaurant we had visited previously.  I'm not going to go into detail about Bistro Bistro, I'll save that for an actual visit, but I will say that it has a quiet elegant charm that is the opposite of the Carlyle's busy carnival atmosphere. 

So, the food was good, and the decor cheerful but I'm at a loss for anything to say about the Carlyle. I'm suffering from food envy. No matter how good the crab cakes were, and they were pretty fantastic - full of fresh crab with a light sauce -I chose the wrong restaurant.  It's impossible to truly loose yourself in a meal when your heart isn't in to it. Then it just becomes eating for the sake of eating, which is the one thing I'm trying to stay away from.

Now I'm very grateful to my folks for taking us out for lunch, but what I enjoyed most about the Carlyle is just being out and about with my family - oh and the flourless chocolate waffle with the molten chocolate inside.  That was killer.