Central Michel Richard

[pretty girl, ugly decor]

Once again, KB lured me to DC, on a Sunday no less, with a 4 o'clock Steelers game (I don't wanna talk about it, James Harrison) with promises of delicious burgers. Now, I've got nothing but respect for the DC burger tradition. I like 5 Guys a lot. Once I ate an entire double bacon cheeser there (all the way, plus BBQ sauce) then had a double waffle cone at Sylvan Beach up in Mt. Washington, IN THE SAME NIGHT, and it may have been the greatest culinary night of my life. So you can see why I was psyched, at the very least, for some quality ground beef. But KB didn't do her research, and both Ray's in Arlington and that fruit from Top Chef's place were closed, so we were left combing through "best burger" lists on DCist (the worst-ever website ) and Washingtonian, and we settled on Central Michel Richard, a shmancy dinner place near the White House with a slumming-it burger menu (read: $16 for the most basic of sandwiches).

My first reaction was, my God, why can't anyone in Washington make a restaurant that doesn't look like a morgue (see photo above)? But my second reaction was, Holy Hell Look At These Prices I'm Already In Debt! But then my third reaction was, Oh God That Looks Good upon seeing every entree that passed us by. And my fourth reaction, after drink orders (go Blusser over Mad Hatter) was to THIS:

[pure fat]

Sorry my picture sucks. That's a duck rieux appetizer, with a dish of faux gras chicken liver spread in the blurry, distant background. Each of these was like an entire stew in your mouth, generated by about .25 ounces of it spread on a piece of bread. Between bites, we cleansed with pickled gerkins and vinegarry pearl onions. I don't know much about pate or fois gras, so I'm not sure how able I am to rate these, but to me they were just amazing.

At some point in the meal we had to make a choice between splurging, making a date out of it, and ordering some dope entrees, which for sure would have catapulted our bill to somewhere around $130 total, but we decided to go with the original plan anywayz:

[ahhhhhhhhhhh!!!]

The burgers, for all their to-do about ginger mayo and other sauces, had surprisingly little flavor. I mean, I was wanting some ketchup by about 3 bites left. The bacon was near-perfect (crispy, a nice lean cut, etc), but it sort of overwhelmed the basic taste of the beef, which was relatively high quality, as I could tell by my bloody red rare version. There was also this thin potato wafer thingy that they put on top of these monsters that really blunted the meat taste. You had all this rich potential for flavoUr, with a capital U, that was offset by these salty starch buttresses whose purpose I can't pretend to understand. The fries were good, but not great.

I'd go back to this place, I guess, because it looked like they did a pretty mean ribeye, but come to think of it -- life's short. I mean, I guess if I were in DC again. For some reason... [sighs]. Grades:

FOOD: B

For reasons described above, I think these burgers have no place on "best of" lists of any kind. They were innocuous, at best. But all that bird giblet fat! Amazing! And everything we saw go buy was serious eye candy. Fish, meat, risotto, oysters, you name it. But alas, it was burger night.

BOOZE: B

I tried the Mad Hatter IPA first, which seemed like a good choice, but didn't arrive at all how I expected it to taste. I detected malts in it, and a serious top of the pallet flavor, unlike the low corners of the tongue thing that happens with a lot of really hoppy IPAs. Strangely, the waiter, when I ordered a new beer (a very pils-y and very good Blusser), said something like, "Yeah, it's really hoppy -- not a lot of people are used to it." KB's Malbec was tasty. I just could not order well that night.

AMBIENCE: B

Weird, extremely large video screens with slideshows of the food available at the restaurant greet you. Stuffy, claustrophobic dining room with glass paned walls separating you from the bar area, allowing bar-iers to spy on your dining experience. Bizarre art made of stacks of plates and more glass. Just not a place I'd like to be every night.

Old Fairfield

[tangly!]

I'm not entirely sure how many people know this about me, but I'm really into big, tangled masses of pipes, mechanical parts, and other sorts of crazy bits of metal. Yeah, that sounds weird, I know, but being in close proximity to large, powerful looking machinery with lots of exposed parts is something that I have, for most of my life, found really thrilling, even if I have no idea what the thing does (like the subject of the above picture) or how it works (like a car motor, a bicycle's gear-shifting apparatus, or my own liver). Maybe it's got something to do with growing up in Pittsburgh, where the old mills along the Mon sit and rust temptingly by the river on the way to Kennywood. Or maybe it's some innate male attraction to tinkering, the same place where Rube Goldberg devices come from: somewhere full of business and technicality but bereft of the reasoning or expertise that makes it real. 

Anyway, a few days ago, while working on a story, a local real estate attorney mentioned to me something about Fairfield, a port district in the oft-forgotten peninsula of industrial South Baltimore that sticks out into the Chesapeake, prickly with loading docks, sout of the Middle Branch, and Old Fairfield, a former residential area nearby. "Fairfield is one of my favorite places ever," he told me. "It's just pure heavy industry."

Really? I thought. Last time I was there it was just one parking lot filled with recently-offloaded cars after another, with some overgrown weedy lots in between. For me, I thought, it ranks somewhere between a courtyard in front of a municipal building and a public restroom on my list of favorite places. 

But then I was back there the other day working on a related story, this time in that soft light of the afternoon, and I actually stopped and looked at all the goddamn tangled masses of pipes and other things, and I ended up wasting a whole lot of time taking pictures, which are totally industrial-artsy-chic. And if you can't see the beauty in these, then you, sir, have no soul. 

[containment]

This are shipping containers, those ridged tin cans that are ubiquitous to any port city, and which Scuppies like to turn into elitist houses. These ones looked particularly depraved to me. 

[brewin' health tonicks]

This is a chemical manufacturing facility of some sort, belonging maybe to Condea Vista or Conoco Phillips or some such company, but all I know about it, really, is that they brew medicines in there, or at least the chemical compounds that become medicines the same way whiskey is distilled (now THAT caught my ear): on a large scale, at high heat, with lots of pressure. Sweeeeeet. 

[sniff sniff sniff]

The above monstrosity of a piece of equipment struck me because of how animal-like it seemed. Like it's scratching around for grubs to eat. Or something. 

[pwn3d.]

And then, oh glory of glories, the car-chewing machine. There were thousands of cars piled up at the Fairfield Scrap Yard, in huge, heaping, triumphant piles. Because they were compressed so thin, they all looked like 1960s Cadillacs, no matter what type of horrid wood-panelled wagons they were to begin with. It was like huge piles of Americana!

[the mighty chewer itself]

[crunch'd]

And this peekchurr I like because it reminds me of a Richard Estes painting I used to have hanging in my room in high school, after I became enamored of that guy's work in senior AP art history class and a field trip to the Met. 

[beauty.]

And then, just in time for Halloween, I found this creepy-ass church, which once provided a place of worship for the hideous vampires of Old Fairfield:

[brrrrr]