Nostalgic for Baltimore, Anyone?

[shyuck, shyuck, shyuck...]

I went to Faidley's the other day for lunch, intending to get a crab cake, but ended up just doing it Mad Men-style, with the working lunch of straight oysters and a beer.

The following night, I had oysters that really blew these ones out of the water at Hank's Oyster Bar in DC, which I think is my current favorite restaurant in the District, but it was Bawlmer, man, and it was REAL. I perused seafood:


[god made ROCK ...fish]

And this handsome fellow came home with me, to be grilled up on Friday. He's all fillets and ice in my freezer right now:


[oh, hi]

And Brooksie knows what's best:


[brooksie]

Felice Bros. @ Birchmere, 4/15

Despite the hellish drive from Baltimore to Alexandria during rush hour, I had a lovely time with KB seeing the Felice Brothers, the latest greatest hillbilly punk band (or are they just a punky hillbilly band?) to emerge from New York. I love this band's self-titled record, mainly because they sound just like The Band on a lot of tracks, but also because they make music that is strikingly rough-edged in an era where that's becoming the norm for garage rock bands, but still hasn't caught on in the country scene. Bluegrass is great, sure, with all its flourish and technical wizardry and hot fiddling, but there was certainly a vacuum to be filled for bands that play low-budg old-time string band music with the same type of voracity that the Sex Pistols or the Stooges played rock. A few years ago, Old Crow Medicine Show started the big push to fill that gap. The Felice Brothers, from upstate New York, are the latest.

Fittingly, drummer Simone Felice was wearing an OCMS t-shirt while he sat behind the kit. His two brothers, James (accordion, keyboards, vocals) and Ian (guitar, lead vocals) were two his right, along with Greg Farley, the slightly ADD fiddler and washboard-scraper who did lots of vaguely hip-hop dance moves when he wasn't playing and wore absurd nut-hugger jeans, and Christmas, the group's bizarre, strung-out looking bassist. They played a good mix of songs from Felice Brothers and their new one, Yonder Is the Clock, which came out just a few weeks ago. "Run Chicken Run," "Cooperstown," and "The Big Surprise" were new to me, while "Helen Fry" and "Frankie's Gun!" were raucous and familiar. Highlights were "The Greatest Show On Earth" and "Radio Song," and very rough-edged version of "Whiskey In My Whiskey," which had a fast, hustling beat, lots of yelling, and featured Ian playing a dirty country guitar solo while standing on his brother's bass drum.

The thing about the Felice Brothers is, they sound like shit in concert. But then again, they sort of sound like shit on record. Their singing voices would make most A&R men cringe. Their playing isn't amateurish, per se -- it's just not especially impressive. What they've got, really, is a real sense of poetry to their songs, dressed up in ripped clothing and wild, drunken energy. "We're just a bunch of dirtbags," Ian said at one point in the show. And he was right on. Christmas, the wide-eyed, strung-out looking bassist, literally had no elbows on his shirt, it was so badly torn. The five of them kept drinking from one another's beers and passing a pack of cigarettes around during the show. Farley, when he wasn't scratching out gloriously scratchy double-stop solos, was either smashing the drum kit's cymbals with a washboard or messing around with the other players' instruments. When they finally ended the set, with a hoarse, drunken version of Townes Van Zandt's "Two Hands" -- my favorite TVZ song, coincidentally -- no one in the crowd wasn't dancing.

Mekong Delta

[k likes pho]

When the bosses in my office heard that just up the street a restaurant called Mekong Delta had opened, they took it as a sign of generational drift. How could one possibly give such a name to an establishment and expect anyone to come? It would be like naming an Iraqi tea-house The Falluja Cafe! Have these kids no historical memory?

OK, fine, so some bad stuff went down in the 60s in the Mekong Delta. But there's some good stuff goin' into my belly on Saratoga Street's own version of the place. I had lunch there a few weeks ago with my friend KC, but it wasn't the first time I'd been there. A week or so before I went with my colleague AR, and at 12:30 we were told that if we didn't have a lot of time, we shouldn't hang around, because each meal is made individually, without line cooks, and that we could expect to wait 45 minutes. For lunch!

KC and I arrived at 11:40, and the service was considerably more expeditious than that. I got a mixed seafood pho with huge gobs of (real) crab meat swimming in a sea of scallions and salty broth. King prawns, scallops, and (I think) some fish meat mingled around the traditional Vietnamese rice noodles, and the whole deal was seriously slurpable:


[slurp!]

KC got the Vietnames "crepes," which our server recommended for someone who was interested in "something different," misreading us, perhaps, as regular customers. It was a tasty savory pancake -- perhaps a bit too pasty -- filled with fried veggies, chicken, and a few too many styrofoam-tasting bean sprouts, and it left me wondering if there was some sort of French Indochine connection here. I mean, are there "crepe" shops set up all over on the streets of Hanoi? What other fusions are there? Pork belly rolls in buttery boules? Guess I'll have to go there and find out.


[dip!]

FOOD: B+
This was no 3-visit Frank Bruni review, but the two dishes we did have were really tasty. I'm not a huge connossieur of pho, so I need to wait until I eat something from MD that has tripe in it before I can call myself a man, but overall a good lunch for $10 apiece. Oh, and the lightly-hinted-at flavor of the cold white tea was great

AMBIENCE: B-
Kinda crappy. The place is too small -- it's in a rowhouse at the corner of Liberty and Saratoga, and every table is sort of near the door. We were wedged up against a fridge full of cokes. But maybe when it gets sunnier out they'll add some sidewalk tables.

SERVICE: B
The first time we went there, the suggested wait was outrageous. If grandma can't cook everything customized in less than 20 minutes, hire some line cooks! But the manager is very nice, and our food came moderately quickly the second time, with no mistakes.