Alas! It was restaurant week in DC! Naturally, I tried to take advantage of some great restaurants and three-course meals for a lower price. First stop:
Fire & Sage.
For some reason when my roommate and I arrived, we were under the impression that Fire & Sage was a more upscale restaurant than it turned out to be. However, we found that not only were jeans acceptable, but so were television sets that played bad NBC hospital dramas and a stereo system that played Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust"--three things I do not associate with fine dining. Located in the Marriott Hotel in downtown DC, I would presume Fire & Sage caters to the traveling, business crowd, and not the local DC resident crowd. A restaurant where they know they may never see you again is usually a risky endeavor. However, this is not to say that Fire & Sage was awful--it was not. But it wasn't the best meal I've had either.
One thing I can say about their restaurant week menu is that the portions are more than adequate. Play your cards right, and you can go home with two meals and still be full from dinner! My roommate, Sarah, started with their flatbread with mozzarella, tomatoes and basil. While the menu stated "flatbread," what came out to our table was essentially an entire 10-inch personal pizza pie that Sarah took home. Not that there's anything wrong with a personal pizza pie, but it didn't look all that appetizing and it was pizza, not flatbread, so I would take off some presentation and honesty points. I admit, however, that I did not try the flatbread. Instead, I started with the corn and crab chowder, which was decently spicy. The chowder should have been thicker, but there were sizable, meaty chunks of crab, corn and some other indiscriminate vegetables. Fire & Sage's meals are served with corn bread that could easily have come from a box mix with some corn kernels tossed in--tasty, but nothing outrageous. And there was an odd tasting whipped butter spread, that may have had parmesan in it, but nonetheless left a funky aftertaste. It was slightly sweet, but slightly cheesy and in my opinion, didn't go well with cornbread at all.
Following appetizers, I had the oak plank scallops wrapped in bacon with cheddar grits, sauteed spinach with a sage cream sauce. The scallops were tasty, cooked just right but not even slightly raw in the center. To my surprise, I liked them with bacon. Then again, doesn't everything taste better with bacon? The cheddar cheese grits were also good and had the consistency of a lumpy version of the breakfast cereal, farina. The grits weren't necessarily the best combination with the scallops, but they were good and the sauteed spinach was simple, yet well-cooked. What brought this dish together and really made it stand out from just another scallop dish was the sage cream sauce. This could have been ladled onto cardboard and I probably would have eaten it. The sage cream sauce went very well with just the plain scallops and the cheddar grits, but also gave a slightly sweet taste that complimented the salty bacon nicely.
The other entree I sampled was the chicken orecchiette with white wine, garlic, lemon, shredded arugula and shaved parmesan. For those of you who are not pasta connoisseurs, orecchiette is a type of pasta that means "little ear" in Italian, and yes, you guessed it, it resembles the shape of a little ear. To me, this dish was bland. The sauce wasn't overwhelming in any way, the pasta (if not smothered in the light sauce) was bland, chicken was alright and the arugula gave it an interesting twist to add flavor to an otherwise bland dish. Looked great on the menu, not so great in reality.
Lastly, for dessert I sampled the key lime pie and the "hot bag o' doughnuts." Key lime pie was good, but was probably from a frozen box of pie. It was thick, limey, with a nice graham cracker crust, but nothing about it said, "I was just painstakingly made by hand!" The hot bag o' doughnuts was exactly what it said it was--little paper bag filled with doughnuts. The doughnuts, however, were kind of thick, but maybe I was just hoping for more of a beignet. Maybe they were also sitting under a heat lamp and not fresh out of the fryer, I don't know. They came with a honey cream (which was actually butter...with the same funky taste as the one served at the beginning of the meal), and a strawberry compote, which was lumpy and tasted slightly like balsamic vinegar. Overall, dessert was something I easily could have skipped here.
All of that being said, the presentation of this dishes was...lackluster. Things were just put on your plate seemingly with very little thought. Not that there's much thought into putting pasta into a bowl, or pie on a plate, but I like to be a little entertained or see something new every once in a while. The service was good--our waiter never hovered, practically read our minds about the big portions and offered us takeaway boxes (which we boxed our own meals...sometimes good, sometimes bad, but this time it made me feel like I was at T.G.I. Friday's).
All in all, if you happen to be in metro center and you really can't find anywhere else to go, Fire & Sage is not a bad option. However, if you're looking for a
really good meal, something that will leave you wanting more and coming back time and time again, I would suggest you look elsewhere. Fire & Sage is what it is: a hotel restaurant primarily serving travelers, and business persons who just want to grab a quick bite to eat with some coworkers.
Next up: lunch at Bobby Van's Steakhouse.
I was hoping PP would be a pizzeria that would end my search, but it fell short. I wanted to really like this pizza. I walked in and smelled the aroma of garlic, olive oil and burning wood. I watching longingly at the pizzas sliding in and out of the wood-burning stove. I've even had good pizza at PP before. Alas, this time it just looked really good, but fell flat tastewise. I'm sorry PP, don't take it personally. 
