77. Art & Soul
As those who follow me in the Twitter-sphere are bound to know by now, I am a big fan of Art Smith. Before today I had never tasted his cooking, but I was a fan solely based on the fact that every time I saw the man (on screen that is), I felt the need to hug him. He’s like Santa with a Tim Gunn-style makeover. And lately he’s been the light in my otherwise horrifying summer TV schedule with his current run as name-dropping underdog extraordinaire on Top Chef Masters. So needless to say, I put him a on a pretty high pedestal. He seemed to come to D.C. under the Obamamania umbrella last year, and settled his restaurant in the newly opened Liaison Hotel—which sounded to me like a relatively suggestive name for a tourist hotel.
So I rolled up to Art & Soul for lunch with my mom, another fan of Art Smith from his days as Oprah’s chef. Now it’s important to make the distinction that Art Smith is not the chef employed by Oprah when she went on that massive slim down (that was Rosie Daley), oh no, Art Smith is a fan of butter and cream. I had heard about the “filibuster buster” deal, which was a pretty ridiculous name, so I thought I’d give that a shot. The deal is: three courses, $24, and they’ll get you from order to check in 45 minutes. Art & Soul’s prices are less than a lot of its downtown partners in crime, but $24 for three courses is still not too shabby.
I started with the “Capitol Hill” salad, which my mom pointed out has nothing to do with Capitol Hill. My interpretation would have been a prepackaged garden salad with a dressing made from the exhaust of tour buses. But to each their own. This one was a classic green apple, candied walnut and blue cheese salad. It was very good and had a nice zesty dressing, if a little too much of it. My mom didn’t order an appetizer, so she feasted on the bread which came out qutie dramatically—a man brought out a hot crock of bread out and with a grande flourish plopped it on the table. We had high hopes that it would be bread unlike we had ever tasted before (it is a restaurant known of their use of butter after all), but unfortunately it was just okay when hot and kind of bad when cold. Oh well.
For our main courses, I had the fried chicken since if I was to learn anything from Art Smith’s time on Top Chef Masters—this guy loves chicken. Served with sausage gravy and mashed potatoes, this isn’t exactly a Weight Watchers-friendly meal but I didn’t care. It was pretty amazing. The chicken was obviously soaked in buttermilk and was tender and juicy under a nice but not over the top crust. I was served three large pieces, and was so full by the end that I left the drumstick untouched on my plate. I love sausage gravy but have weaned myself off of it once I got tired of the look of sheer disgust on my dining partners faces, so I was happy to eat it under the guise of it being in the name of the blog. It also gets points for not congealing once it wasn’t piping hot anymore—a trick the folks at Bob Evans never seemed to master. My mom had the soft shell crab BLT, which was ingenious in it’s simplicity. Because really, what is better than soft shell crab AND bacon? Not much. Aside from the tricky technical aspect of eating a soft shell crab without cutting it up first, the sandwich was a hit. Thick slices of bacon and a nice juicy tomato stood up to the crab without overpowering it.
My filibuster buster lunch really hit its stride with dessert. I was so full by the end of my fried chicken that I wasn’t looking forward to another course. Well, to my surprise and delight, the dessert was two tiny cupcakes served in a to go box for me to bring back to my office for all my coworkers to drool over. Today’s flavors were devils food and mango-lime. I was a nice person and shared with my friends, but having tasted their cupcakes before; I know that these are not to be missed.
In case you were wondering, I can now say with a lot of confidence that Art Smith has earned his place on Top Chef Masters. Now if he could only figure out a way to use his fried chicken skills for good (beating Hubert Keller) instead of evil (making me fat), he’d be unstoppable.
