12. Kinkead’s
I fancy myself pretty awesome at the Internet. I’m an excellent Googler, and I copy/paste like a madwoman. However, I got a little too excited about Restaurant Week reservations this year and moved a little too quick, and my Interneting suffered. In English, I made a boo-boo and booked a wonderful RW meal for my parents and myself at Kinkeads. However, I didn’t quite read the fine print online, and Kinkeads only had a lunch RW option. It was the whoops heard ‘round the world. Total. Restaurant Week. Embarrassment.
After some sitcom split screen style phone tag, my parents and I decided to stick with the Kinkeads reservation instead of settling for the dregs of whatever was left over after a month of Opentabling. (Teatro Goldoni, I’m looking in your crappy RW menu’s direction.) It actually was pretty genius since the restaurant wasn’t packed with giant tables of 20-year-old girls—it was instead packed with parents and their soon-to-be college freshmen. That was pretty awesome entertainment, watching the parents waver between excitement and sadness while the kids just wavered between awkward and awkward.
To the food: I started out with the seafood chowder, which was stuffed to the gills with not only seafood and potatoes but sausage too—a nice little bit of heat. All in all, a pretty perfect rendition of seafood chowder. My mom had the figs, which were really overpowered by too-pungent cheese, and my dad had the heirloom tomato salad—straightforward and a little predictable. For my main, I had the seared scallops with fava beans and gnocchi. I was trying to be a little healthy, which was dumb, so my meal was a little too boring for me. The scallops were cooked well, but nothing really wowed me. My dad had the cod with crab imperial, which was even richer than I thought it would be. Again, it was good but nothing wow-worthy. My mom (as usual) had the best dish—cornmeal crusted soft shells with artichokes and Tasso ham. As my dad said, it was a real party in your mouth. There was a lot going on in the dish, but it really worked. It was refreshing to get a dish that had a big flavor to go along with perfectly cooked protein. We ordered dessert since it was there, and as a family that doesn’t go much further than ice cream for good sweets, the pear tart was unanimously voted to die for. It’s worth the 15 minutes it takes to prepare for sure.
Here’s the thing with Kinkead’s: it is really great. It is not, however, too terribly exciting. They have made their name on perfectly prepared fish, and they deserve all the credit coming their way. That said, sitting in their dining room with a giant plate of crab imperial does feel a little old fashioned after eating at hip and cool places like Volt and Founding Farmers. Does it still deserve to be as high on Washingtonian’s list as it is now? Probably not. But the truth is, if you just want a textbook prepared piece of fish, you’re not going to find a much better place.
