67. Mannequin Pis
OK everyone, I’ll give you a minute to giggle immaturely about the name before we start. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Done? Everyone? Even you in the back, you look like you’ve got a pee joke just waiting to be said. Alright then, let’s proceed.
What’s that they say about buying a house? Location, location, location? Well, not the case for this bit of real estate. They are smart enough to poke fun at themselves though since their business cards say “Hard to Find, Good to Come”, which doesn’t totally make grammatical sense, but we get the idea. The issues are as follows: 1) you can’t see the restaurant from the street 2) the sign for the restaurant is actually in front of a gas station 3) GoogleMaps instructs you to make a u-turn to get the restaurant, yet u-turns are illegal, and 4) the shopping center parking lot you need to cut through to circumvent the illegal u-turn has a lot of bad drivers (I’m looking in your direction, green Town & Country minivan). To end on a high note though, there is tons of parking once you finish the odyssey.
Located in what I will call “Olney’s Restaurant Row” (Mannequin Pis, Number One Chinese, Wasabi Wok and Armands), the restaurant itself is incredibly tiny. Like fourteen tables and one waitress tiny. The truth is though, that made it seem a bit more authentic. I’ve never been to Belgium before but my mom testified that it looked like every restaurant she ever dined in there. Dark wood, shoved together tables, big bar with every Belgian beer under the sun, and of course, a little Mannequin…Pis.
The menu is pretty full, but truth be told, we didn’t even look at anything except the mussels. There were about 15 different varieties that ran the gamut from wine and herbs to cream and mustard. I had the “English” preparation, which was onions, malt vinegar, salt, thyme and beer. I love salt and vinegar on anything, so the big fat pot of moules in that style was alright with me. My mom had the special—cream, Dijon mustard, onions and spices, which she thought was great if a little too oniony. It goes to show that there is a mussel preparation for every eater though—I thought her version was way too mustardy, and she thought mine sounded too disgusting to even try. Good thing we didn’t have a Freaky Friday moment!
We also started with some homemade sausage (merguez) and braised red cabbage. That was really great—dare I say it, better than the mussels—especially the cabbage, which I could have eaten an entire plate of. I bet that wasn’t a sentence you ever thought you’d hear a girl say. The meal wasn’t all oh la las. The mussels were served with the requisite frites, which were disappointingly mediocre. The mussels themselves were tiny, though I won’t hold that against the restaurant since I’m guessing they have yet to perfect x-ray vision. What they lacked in size, they made up for in sheer quantity. So we’ll call it a wash.
The question isn’t whether or not Mannequin Pis is a great Belgian restaurant—it definitely is. It’s actually whether or not it is worth the trip to Olney. Well, I’m not so sure about that. It’s worth a trip from Rockville to Olney, but probably not Arlington. But if you were say, going to Merriweather and the Beltway was totally screwed up and you had to go the back way, I say definitely stop in for some moules and some beers. Don’t take GoogleMaps advice on how to get there though.
