10. The Source
Without a doubt, the best thing about eating at The Source is the music. The restaurant decor is a complete downtown swankfest, but the music is the complete MIX 107.3 special. We’re talking “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A”, Natasha Beddingfield, John Mellencamp and so on and so forth. I was sad when the bill came, because it was right in the middle of a sweet Gin Blossoms-a-thon. I didn’t know Wolfgang Puck was a fan, but I guess he loves mid-90s soft rock just as much as the rest of us. Aside from the rockin’ tunes, The Source is just about as sleek as a restaurant can get. It’s all glass and chrome, and the dining room was bright and sunny on account of the floor to ceiling windows. Handy for pointing and laughing at the tourists waiting in line for the Newseum. A note about the Newseum: though the The Source is “at the Newseum”, it is not in the Newseum. We found this out the hard way when Meagan went through security and got up to the ticket booth before asking where the restaurant actually is (it’s around the corner, on 6th St.).
Once we actually found the restaurant, I was pretty surprised how empty it was. True, the downstairs lounge isn’t exactly power lunch friendly, but as nuts as everyone goes about this place, I figured it would be packed. The aforementioned downstairs lounge is pretty underutilized at lunch (it seemed like we were just walking through the glass-washing station on the way to the dining room), and as Meagan pointed out, looks a lot like a first class airport lounge. A very nice lounge, but a lounge nonetheless. Upstairs, the dining room is more white tablecloth and general formality and came complete with the requisite celebrity spotting (former mayor Anthony Williams!). It was a power lunch-a-palooza, and I don’t know where these people work, but they were taking some seriously long lunches. That was a gripe I had with The Source—we are not talking a quick in and out. It took a good hour and 20 minutes to finish our meal, and when I’m having a middle of the day lunch date, I need it to be speedy. Like eating my McDonalds while waiting to pay speedy.
The food, however, was oh so very un-McDonalds. Wolfgang Puck has made his name by being an Austrian guy who cooks Asian food, and The Source carries on with his very lucrative juxtaposition. I have eaten at a couple other of his restaurants—Wolfgang Puck Orlando and a couple Wolfgang Puck Expresses—and I feel like his casual dining places don’t really live up to his illustrious name. The truth is, his grocery store frozen pizza is better than a lot of the dishes I’ve gotten at the actual restaurants. Lucky for Washington, The Source falls in to the fine dining category of the Puck Empire. I would recommend not missing the appetizers—we only had two and I wish we had ONLY ordered apps. We had the pork belly dumplings, which were probably the best dumplings I’ve ever eaten. I’ve never had dumplings where the filling completely filled up the inside, but these little guys were busting with salty porky goodness. We also had the shrimp and scallop shu mai, which were great, though they were pretty fishy for not having any actual fish in them. We just about licked the plate though so the fishiness obviously didn’t bother us that much. For our main courses we both had salads since we’re dainty girls, though Meagan had to tear me away from the lobster club (not so dainty). The truth is, ordering salad here seems like a cop out since there is never going to be anything too life changing about vegetables, but both were huge and flavorful. Meagan went with the Shrimp Cobb Salad, which came packed with shrimp and all the cobb-y accoutrements. I had the Thai Chicken salad, which was light and tangy. The chicken was chopped up so tiny that I could never really figure out if I had any on my fork, but the addition of fried wonton bits gave the salad a great crunch. We both ate half our salad and got a doggie bag for dinner, and both reported the next day that the salads did not keep in their take out containers. So folks, eat what you take but don’t take what you (don’t) eat.
Friends have told me that eating dinner at The Source is ungodly expensive, and to my delight, that’s not really the case at lunch. Yes, there are some things on the menu that coast in to the crazy realm at around $30, but our salads were around the $15 mark and definitely better than the CPK salads for the same price. (I’m sure Wolfgang died a little when I just compared his food to California Pizza Kitchen.) It’s also a much better deal than the Newseum. The pork dumplings cost five dollars less than admission to the museum, and were about a million times more enjoyable, in my opinion. I choose pork belly over old newspapers any day of the week.
