After coming back from a weekend in Washington DC, I was struck by the dramatic improvement in the city's restaurant scene (especially downtown!) since I last lived there almost a decade ago. I'll post a few more reviews in the next few days, but here's one to get things started....It's hard not to work up an appetite fighting international terrorism....and after a morning doing just that at Operation Spy at the International Spy Museum, MerMom and I were searching for lunch options. We spotted Zaytinya from a block away and it looked promising. Boy, was it ever!
Zaytinya specializes in eastern Mediterranean small plates, and is one of Jose Andres' restaurants in Washington (another, Jaleo, is one of my longtime favorites). It's a modern, high-ceilinged blue-and-white space that looks like a Mediterranean island. It's large and has a substantial bar area too. We found six small plates to be more than enough for lunch, especially with the hot puffed bread and olive oil that our servers kept refilling. We started with baba ghannouge (which was a little light on the eggplant but very good) and a romaine salad. Spanakopita was excellent, shaped like a mini egg roll and with a good balance of spinach, cheese and dough. Arni souvlaki (lamb skewers) were perfectly cooked and very tender.
We made an effort to make room for dessert: homemade ice creams, in a choice of unique flavors. One option was olive oil -- which I regret not trying, especially when I learned that Zaytinya means olive oil in Turkish. I had coffee (a bit grainy and dry, but very coffee-tasting), walnut (also a little dry), and honey (the best of the lot, if a bit sweet).
I'll have to go back on my next trip to DC to try the olive oil ice cream and the Eastern Mediterranean wine list. Mermaid rating: four seashells (out of a possible five).
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