Dupont's edible esoterica

I'm proud to say ("proud" might be overstating it) that I've now lunched at Dupont Circle's two worst-kept secrets: The Well Dressed Burrito (1220 19th St. NW) and the Brookings Institution cafeteria (1775 Massachusetts Ave. NW). Both are vaguely hidden, a la the nightclubs featured in Swingers. The Well Dressed Burrito serves up its large, marinated beef burritos ($6.50), using actual pulled meat instead of cheap ground beef, in an alleyway; the Brookings Institution cafeteria is, you guessed it, inside the Brookings Institution.


Neither, however, is truly obscure. The Brookings lunch experience, for example, has been deconstructed on Yelp, where one reviewer judged its food to be "just like its politics," that is, "middle of the road." As for The Well Dressed Burrito, here's a Pipón tip: the staff must be used to regulars since they neglected to remind me that the burrito "platter" is just $1 extra and includes homemade enchilada sauce, beans, Southwestern rice and some greens; when I visited, I was so busy dissuading my friend Lauren Miller from ordering a salad that I missed the listing on the menu.

If you want to eat somewhere truly "off the beaten path," try my sister-in-law Marni's garden-level apartment, where I tried the turkey meatballs and Israeli couscous and roasted broccoli the other day.

Burrito photography by Lauren Miller.

Please pass the Colonel Mustard

I'm hardly a Super Bowl traditionalist. (I only learned who was playing on Friday on line at the Safeway on Columbia Road when I asked the woman in front of me whether she considered a jar of cocktail onions a key part of her pre-storm food supplies.) Still, I was surprised to hear that my friend Rob Margetta, of Congressional Quarterly fame, was planning to make tacos for his Super Bowl party, provided he could hire a "dog sled team" to transport him from Alexandria. From a native of Fall River, Mass., I would've expected fried chicken, cold cuts and sour cream and onion dip.




The menu sounded similarly atypical at Julia Schiff's Super Bowl gathering in Adam's Morgan, highlighted by homemade pork and beansprout Thai egg rolls, made by Art Jirut, whose love for Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy and Compassion, means she just-says-no to beef.


In a nod to more standard Super Bowl fare, however, Art also whipped up (in addition to a pistachio cake) a pot of turkey chili with scallions, kidney beans and Fritos. The hostess, meanwhile, balled some peanut butter and dipped it delicately in chocolate, and also sprinkled Americana throughout her sitting room, including a hard cover copy of David McCullough's 1776, published volumes of her father's photographs of Cincinnati and even a DVD of the 1985 movie Clue, an American classic even if Wadsworth does have a British accent.

UPDATE: My old roommate, Brian Chelcun, reminded me that the peanut butter treats are called "buckeyes," an Ohio specialty apparently designed to resemble the nut of an Ohio Buckeye tree.