HoneyPig Izakaya - Good Local Japanese food

Good fortune hit a few weeks ago as HoneyPig Izakaya released a livingsocial deal just days after I heard about it from a friend.  After visiting Japan this spring, I'm extremely motivated to find good Japanese food here in the DC area. So off I went.

HPI is in Annandale, not too far from the DC beltway of Gallows road.  As I was walking in, I think I saw the owner outside talking on the cell phone.  I think she was the owner because she has "uniquely identifiable hair" and her picture is all over the restaurant and the billboard holding the front door open :)

We took our seats and perused the menu.  The menu is fairly large and has a variety of Japanese food items as well as some Korean ones, as well. I was hoping to find a really cool dish I had in Japan at an Izakaya called Monja but after checking with the owner and their "consultant from the kitchen, they definitely don't serve it.  The menu did feature a traditional Japanese comfort food called Okonomiyaki, which the Japanese call "Japanese pancake".  I tried this in Japan and while I appreciated that HPI serves it, it is a bit too eggy for me to want to order.

The presentation of the seaweed reminds me of something evil with the pools of brown and

 yellow sauce

We opted for some traditional items starting with some seaweed salad and dumplings.  The dumplings tasted fresh and not frozen and the seaweed salad was very large compared to what I usually am served. 

Next round was some traditional ramen and some skewers.  Ramen is so hard to screw up and HPI does a fine job of serving it as they do in Japan complete with egg, green onions, sliced pork, fish cake and a slice of dry seaweed on the side.  I'm still not sure what the point of one piece of dried seaweed is sitting in a wet soup but this seems to be how the Japanese do Ramen!  The skewers were well-cooked but while I love fresh grilled meats and veggies, it's painful how pricey these Yakatori items can be for such small morsels of food.

Very oily but authentic and good

Overall, the experience didn't do as much to remind me of Japan as my trip to Makoto did last month, but it was still good to get out and get some Japanese food.  The service and prices were nothing spectacular but I'll probably be back again if I'm in the area.

Rating - 3.5 stars out of 5.

Sax DC - A Unique DC Experience

Sax DC is a unique DC dining experience.  Sax is a relatively new restaurant in DC a couple of blocks west of Chinatown.  The idea for the restaurant is reasonably sane.  Let's build the absolutely most opulent restaurant in the city, serve some expensive French cuisine and have a stage with scantily clad dancers that pop on every 15 minutes or so.  Sounds great, right?

Unlike most people that go to Sax, I actually had very low expectations.  I expected everything to be over-the-top, trying too hard, gaudy, poor yet expensive food and tacky dancing.   What I got was a luxurious interior that wasn't disgusting, tried just hard enough, was semi-tasteful, better than average food and entertaining dancing.  The setup as you enter the restaurant is a very beautiful entryway and hostess stand.  The amount of gold used in this place is more than anywhere else in the city.  Everything is intentionally made to look expensive with nothing spared.  The stage is actually set above the bar and encased in glass so it has the feeling almost like you are watching TV instead of a stage.  The dining room is darkly lit and extremely sexy.

View of the stage at Sax

Service was very good.   The only way they could really have served us better would have been to be around more and in a place like that, you want to watch the show and look at the beautiful people and not have a team of servers in your face. 

It's the kind of place you take someone when you want them to be impressed by how much money you are spending. Will it ever be a Washingtonian top 10 restaurant?  No.  You are going there primarily to say you've gone and to tell people just how bling everything is.  Many of you are probably wondering about the entertainment.  Every 20 minutes or so the stage would light up and 2-4 dancers would dance.  It was always a decent show but perhaps not necessarily a sexy cabaret show.  Still, I enjoy being entertained while I eat and that's an uncommon experience in this city.  I appreciate what they are trying to do here.

The food was good but nothing blew me away given the prices they are charging.  It's also hard for the food to top the ambience and that might work against what was actually a pretty decent meal.  I will mention that anyone that pays full price for food at Sax is a fool.  If you are there for the food, try a weeknight when they offer special discounts on their tasting menu.  If you are there for the ambience and to drink on a weekend, eat before you show up and party it up.

Lobster sliders with seafood bisque

The dinner started out with an Amuse Bouche that I cannot recall and then was followed by Wagyu Beef Tartar and YellowFin Tuna Tartar.  Both were very good but nothing remarkable to report.  The Tuna tartar was a very large amount of raw fish but the presentation was completely uninspired.  But as I love raw fish, Sax was forgiven for the sheer quantity of tuna.

Next came a seafood bisque and Lobster sliders. Again, both were what I would expect from a nice restaurant but not more than that.

A very average Beef Short rib

For mains, we decided to get the Short Ribs and the Crab Cake.  I must preface what I write by admitting that I am a huge crab cake snob.  Having grown up in Maryland, I've had MANY crab cakes and obviously, the only good way to make it is Maryland style.  Sax's crab cake was dry, boring and had a little too much filler in it.  It's just a total turn-off eating an average crab cake.

The short ribs were ok.  I guess the memory of Citronelle's 72 hour hour short ribs was still in my head and that's not really a fair comparison to two completely different dishes.  But as you can see by the photo, it didn't even look very appetizing.  I wouldn't order either main again.

More mediocrity with the mains.  An average crabcake.

Good recovery with the chocolate cake!

I love apple pastry for dessert.

For dessert we tried the Sax Chocolate cake and the apple tart.  Both were pretty good.  A decent apple tart is such an easy win for me.  Unless it is too sweet somehow or soggy, I'm always happy by my last bite.  The chocolate cake was very rich and if you are a chocolate lover, I'm sure you won't be disappointed.































Sax is what it is trying to be.  The sexiest location in town for dinner and drinks.  We should all consider ourselves lucky that the food is decent too, as we drop 200+ dollars trying to impress a date. 

Rating - 4 out of 5 Stars.

Cityzen - A top 10 DC Dining Experience

One of my closest friends was coming to visit me and she coincidentally is one of the inspiration for this blog due to taking me to Komi years ago and showing me some of the joys of cooking.  As we always do, we booked a table at a place we've never been to with the hopes of if being so good that we'll remember the meal when we talk about it years later.  The choice for this particular adventure was Cityzen with head chef Eric Ziebold.  Foodies will remember that Ziebold is a former James Beard regional winner and Cityzen was a Gayot top 40 restaurant in the US in 2008.  As such, Cityzen has been on my radar for a while now as is housed in the gorgeous Mandarin Oriental Hotel in DC and is consistently featured in Washingtonian magazine as a top 10 pick. 

The Mandarin Oriental Hotel is very nice.  Everyone you see inside is wearing a suit coat or a blazer.  High end clientele, indeed.  We arrived a bit early for our reservation so we ventured a few steps away to their live jazz bar.  Not only was there a female jazz singer with an incredible voice, but I had one of the better cocktails I've had in the city.  A strawberry basil mojito. 16 dollars for a cocktail though? If paying that much for a pre-dinner cocktail doesn't piss you off, I suggest hitting the jazz bar before dinner.

The only knock I can give the restaurant is what took place at the entrance.  When we first came in to check in, there was no one there to greet us.  Extremely strange for a very nice restaurant.  We stood there for a couple of minutes before anyone came to the front.  A woman looked us up on the reservation list and told us to come back in 15 minutes which was fine as we were 15 minutes early.  Upon re-entering the restaurant later, the Matre' D was talking to three female patrons who were trying to score a last minute reservation.  Even though our table was ready, we had to stand there for 5 minutes while he dealt with them.  This may seem nitpicky but when you are about to drop over 100 a person on a meal, you expect them to be able to afford to staff the front entrance properly.  You never want to mess up a person's first impression of anything in life and especially not FOOD.

Thankfully, that was just a solo blip on the service radar map the rest of the way.  We had several staff help manage our table including the Matre 'D himself taking our drink order.  I'd have to rate the service at Cityzen very high. If not for how they manage their guests upon entry, I'd rank it up there as one of the best. The ambience was great.  The kitchen isn't totally open but it isn't hidden either. You can see inside and witness some of the action as the staff works diligently to get your food out to you in perfect condition.  All of the courses came out in perfect symphony.  Not too soon, not too long between servings.  While we were eating, a table of bigshots next to us had the privilege of Chef Ziebold talking at their table for what seemed to be at least 10 minutes!  Pretty cool.

On to the food!  We both opted to do the four course menu instead of the Chef's menu for the day for serveral reasons but most important of which, the fois gras was on the four course list :)  The first course was a tiny Amuse Bouche of scallop flan with Peruvian potato Salad.  I love a tiny bite to start off a grand feast.  The server then brought some bread out to us.  I chose the foccaccia which also came with butter.  Thank you, Cityzen for getting the butter right.  I much prefer room temperature butter so it is spreadable and that is how it was served.

Pure Heaven - Fois Gras with Crawfish Fricassée

And then my favorite course of the evening - Moulard Duck Foie Gras with Crawfish Fricassée served over roasted leeks.  This dish was perfect.  The crawfish tasted as if they had been poached just enough that they were tender without being soggy.  The best I've ever had.  This dish hit the spot for me and my friend both.  A not so fun fact for you Foie lovers out there.... Many states are beginning to ban it from being served.  California's ban begins this summer.  Inhumane practices in raising the geese in some areas of the world are ruining it for the rest of us unfortunately.  But if you want a final
Foie Gras experience, you can't go wrong with this one.

Blackfish.  Excellent!

The next course was seafood and we both opted for fish.  I really enjoy a perfectly cooked piece of fresh fish.  Hers was a Potato Crusted Halibut with an oyster scallop broth.  This was actually my first choice but she stole it and we wanted to try different things.  So I opted for the Sauteed Pave' of blackfish as I have never had blackfish before.  Both dishes were cooked perfectly and while I liked how my fish was cooked, I liked the overall flavors of the Halibut and the oyster scallop broth a lot, too. 

Potato Crusted Halibut

Beautifully prepared rabbit.  Just not my favorite.

As seems to many times be the case when I "dine finely", the mains are never as good as everything else.  I'm not sure if it is because I'm always trying new things instead of going for what I know I'm going to love or what it may be.  In this case, I didn't love either main dish as much as the fish or the Foie Gras before it.  I opted for the Rabbit with crushed potato over top some vegetables and a Pesto-Rosemary Jus.  Hers was Roasted Shoat (which we determined was a young pig) with Apricot and Favre beans.   Both were good but I just wasn't excited to talk about either one. 

Look at the grill marks on that Shoat.

This is no fault of the chef's.  It's just that neither protein would be my first choice in the future.  I prefer my pig meat cooked in any way that results in a crispy skin and some of the fat melted away.  The rabbit was similar to chicken to me but not as good.

Bread in a box

Amidst all these wonderful courses, the server came by with a box that contained 8 rolls in it.  I was about to say, you've gotta be kidding me to fill me up on rolls with dessert still to come.  But when my friend groaned with pleasure and said I had to try one, I did.  Three, in fact :)  They look so simple but they were a buttery, salty deliciousness that you should not skip if you go to Cityzen. 

A Sour Cream Chiboust

Buttermilk Panna Cotta with Meyer Lemon Mousse

Desserts were really good.   Even though the Rhubarb Dessert I wanted wasn't on the side of the menu I was supposed to be ordering from, the server said, not a problem. The formal description of the dish was this - Sour Cream Chiboust, Oatmeal Crunch, Mint and Rhubarb Sorbet.  Sounds so intricate.  Very delicious.

My friend ordered the Chess pie which was Buttermilk Panna Cotta, Meyer Lemon Mousse and Heirloom Cornmeal Tuile.  I actually prefered hers over mine as the Meyer Lemon Mousse gave
me heart palpitations it was so good.

Kudos to the dessert chef at Cityzen.

While we drank our coffees and reminisced on the meal and our fat bellies, the server brought out our checks and some bonus desserts.  Each one was a gourmet candy in itself and I only wish I had the room left in my belly to enjoy each one properly.  It was a perfect way to end a fabulous meal.  I look forward to returning to Cityzen one day soon.


If you are trying to get there, the hotel is in the southwest corner of DC, almost equi-distance from the 395 and route 66 entrances into the city.  It's location is also prime for great water views of the Potomac River. I was able to secure a table for Cityzen for a Saturday night several weeks in advance but when I checked a few days before just to see, they were completely booked up.  I highly recommend booking well in advance of a Friday or Saturday dinner.


Rating - 4.5 out of 5 stars