Neighborhood: Friendship Heights
The Setup
A needed day off and a pair of free AMC movie tickets were already in the bag, and the subject of dinner had come up. "Hey, there's an AMC in Friendship Heights. Why don't we try Range?" asked Official Co-Writer/Girlfriend of DCWD Texas. Brilliant idea.
The Vibe
It's no secret here that we love what Bryan Voltaggio does, from the upscale
Volt to the downscale
Lunchbox. Part of that is his restaurants' design aesthetics, which often puts modern touches into traditional settings, transforming it overall into something clean, functional, and pleasing. On some level, Range's interior conceit is the equivalent of taking Volt's front room and back room, mashing them together, and landing them in a mall.
Ah yes, the mall part. Range sits on the second (or at least one level above ground) floor of the Chevy Chase Pavilion, a stark newly renovating mall on the very edge of the District's limits. The restaurant makes fun use of this blank canvas: its main dining room curves around the floor's edge with full-length window panes for its wall, like an observation deck. Which is nice on one hand, since it allows you to see Range's brilliant decor from a lot of vantage points in the mall, and since the mall's renovation has included bedazzling itself with LED screens that shift colors. It's also weird, since your view on the edge isn't something like the City of Seattle or the international terminal at LAX, but rather an under construction Starbucks.
Still, the interior is charming. Like his other spots, the mood is relaxed and inviting, almost austere in its lack of adornments. Instead, it brings a lot of clean white and grey and beige and lots of horizontal lines, from the honey brown slats behind the bar, to the triplet lines that mark each interior column. A good deal of glow is provided from the exterior mall, with light supplemented by a multitude of fishbowl-sized orbs and track spotlights. The furniture is modern too: lots of squarish leather-upholstered ecru seats in the house.
Seating wildly varies with fours and twos scattered about, and ringside seating along the edge of the massive open kitchen. There's something to be said that a two-top can be either the best seat in the house (central in the main dining room along the windows) or the worst (squeezed in the back in the half-booths). The scale of the restaurant can't be understated either; a walk to the bathrooms shows you that there's a whole other dining room and private room to the rear.
The only other thing to note is the buzz around the place: it's still early yet, but it's hard to imagine the excitement around Range dying down substantially any time soon. I mean, it's a native son with Top Chef credentials debuting his newest restaurant as he moves evermore towards central D.C., with few if any contemporaries in the surrounding neighborhood; to wit, its next-door neighbor is a Cheesecake Factory. The incredible diversity of patrons is noticeable: there are almost as many businesspeople in work attire as there are locals in sneakers. It'll be interesting to track how Range plays out: is it just a neighborhood place or THE neighborhood place? Put another way, is it the restaurant you put your jacket on for, the one you reserve when you want to signal to your date that you're serious? Or is it be the familiar "our restaurant" sort of place where families takes their kids every Sunday? Or will it be both?
What's definitely true is this: on this
Tuesday night, the place is
packed.
The Food
Our waitress stops by to do the normal "let me tell you about our restaurant" shtick (oh hey, this place is small plates, bee tee dubs), when she drops an interesting note: the kitchen, the open one that extends across the entire back of the restaurant with a score of chefs shuffling around behind it, is actually nine (!) separate kitchens that are operating fairly autonomously. Each of them revolves around one of the categories on the menu, ranging from the raw to the wood grill. They'll fire stuff accordingly (you're not gonna get your steak before the bread), but things are coming as they're done.
So our first three dishes arrived fairly concurrently. The first was the skillet corn bread with a bacon marmalade, which frankly might have been the best part of this early round. The corn bread was relatively light, even with its healthy pat of herbed butter on top, with a nice homey moistness about it. The marmalade was assertive but not aggressive, dancing that fine line between being too jammy and being too salty quite admirably.
The other two dishes were good but had their little imperfections. Our crudo of kampachi with pine nuts, radicchio, microgreens, and a candied lemon puree was a perfectly good dish but had some minor things about it that made it miss the cut: our particular slices of fish were a little tendony, and the lemon hit was a tad bit overpowering. Still, the flavor combinations were nice and straightforward. It was something that was enjoyable but not terribly memorable.
Our pasta was the pumpernickel cassarecci with bits of lambs tongue and (supposedly) gruyere. The cassarecci were a little firm for my taste (though Texas noted, that might have just been the necessary consequence of their composition), but I quite liked the pumpernickel flavor. The lambs' tongue bits were juicy, though a little small and infrequent. And I say supposedly on the gruyere, because I'm not sure there was any on the dish (maybe it was in the sauce). Either way, not a bad dish, just not our favorite either. Texas and I love to play what I call the "Elimination Game" when we can't decide on a dish on a menu; each person takes a turn eliminating something they don't want until you get down to the ones you want. This one was my call, and when the chestnut ravioli we passed on landed at the next table, I was a little sad, we didn't get that instead.
The meal picked up significantly from there though, starting with our first main: a prawn pizza topped with arugala and black winter truffle. I have strong feelings about shrimp; I grew up with the deliciousness of Vietnamese poached shrimp, and so I'm always wary of ordering it elsewhere. Still, these prawns were perfectly cooked, and the pizza was delicious: crisp, faintly blackened by the wood oven, with a light oil to it. The arugala was a strong complement, though the truffle was less apparent. Definitely a highlight to our night, and one of the better bang-for-your-buck items on the menu.
The last two dishes came at the same time, the first a seared hanger steak with roasted shishito peppers, the second slices of venison with an espresso spaetzel, a crisp oyster, and candied orange peels. Both can be described in relatively the same way: solidly cooked with a nice sear and tender on the inside; a nice hint of salt on the crust; very forward earthy flavors.
The difference were their accompaniments: the shishito peppers were straightforward, finished with some fleur de sel, while the venison's partners were a little more creative, though no less successful. We didn't get much of the espresso part of it, but the orange peel was a cool sweet pairing.
To end the night, we ordered the chocolate ganache tart topped with an almond milk ice cream and some poached pear. To quote Texas, "Yea. It's a ganache, alright." Which is to say it was not an outlier both in a good way and in a bad way. For me, the ice cream was the most interesting part, a nice milky addition that changed it from being just a hit of chocolate.
The Verdict
It's not quite a finished product yet (something we definitely factor in). And we recognize we had high expectations, given our experiences at Chef Voltaggio's other restaurants. It's not Volt South, and frankly, it's not trying to be. But it's a solid addition to the neighborhood, a wonderful date space, and a kitchen with a lot of potential.
Food Rating: *** 1/2 (out of 5)
Date Rating: 4 Hearts (out of 5)
Dress Code: Smart Casual
Bar Rating: Classy Crowd to Suits Scene
Vibe: Energetic
Cost: $$$$ (out of 5) ($75-$100 for two)
Pairing: There's plenty of shopping to be had here on this strip of Wisconsin Ave. from the department stores down the street, to the Mazza Gallerie and Chevy Chase Pavilion itself. We stopped by Williams-Sonoma ourselves.
The fritters arrive first. Small bites of fish and risotto fried into a crust and served with remoulade, they are fairly plain, lacking the trademark creaminess or punch of flavor that might normally be expected; the remoulade helped a little bit, but not terribly much. The filling cried out for a dash of salt or some heat, and the more I revisit it, the more I challenge whether or not this combination was doomed from the start.
