What a Boar!

There are three main facets to the dining out experience: the food, the presentation, and the service. I think if you have been following along with my culinary adventures thus far you will not be surprised to hear me say that presentation falls at the bottom of my list of importance. Yes, it is neat be presented with a plate of some artistic looking dish, but in the end you're just going to chew it up anyway. After all, some of the worst looking dishes are some of the best tasting ones.

I would be hard pressed, however, to try to determine whether the food or the service is more important in the experience. In the end, I think it depends on the situation. If you are hosting an important business dinner, a restaurant which provides you with outstanding service and unremarkable food is better than a restaurant full of rude servers and stellar food.

It came to pass that the Boss invited me to lunch one day this week. She really wanted to experience RW, but not having sampled as much of this city's offerings as I have, she wasn't sure where to go. We would set out with my knowledge and her credit card and have at it. I chose Urbana, a restaurant I had visited once in September and longed to return to.

My memory of Urbana was of excellent service and superb food. It has been said, however, that if you have a truly great memory of an establishment you should never go back there, lest your second experience taint the memory of your first. I wish I had heeded this advice.

Located down in Dupont Circle, Urbana has the flash of trendiness with none of the pretension. The space is semi-underground, providing for very few windows. It is tastefully decorated in understated dark and earth tones with very bright spot-lighting thrown in here and there to create a fun, interesting effect. We were seated at one of their booths, which I don't particularly like by the way; I'm a big fan of booths but the ones at Urbana force the occupants to sit at the very ends of the seats, as far away from one another as possible while your coats, bags, etc. get to languish in the large empty space in between. Very strange. Upon sitting, the first thing I noticed was lipstick all over one of the pre-set wine glasses. I pointed this out to the gentleman who sat us (the use of "maitre d' " here seems too grand) and he apologized, quickly whisking the glass away and returning with a fresh one, but it was an ill omen.

We were presented with the RW menus. Every restaurant handles RW differently, with some allowing the whole menu as an option and others offering a more limited selection. Urbana is one of the strictest menus I've seen, with only two appetizer choices, two entree choices and one dessert. With the exception of the dessert (creme brulee) I had no idea what some of the other options were. I ordered an appetizer that I could only figure out had something to do with eggs and olives, and the wild boar entree. (The other entree was salmon, but I don't eat fish, and as long as it's not fish I'm willing to try almost kind of unusual meat.)

The Boss ordered a tomato soup and the boar as well, along with a glass of red wine. The wine came back to the table with bits of cork floating in it. For a place that bills itself as a "wine bar", as Urbana does, I just couldn't believe they had actually served a glass that way. They weren't small bits of cork, either- big floating chunks they were. I pointed this out to the server and she returned in a moment with a fresh, cork-free glass.

My appetizer turned out to be a poached egg served over some hard, crouton-like chunks of bread mixed with scallions, onions and other herbs. I moved the egg off gingerly (what is such a picky eater doing writing a food blog, eh?) and sampled the stuff underneath. It looked quite plain but was really very tasty. I might complain that there weren't enough olives, but then again, I'll always complain that there aren't enough olives. The Boss remarked that her tomato soup was fine, but not noteworthy.

Next came the boar. I was presented with a plate of wide noodles covered in a ragout containing large chunks of meat. If I hadn't known better I would have said it was beef. I sat politely, eagerly waiting for my Boss to get her plate so I could dig in and sample this stuff- it smelled great. A few minutes went by but no food came for her. Finally we flagged down the server who said that she didn't realize my Boss had ordered an entree as well. So much for the great service of my first Urbana experience; lipstick on the glass, cork in the wine and a forgotten entree. Ah well.

The boar ragout was wonderful! The flavors were intense and gamy, but not overwhelming at all. The texture of the meat is hard to explain, although I was using the word rough to try to convey it. It wasn't tough, but it wasn't tender either. It was stringy, but not hard to chew. Hmm... Yep, can't do any better than that. It boils down to this: if you have the opportunity to sample some wild boar, I do recommend it.

After our plates were empty and taken away, we were presented with the dessert of butterscotch creme brulee. I am a big fan of creme brulee, and as such I'm kind of picky about it. One spoonful of Urbana's delicious, creamy version, covered with the signature crispy, slightly burnt outer layer, and I was momentarily transported to another world. I would rank this as one of the top five creme brulees of all time- and that is saying something.

Still on our sugar high, we prepared to settle the tab and set off gloomily for our office once more. When the check finally came it wrongly listed three entrees rather than two. When it was finally corrected it took far too long for the server to come retrieve it; she walked several times through the dining room without once looking around at her tables and even stopped to chat with the bartender for a few minutes. By the time we had paid and gotten the credit card back, the server was irredeemable in our eyes. The truly sad thing about that is our grumbling is what left us with Urbana- not our memories of the wild boar and yummy creme brulee.

It wasn't the lunch it should have been. The food was excellent but we had received what I would rate as just plain bad service. I'd be willing to give Urbana another try though, even if only for one more crack at their creme brulee.