By Greg B. By Tuesday, most of us are pretty overloaded from the conference.  It takes a lot of energy just to maintain a good, productive scientific conversation normally, let alone in dim, randomly fluctuating lighting surrounded by the dull roar of 31,000 people talking, walking, moving, etc, and doing this for hours at a time, over many days.  So, these facts, coupled with the fact that none of us had anything really important to see on Tuesday, we decided to take a day off and scope out DC a bit.

Now, most of us have been around DC before, seen the monuments and such, but in all honesty, I hadn’t been to the Lincoln memorial in at least a decade, never saw the WWI memorial or Korean memorial, and had never been to the Jefferson Memorial (among my favorite of America’s founding fathers).  So on a cold cold day, we walked from Scott circle, down around the white house, out to the WWII memorial, down the reflecting pool (needs to be cleaned up a bit, US park service), up to see Lincoln, then down past the Korean War memorial, over to the WWI memorial, out by the Tidal Basin, through the FDR memorial (my 3rd least favorite president… I only saw it b/c it was on the way to Jefferson’s memorial), down further along the tidal basin, over the bridge of freezing, gusty wind, through the George Mason memorial (writer of the Bill of Rights), then up to see Jefferson.  It was quite a hike, but really a nice day for it.  The cold temperature kept most tourists at bay and led to a nice, crisp and bright day.

Afterwards, the girls were literally freezing to death, so we stopped by the Cosi near the US State department.  I had a really nice Hot, Spiced Apple Cider that was perfect on such a nice cool day.  So while the girls re-hydrated themselves and got the blood flowing again in their extremities, I sat back and enjoyed myself.  This location, on Pennsylvania avenue, is always busy and has people coming and going constantly.  I also appreciate their efficiency.  Well done, Cosi!

So, having finally warmed up, we started to walk back towards the convention center to meet up with friends.  Today was going to be the day that I was finally going to try Dim Sum.  If you haven’t tried this, it is really a pretty amazing experience.  Tons of food is brought around, in small samples (almost like a Tapas style place, but with Chinese food), and you can really eat your fill for fairly cheap.  This being said, 6 people rang up a $200 tab.  Not because the food was expensive, but more because we just ordered a ton of it.  We went to Tony Cheng’s Seafood Restaurant in Chinatown.  This restaurant is located at 619 H street, NY Washington DC 20001.  The inside has an impressive amount of marble tile and nice decoration.  If you want the Dim Sum, go inside and to the right, up the stairs.  Dim Sum is upstairs, Mongolian food is downstairs.  Below I will list off all the items that we ordered, and you should keep in mind that we also ordered 2 or 3 of some of these as well, but all of them at least once.

1. Spare Ribs in black bean sauce
2. Steamed shrimp dumplings
3. Shrimp and Pork Shui Mai
4. Steamed Gun Gor
5. Steamed Beef Ball
6. Chicken Feet in Black Bean Sauce
7. Chicken Shui Mai
8. Stuffed fried bean curd
9. Pan fried shrimp and leek dumpling
10. Steamed chicken bun
11. Steamed roast pork bun
12. Baked roasted pork bun
13. Steamed shark’s fin dumpling
14. Steamed shrimp ball
15. Stuffed bean curd sheet roll with oyster sauce
16. 2 orders (2 per order) of Rice (comes wrapped in a leaf of some sort, around various meats)

Ok… I think you can pretty much tell by this order that we took home some food.  A lot of food.  4 take out containers were needed to divide the leftover food items, and the tab came to about $30 a person.  We also got a glass of Tsingtao beer, to help wash down some of the food.  It’s not my favorite beer style, as it falls into that “beer that every nation produces that everyone in that nation drinks that really isn’t very special”, but it is refreshing given the bready and fatty style of food we were consuming, en masse.  When you order you also get sauces to add to various foods, one is a soy sauce based style sauce that is very much like what you get in Korean restaurants with the PaJung (seafood pancake).  The other is an oily sauce with a lot of spicy pepper seeds.  Very delicious, quite spicy but nice to add to buns and dumplings, even if mixed with some soy sauce.  You are also provided with a tea, I am assuming black tea, but a pot of it is placed at the table and everyone gets a nice small ceramic glass from which to drink.  Unlike the normal Dim Sum style, on weekdays at lunch apparently Tony Cheng’s does not push food around with a cart, you stick with the menu.  That being said however, I felt the experience to be interesting and certainly one of amazement at the quantity of food that was constantly being presented before us.  Certainly a rival for the Korea food experience!

After Dim Sum, we went home and took a nap.  Seriously, we needed to digest some food in the best way possible, passing out.  After a few hours we awoke and went out to meet a friend of mine from NY whom I see once a year in DC.  We met Emily at the bar, Stoney’s pub on P street, between 14 and 15th st, across from the Whole Foods.  Nice little joint, very relaxed atmosphere.  I ordered a boddington’s ale, a quite nice, heavy bodied, thick headed ale that has a real grainy/corn taste to it with a mild sweetness and mild bitter flavor.  We also ordered some chili cheese fries with the dinner, which were kind of a smaller portion than I suspected, but they did not skimp on the chili or the cheese.  Could have used a few more fries to sop up the rest of the mixture, but it was delicious tasting.  Emily ordered an Irish coffee and got Irish cream (I think she may have been mildly disappointed, yes Emily, we did notice this), but it seemed like a nice place to hang your hat on a cold day, if you’re strolling around town looking for a pint.

Finally, to finish out the evening, we headed back towards DuPont circle.  With the girls once again nearing the absolute freezing points and almost unable to walk any further, we ducked into James Hoban’s Irish Pub. This was a nice pub, with mildly decorated like an Irish pub, but also playing interesting dance music (I think some of the drunk girls got control over the juke box).  Coming in from the cold, there really is only one solution.  A shot and a pint.  I got the obligatory Guinness, along with a drink of Bushmills Blackbush, a really nice, smooth whisky.  Gabi got her usual Dogfish head 60 min IPA, and Mihyun tried a chocolate martini, which was very chocolatey.  We also ordered the Brie & Ale, which is this really awesome fried brie with a raspberry compote and sliced, toasted baguette.  The menu says this is great for sharing, and while that may be true, by the nature of the dish, it is so excellent you may want to get one just for yourself!  The brie was mild enough to let the subtle sweet/raspberry flavors of the compote come out, and the baguette was a good vehicle for this delicious combination.  Everyone really enjoyed this dish, and if you stop into this pub, I highly recommend try this!  It even went very well with the Blackbush whisky, no doubt due to the fact that blackbush whisky is aged in sherry casks, giving it a slightly more sweet flavor which really highlighted the raspberry element of the dish.

Our server, Denise, was always very fast with providing the drinks or the food, checked up on us on a regular basis, and was very friendly all the time.  Kudos to her!  The girls later on tried a Thin Mint Martini and an Irish Manhattan, both of which was good in their own way.

Having drank and eaten our fill, we began the cold walk back to our hotel.  However, we HAD to stop by this empanada place along the way.  The previous night (which I realize I neglected to mention in the last post… sorry!) we had stopped here and bought two empanadas which we ate for breakfast.  A-mazing. Julia’s empanadas, are seriously the best of the best.  They claim they are ‘made with love’, and after eating them, I have to agree that if love was bakeable, these would certainly be baked full of this emotion.  They only take cash, so be prepared, but here are what we tried.

• Spinach Empanada - Amazing.  Basically a mixture of spinach and mozarella cheese with some delicious spices.  The dough is incredible too.
• Chilean Style Beef – Amazing.  Same incredible dough, ground beef with raisins, onion and slices of hardboiled egg.  So good, this really was the favorite of everyone who tried it, we got it twice.  Also, my mouth is watering right now just thinking about this, and I wish the owners would open one of these places up here in Baltimore (Hint Hint!)
• Chorizo - Also Amazing.  Spanish sausage with rice and black beans.  it sounds so simple, and it is, but man, it is so good.  Same delicious, buttery, crispy yet hard dough, same delicious flavor infusion of filling.  I could eat these all day long.

Julia’s has more empanadas to try, Saltenas, Turkey with spring onions, Jamaican style and a vegetarian style, along with sides of soups and salads and desserts.   If anyone checks these out, please let me know how they taste.  Also, I will be back to DC to complete the rest of this menu, you can all mark my words.

And this concluded our second to last day in DC.  We still had more science to do on Wednesday, poster sessions, people to talk to and science to see, but we were glad to have taken this day off to recharge our batteries, as it were.  Getting a full night’s worth of sleep, we all anticipated the end of the conference, and what more restaurants and beers awaited us.  Little did we know, tomorrow would be an interesting beer day indeed…