Your Logeuse (Landlady) Loves It
Written: Aug 18 '02
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Pros: Good for Picky Eaters if They Don't Mind Dressing Up
Cons: Specializes in Picayune Cuisine
The Bottom Line: Try not to avoid it, or once the boomers retire, there won't be anywhere left for people who want the occasional bland meal.
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| connedsumer2's Full Review: Le Vieux Logis |
This is the first and probably only review of this restaurant on Epinions.com, because, as we should have realized, people who use computers don't go here.
My wife had just gotten a new job, or thought she had, though later it wasn't clear if she had or hadn't. But right now it was time for a celebration, not the local Chinese restaurant, and we'd seen this cottage type place with the paintings on the outside in Bethesda, and it was allegedly a French restaurant, so we figured why not? The evening started out very well. Though the nearby parking garage was under construction, we easily found metered parking on the street and could have used the valet service if we hadn't. We were taken right to our table despite having arrived 15 minutes after our reserved time owing to slow traffic resulting from a heavy rainstorm. Our French accented and very attentive waiter (please, not "server"--this cuisine comes from a country where men are proud to make a career of waiting tables and where women are so proud to be chain smoking anorexics that being called a "waitress" is the least of their problems) managed to find my wife a good white wine and me a good red wine by the glass, not the bottle, despite my wife's aversion to Chardonnay and mine to Merlot and Cabernet. In most places, we would have to have ordered a bottle of one or the other. Then we looked at the menu.
If you're afraid of French restaurants because you think you'll have to eat a skillet of kidneys and sweetbreads (thyroid glands) with marinated octopus on the side, don't worry. This place didn't have anything like that, or even rabbit stew. Or, so far as I can recall, duck liver pates. Or even bean casserole. I think they may have had an escargot appetizer, but basically it was beef and chicken and fish of the day and some grilled vegetables for the vegetarians. So for a little excitement we ordered the specials not on the menu that our waiter glibly reeled off. One never learns more than basic food terms reading literature and scholarly articles for French classes in school, but these dishes sounded pretty exciting even when he recited them in English. We did get one thing off the regular menu because my wife had a hankering for mussels. The most wonderous thing about those mussels was knowing you could get them again without driving all the way to Le Vieux Logis. They were quite obviously the quite tasty New Zealand green mussels that come precooked and frozen in the supermarket. You don't have to boil them or open them; they're already on the half shell. And they're really rubbery because it doesn't take much moisture to reconstitute them. The appetizer special was a bit harder to find on your own. The most original dish of the evening, it was a crabmeat crèpe buried under a bowl of creamy cheese sauce. My wife thought crèpes were supposed to sit intact, not disintegrate into the sauce, but I just pretended I was in a Tex-Mex seafood restaurant eating a crab enchilada and enjoyed it just fine.
It was time for the main course (in France, entrée means "first course" or "appetizer," so I won't commit that faux pas). It's not often that you go to a French restaurant and get a real home cooked meal. I mean, if I was at home, I'd have no trouble making it myself, though I might not have set myself back $128. Whatever "lamb special" I thought I was ordering turned out to be basically a broiled steak, tender but thinner and more charred on the edges than one would get in a steakhouse chain, not particularly lamb-like, with sauteed potatoes, summer squash and carrots. The vegetables were crisp and bright, yet sufficiently cooked. They may have had a bit of butter on them, but nothing potentially more offensive than that. It was the sort of food you'd find at a hotel convention or a relative's wedding catered at a country club, where because everyone gets the same thing, everyone has to be able to eat it. My wife's seafood fricassee, another "special," would not have been quite as easy to make at home. You wouldn't expect to find a brown gravy with scallops and shrimp in it in the Stouffers, Lean Cuisine, or Marie Callender aisle; it's the kind of thing only the Budget Gourmet frozen lunches can manage. Her white rice, served on the side, I have to concede, had honest to goodness orange saffron strands running through it, not the turmeric that typically turns the whole thing yellow in Indian restaurants. I don't know how traditionally French saffron rice is per se (maybe Algerian?), but it seemed to fit in with the rest of the food, and I know we've found saffron called for in a French recipe for bouillabaisse when cooking at home.
We weren't going to get any dessert but were curious to hear the menu, which included a chocolate meringue offering, which we were sufficiently tempted to try. We'd never had anything like it. It satisfied the sort of craving I hadn't sated since my first and only Hostess cupcake. Primarily chocolate icing, it was the kind of confection that as a child you wanted for your birthday but weren't allowed to have. My wife had been expecting it to be like a giant crunchy chocolate-filled torte or at least like a meringue pie with fluffy egg white on top, but either it had stood out too long and the meringue part had disintegrated, or some thoughtful soul, perhaps concerned that customers might be offended by the taste of raw egg, seemed to have folded the egg whites back into the rest of the concoction.
Whatever our experience with the food, Le Vieux Logis offers an interesting ambience. The wood beam architecture and wine bottles on display suggest a rustic atmosphere. The framed Toulouse Lautrec style posters suggest an urban atmosphere, though in Paris you'd be more likely see such posters on the street or in metro stations, not inside restaurants. The clientele were all pretty relaxed, quiet and mature, suggesting a quaint, cozy atmosphere. They were also far better dressed, older than we were, and not visibly multicultural, suggesting an upper class, exclusive atmosphere. We'd been to other upscale places where it wasn't uncommon to see people our age and people who dressed as we did on the weekend, so we were rather concerned we might have happened upon a place where they might add a $500 base charge just for sitting down. No they hadn't, and no, I don't mean to be ageist, but we had found nothing about this place online other than that it had a "loyal following," and hadn't realized what these words were code for. Though the waiters spoke fine French, I think someone printed the name of the restaurant incorrectly; it probably should have been Le Logis des Vieux, in honor of the majority of the customers, who appear to have come of age in the generation when garlic and fresh herbs were still unknown in America and broccoli was this weird Italian immigrant thing being demonstrated on cooking shows that you had to buy in an ethnic market. So I guess in summary you could say it was kind of a "haute paysan" atmosphere, the kind of country club crowd that would have liked to have tried slumming at the villas of Napa and Sonoma but had obviously spent their whole lives in Washington, DC. Or maybe they'd been to California and eaten at the Ritz Carlton of Sonoma. But these customers were all very elegant and polite. None of them would have written a review like this even had they felt as we did. And they unwittingly allowed us to get served in time to make it to a dance performance in DC because they didn't waste the waiters' time; they all knew exactly what they wanted. For instance, a man at the table next to us was quite willing to try the Scandinavian platter with the smoked salmon and trout if they made sure to remove the imported Danish herring, and his partner made it quite clear that her salmon should be served very well done. Yes, I have proofread this review.
In case I've left you thinking there was anything recognizably fishy about this restaurant, I assure you there was absolutely nothing wrong with the food. We would have been extremely grateful to have found a meal like this driving by a supper club after a couple days backpacking in West Virginia, where it would have been a third of the price. It's really the perfect place to take your parents, particularly if you're a contrite sort of person accustomed to frequent travel in the course of performing deafening odes to teenage angst, testing novel pharmaceuticals, or enjoying habitual intimacy with someone to whom you refuse to be betrothed. And believe it or not, it's not uncommon to find meals like we had at Le Logis des Vieux in France or elsewhere in Europe. In Paris we had something pretty basic in a 4-table restaurant operated out of a woman's home, and unless you're willing to payez through the nez, you may find yourself sitting in France grimacing and reminiscing about Le Logis, though you'll probably also be longing for other restaurants in the States, ones in which flavor is the daily feature. Of course I'm referring to such fine, reasonably priced establishments in the DC suburbs as Le Gaulois in Alexandria, VA and Le Mannequin Pis, a great Belgian place in Olney, MD. Mais pourquoi quelqu'un revenerait a cet restaurant susdit, ça défie tous les vieux logiciens.
Recommended:
No
Kid Friendliness: No
Vegetarian Friendly: No
Notes, Tips or Menu Recommendations Tips are unfortunately necessary because the service is far better than the food. Notes can be passed on napkins so as not to disconcert the other diners. Menu recommendations should be avoided.
Best Suited For: Kids and Families
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Epinions.com ID:
connedsumer2
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Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 0 members
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