Zaytinya

A friend, sweetmonger and I dined last Friday night a Zaytinya, José Andrés’ mezze restaurant in the Penn Quarter. Mezze are small plates of eastern Mediterranean cuisine. Given my recent fascination with Middle Eastern and Greek food, I was extremely happy to satisfy my urge to eat at Zaytinya and was genuinely impressed by the quality of the food.

Zaytinya is extremely popular and only takes a limited number of reservations thus making our wait around an hour. This was expected and didn’t bother me and gave us a chance to hang out in Zaytinya’s large bar area. It has a couple good beers on tap including Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA (a 4 hop beer) and the cocktails (I tried sweetmonger’s) are inventive and very good.

We were seated in the loft area which provides a slightly quieter dining experience and allows you to enjoy great views of the restaurant below. After studying the menu, we picked 6 of the over 70 small plates to share and I ordered 1 extra course to have all to my self.

The hummus and piping hot, fresh pita bread were delicious, maybe the best hummus in DC (not positive about that though). My cauliflower soup with Moroccan truffles and lemon was light, creamy and wonderful. The scallops with yogurt dill sauce were perfectly seared, sweet and super juicy. The arayes, ground lamb and tahini stuffed pita bread, was well seasoned and quite enjoyable. The lamb and beef sausages were tender and bold and the skewered lamb melted in my mouth. The red wine braised rabbit was not quite as good as the other mezze but it was cooked well and well cooked rabbit is always welcome in my mouth.

As good as the mezze were, the desserts at Zaytinya were every bit as good. We shared two: Turkish coffee chocolate and Turkish delight. The first was warm chocolate cake, bittersweet chocolate flan and cardamom espuma finished with espresso syrup. It was not super inventive but rather very well executed and showcased great flavor. The Turkish delight combined walnut ice cream with goat’s milk yogurt mousse, honey geleé, orange-caramel sauce and caramelized pine nuts. The walnut ice cream was particularly good and was an intriguing end to the meal.

My only complaint about the night is that our waiter inexcusably brought me some radler (beer and sprite) tasting concoction even though I had ordered another Dogfish Head. It was beer so I drank it instead of complaining but it pretty much sucked. Anyway, go to Zaytinya, make sure they understand your drink order and then enjoy. It will be hard not to.

Zaytinya
http://www.zaytinya.com/
701 9th St. NW
Washington, DC 20004
202-638-0800
See website for hours.