Who Wants Toast For Dinner?
Do you remember the movie Mermaids? With Cher? Truthfully, the only thing we remember about it is that she always made finger food for supper. She couldn’t just make a sandwich, rather she’d cut them into shapes and serve them like hors d’oeuvres. Well, before we were married, we loved to eat like that. OK, not exactly like that, but to eat little bits of lots of things, sort of like having tapas for dinner. Then we got married, and our very sweet, very hungry husband would look at meals like that and ask where the main course was, so now we cook like a grown-up.
Enter Dinette. This relative new-comer to the Capitol Hill dining scene has been on our radar for a while, but it was only when friends from the Eastside told us they’d been and loved it did we feel ashamed of ourselves and actually make a reservation.
The menu begins with “Toast”. It was love at first sight. We were hooked. In fact, the physical menu is all small plates (actually, they call them small plates, we’d call them bigger than that) of munchie food, and then there’s a chalkboard with the proper meal-size dishes which apparently change daily. On Saturday night there were five specials including seared sea scallops on lemon risotto (which we wanted to order but had to draw the line somewhere) and spiced lamb (which we did order) served on a wonderfully fresh, well-dressed bread salad with crunchy cucumbers and a thick yogurt raita sauce. From the regular menu we had three kinds of toast: a divine chicken liver mousse with hot pickled peppers; sliced duck rillette terrine with grainy mustard, pickled onions, and cornichons; and a creamy white bean spread with a nice chunky eggplant caponata. The bread they use is crusty, thick-cut, and delicious all by itself. Each toast is cut into three, and we could have happily made a meal of them. We also had a slice of Spanish tortilla, the potatoes perfectly tender, just a bit of egg holding it all together, served with a generous dollop of paprika aioli. There’s also a pasta section with a chicken option, a vegetarian one, and what we are definitely ordering next time, gnocchi with short rib ragu (talk about comfort food). The salads on the regular menu sounded fabulous too, one in particular with roasted beets and a warm vinaigrette. Our server was attentive, and friendly, and gave us great advice (we wanted everything on the menu and he politely suggested we start with a few and order more if we were still hungry…thank goodness). We didn’t even have room for dessert, which was a pity because we are still thinking about his description of the chocolate terrine.
The room itself is practically unadorned, but it filled quickly, and all the people and all the chatter and the pink drinks in martini glasses were soon decoration enough. We are so happy Dinette is here, and we’re looking forward to many future dinners of toast.
