These days, a visitor's best glimpse at insider Washington often comes from having lunch at the Palm, the 19th Street institution prized for its Eisenhower-era cuisine—steaks, lobsters, terrific Martinis—not to mention its aura of manly wheeling and dealing. Friends and I once showed up with reservations and stood waiting for nearly an hour as each new free table was given to people who'd just floated in the door, often with faces you recognized from the pundit shows.
My next time there, I was interviewing the host of Hardball, Chris Matthews, who really isn't a lout, he just plays one on TV. Although there were a dozen people waiting, we were instantly squired through the dining room crowded with mahogany-tanned lobbyists, journalists, and countless PAC-funded apparatchiks. As we sat down, Matthews sighed happily, "I love it here." And who could blame him? What has always drawn people to this city is power—be it the power to build highways, launch missiles, or land the catbird seat at the Palm.
Dylan Thomas once said that Washington isn't a city but an abstraction, and in a sense he was right. The District of Columbia—once a muggy, mosquito-riddled river settlement—only became the U.S. capital because the northern states and the southern states cut a deal after the Revolutionary War. Gore Vidal dated the birth of what he calls the American "empire" to the invention of air-conditioning in the 1930s. Before then, politicians fled the city, which annually turns into a tropical inferno, for three months a year instead of staying all summer "making mischief."
If air-conditioning made Washington less unbearably hot, Camelot made it cool. The Kennedys were the first genuinely television-savvy First Family, and they bathed the city in stylishness—working for the government was suddenly youthful, chic. No neighborhood benefited more from the New Frontier than Georgetown, which went from being a neglected patch of 18th-century brick houses to a watchword for glamour. Each time I visit, I find myself strolling along N Street past the lovely Federal houses, walking along the C&O Canal, and admiring the high Gothic spire of the university's Healy Hall. Still, Georgetown's with-it reputation has long since moved on—not only to Adams-Morgan but to nearby U Street.
Because it's obsessed with the red meat of politics—and its sporting simulacrum, Redskins football—Washington has long been renowned for its mundane attitude regarding the more civilized things in life. Arts coverage in The Washington Post is worthy of Omaha, all those bureaucrats with M.A.'s prefer the multiplex to the Kennedy Center, and the city itself has inspired no great novels. Until rather recently, this same prosaic, almost puritanical attitude afflicted the local outlook on food. When the late Jean-Louis Palladin opened his eponymous restaurant in the Watergate back in 1979, it was as if a Martian had fallen to earth bearing foie gras and truffles—alien food.
Now, Washington is filled with restaurants that, if not so dazzling as some locals claim, offer a level of finesse that you wouldn't have dreamed of when Palladin's Air France spaceship first touched down. Not only does the city boast first-rate places such as Kinkead's, Michel Richard Citronelle, and Palena, but even the outlying areas have a couple of good spots—Café Bethesda and Tavira, both in Maryland, and Evening Star, a small Alexandria restaurant with terrific American cooking. Though I was there on a Monday, the place was packed with young professionals. Washington has become a city of commuters, and once these folks leave work, they don't fancy going back into town to eat. This hasn't been lost on the likes of Bob Kinkead, who opened his acclaimed Colvin Run Tavern near Tyson's Corner, the traffic-snarled center of suburban hell.
Nothing in the suburbs, however, compares to the Mall. One bright morning, I made my way to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, with its haunting, inscribed black walls and gifts of remembrance beneath loved ones' names. No matter the hour, I've never been there when I didn't find someone weeping. The Mall itself is not beautiful—its sparse planting makes it look a bit too much like a runway—yet its vacancy is redeemed by the distant view of the Capitol. It is, in fact, so encyclopedic in its possibilities—from the shattering Holocaust Museum to the Air and Space Museum's exhilarating IMAX movies about flight—that it's hard to decide where to go first.
I ended up in the National Museum of American History. Its giddy blend of the esoteric and the pop, the radical and the commercial, never fails to remind me what it is I treasure about this country. Inside the gift shop were books on our current president, including Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose's Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush. The very presence of a book that mocks a sitting president, just blocks from where he lives, is stunning testimony to our democratic ideals. A couple days later, I had lunch with Charles Paul Freund, an editor at the libertarian magazine Reason. I mentioned that nobody seems to realize how great the Mall is. "The trouble isn't that nobody knows it's great," he said, "it's that elite taste has always looked down on Washington for not being as classy as New York or Europe." Then he flashed a sardonic grin: "The only people who understand how good it is are the millions of ordinary Americans who pour into this city every single year."
WHERE THE ELITE MEET TO EAT
Billy Martin's Tavern, 1264 Wisconsin Avenue, N.W. (202-333-7370). The Grill from Ipanema, 1858 Columbia Road, N.W.(202-986-0757). Palm, 1225 19th Street, N.W. (202-293-9091). Kinkead's, Red Lion Row, 2000 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. (202-296-7700). Michel Richard Citronelle, Latham Hotel, 3000M Street, N.W. (202-625-2150). Palena, 3529 Connecticut Avenue, N.W. (202-537-9250). Café Bethesda, 5027 Wilson Lane, Bethesda, Maryland (301-657-3383). Tavira, 8401 Connecticut Avenue, Chevy Chase, Maryland (301-652-8684). Evening Star Cafe, 2000 Mount Vernon Avenue, Alexandria, Virginia (703-549-5051). Colvin Run Tavern, 8045 Leesburg Pike, Vienna, Virginia (703-356-9500).
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