NoVa and NoVa
 

Met flyertalkers joanek and naxos (with family
members Michael and Lizzie) at Duangrat on
Leesburg Pike, a restaurant I always enjoy, although
the food has become less spicy and more round-eyed
with every passing year. Also present, my friends
Bill and Carol, who were to give me a ride to IAD.
We decided on Duangrat because it was more convenient
for us all than Haandi, my original choice.

I really enjoyed the group, but most of the hilarity
was produced by the discovery that joanek had interned
for the woman who was maid of honor at Bill and Carol's
wedding and that there were numerous other close and
distant relationship webs in the group (I was privy to
none of this, for a change). Not much flyertalking, a
lot of Washington schmoozing, and a surprising amount of
discussion about New York theater (mostly of the '70s).

I focused on the food.

Larb - this is a traditional meat salad that comes
either raw (beef) or cooked (beef, chicken, or pork).
On this menu, only cooked chicken is offered. Cooked
ground meat dressed with lime juice, salt, red onion,
chiles, and fish sauce, piled on lettuce leaves.

Wing Fancy - boned chicken wings stuffed with ground
pork, vegetables, and glass noodles, served with a
sweet dipping sauce.

Mee Krob - deep-fried thin rice noodles coated in a
spicy sweet-sour sauce. Sort of an adult version of
Rice Krispie Treats.

Green papaya salad - shredded fruit dressed with,
well, most of the things that dressed the Larb.

Moo Pah - pork cooked with basil, chiles, eggplant,
and peppercorns. I asked for it to be made very
hot; it came mild to medium.

Wild Beef - beef cooked similarly to the Moo Pah
but with the addition of green beans. I asked for
all the other dishes to be made regular, but for
some reason this one came out twice as hot as
anything else on the table (including the Moo Pah).

Drunken noodles with duck - a Chinese dish,
actually: thick, chewy chow foon noodles tossed
in hot oil with wine and dark soy, with onion
and duck slivers and bean sprouts thrown in.

Catfish with red curry - fried very catty catfish
in a red sauce with basil.

Farmer's curry - eggplant and other vegetables
in a thin green curry.

Bram - chicken in a yellow peanut/coconut curry:
I found this dish sweetened to the point of
dangerousness; but it did disappear nicely.

We had a perfectly respectable 1998 Cotes du Rhone
with this - nice fruit and good body and nothing
to be ruined by the spice of the meal. I might have
gone for the Bouvet Brut nv as I find that dry
sparklers make hot food seem hotter, but the table
consensus was red.

Desserts included mango sorbet (served with a
tropical fruit compote); black sticky rice with
taro (one of my favorites; but the dish this day
was mild with creamy bits of mashed taro instead
of big chunks of the stuff); cinnamon ice cream
with fried banana; and creme brulee. All good,
all uninteresting.

On the whole what people have been saying is true -
it's a very nice setting, the help is pretty good,
and the food is quite palatable and well prepared.
But the excitement of when the restaurant opened
and intermittently experienced in the intervening
years is gone. Spicings have been toned way down;
instead of gamy wild boar (slices of fat and of
tough sinewy meat as well as regular chop meat)
in the Moo Pah you get slices of perfectly nice
pork loin; sweet-and-sours have been tipped toward
the sweet, whereas in the old days they tipped
toward the sour. It's an American Thai restaurant
now, and to this I think we owe legions of
would-be adventurers who have chugged too many
pitchers of water and left far too much good food
on their plates.

The company, though, I enjoyed that, and I hope the
feeling was mutual. We broke up shortly after 8
so I could make my plane ...

UA 1814 IAD-BOS 2D xld 733
US 4864 IAD-BOS (CHQ) 15A 145

Got to IAD at 8:30 and the RCC at 8:40. Checked in at
the desk and discovered that the monitors listing my
flight as "on time" were lying, and the plane had not
come in from Chicago and was in fact not expected to
come in at all. Got endorsed by a very sour-faced
agent to US Air: the itinerary said that the US Air
flight was leaving at 8:45, but he indicated that they
would hold the flight until 9:15. Along with another
fellow who was in a similar situation I hot-footed it
to the shuttle to the B terminal. Got to B23 and saw
the gate display: Flight 4864 to Boston departs 8:45
ON TIME. Went to the desk to see what other arrangements
could be made. Turns out US Air also lies. They were
still awaiting equipment coming from Rochester. But UA
had apparently overbooked this flight without telling
US, so I was on standby for a flight that was oversold
by 7. Okay, round about 9:15 the equipment got in, and
we walked down to the tarmac and emplaned around 9:25.
There were a bunch of empties; so much for overbooking.

Never been on an ERJ-145 before. It's slightly nicer
than their props and I think slightly nicer than the
CRJs. Underseat and overhead storage is somewhat
inadequate (sacrifice made in favor of headroom, a
tradeoff I approve of). Seats are leather-covered but
although narrow neither comfortable nor uncomfortable
(until I decided to get my sleep and reclined the thing
something like 2", which is about as far as it'll go;
fell asleep and about 15 minutes later the guy behind
me rather savagely jammed his knees into my back; I
didn't react and he didn't repeat the exercise).
Reasonably quiet cabin, even in the back where I was
(seats 50 in a 1-2 arrangement, with 18 the back row).
Slept through most of the flight. Landed at Logan,
taxied to someplace in the middle of nowhere, whence
we were bussed to the terminal. Altogether uneventful.
And so to bed.