Washington, DC. Day 3. At Least Some of Us Got to Eat.

We got up today, again too late for breakfast. It’s great. Tzvi left for work and I got coffee at the coffee shop in the lobby, which of course has its own obnoxious hipster name, though this one is actually kind of fitting - The Cup We All Race 4. Yes, that’s actually the name of the place and yes, there really is a number in the name. Good coffee though. Very slow service. I did order the pour over though, so I don’t know what I expected.

Today was packed with professional development. I couldn’t even tell you what we learned. It was all great stuff, but just too much at a time. Tonight, instead of heading to the night activity, we went to Nelson’s apartment. Nelson is the head of campus affairs in the education department at JNF, and my supervisor. His apartment was super nice. Must be nice living outside NYC. He even has a Peloton in his gym! He doesn’t use it. It’s a travesty. Anyway, we hung out there for a bit, met his wife, and then eventually headed out at 8:15. We ubered to this bar where all of the ICC people were, but by the time we got there the kosher food was gone, so I ate a lot of cauliflower. It was also so loud. Most of the people here are single and young, and while I may be young, I’m too old for loud bars. A few of us decided to leave pretty quickly, so we ubered back to the hotel and got ice cream. We’re cool.

Tzvi: Another busy day at work, but it wouldn’t be another late night in the office, because I had made plans to see a client. Around 3 I left the office and went for a visit at a client’s office in Virginia, and then around 7 came back into DC with a couple of lawyers from the client and went for dinner.

Dinner was at a French restaurant in the 14th Street neighborhood called Le Diplomate. We had to wait a bit for a table so we started at the bar. The clients shared a bottle of wine and I ordered an old fashioned. The place was beautiful and actually a pretty large space that made you feel like you were in a typical French bistro. Eventually we got a table and started with a bread basket that was simple but perfect. It’s hard to go wrong with a bread basket in a French restaurant. And butter, of course. Such good butter. To start, I shared two appetizers with one of the lawyers - a tuna tartare that was paper thin and delicious and a basket of gougers, basically fried cheese puffs. Cheese puffs is a terrible way to describe it because it invokes images of fingers covered in gross orange powder. These were like dough, puffed cheesy… things. I wish I had photos, but I thought it would be bad form to take out my phone and snap photos of food in front of clients. Wikipedia describes them as a baked savory choux pastry made of choux dough mixed with cheese. Whatever they were, they were delicious. For the main I had trout almandine. It was perfectly classically French - melt in your mouth trout covered in toasted almonds and on a bed of tender, salty, buttery green beans. For dessert I had a crème Brule that had so much fresh vanilla bean in it that it was basically speckled black and white. We finally finished around 11 and I got an Uber back to the hotel.