RestaurantPalaver: Mintwood Place (the restaurant, not the street)

Mintwood Place CityEats cast iron chicken

Gradually, but decisively, Adams Morgan changed from being an eclectic neighborhood packed with good, ethnic restaurants to one jammed (mostly) with places for drunk people to buy a slice at 3 a.m. My discouragement peaked when one constantly-changing space took the name McNasty's. (To be fair, it might be a lovely place. I have never been inside. It is called McNasty's.) So I was delighted at the arrival in January of Mintwood Place, where chef Cedric Maupillier, formerly of Central Michel Richard, serves a mix of French bistro food (steak frites, frogs legs, and the cast-iron chicken pictured above), upscale down-home food (deviled pickled eggs, maple pork cracklin', bacon cheeseburgers), and possibly the best tagliatelle Bolognese I ever had. Mintwood Place is located below (and co-owned with) Perry's, an Adams Morgan mainstay and location of one of the best rooftop bars (and maybe the only drag queen brunch) in town, on Columbia Road near the corner of Biltmore (a block away from the street named Mintwood Place). It's a big, comfy, noisy space with friendly, professional service, and delicious food. What more could you want? Oh yeah, it has a sidewalk cafe! And now brunch on Saturday and Sunday. As an example of how good the service is, on one visit our server was Johnny- on-the-spot with an offer for a glass of wine with my main course just as I was silently lamenting the end of my first glass, and another server who brought us the baked Alaska we ordered offered to wait until my friend returned from the rest room to light it on fire (which was a beautiful sight).

I'd hoped to write about this place before the WPost reviewed it and it became even more crowded than it's been, but I dawdled. Tom's three-star review runs this Sunday. If you want to get a reservation in while you can, Mintwood Place has gone against the OpenTable trend and signed on with CityEats, a competing site owned by the Food Network.

The best restaurant in Adams Morgan before Mintwood Place opened, by far and for many years, was Cashion's Eat Place, a few doors down Columbia Road. I love Cashion's, and hope that it will only benefit from the additional grown-up traffic Mintwood Place draws to the neighborhood.

Posted on April 18, 2012 at 10:50 PM in DC, Restaurant | Permalink