Dining at Oval Room: DC Restaurant Week Winter 2012

Today was the last day for the official DC Restaurant Week (Winter 2012) period. Today I took a group to a favorite that if you had an expense budget you'd probably visit their private dining 5-course dinners much more :) Where many of the power players in DC have come to eat over the years, the Oval Room.

• Ranked #7: 2010's Washingtonian Magazine's 100 Best Restaurants
• Editor's Pick in the Washington Post

FOOD: American w/ tons of creativity. Chef Tony Conte, formerly from Jean Georges in New York, is quite imaginative with his dishes. Normal prices are up there due to high quality ingredients. This place isn't about 'quantity over quality'. More often than not, his dishes are superb. And when the kitchen's on ... wow.

SPACE: Sophisticated and contemporary, very nice looking space.

Some of the dishes I tried tonight:

Goat Cheese Custard w/ Warm Cherries , Pistachios & Arugula

Rockfish w/ Spaghetti Squash, Sweet Garlic Lemon Broth & Chili Oil

Grilled Flat Iron Steak w/ Tararind Condiment, Crispy Potato & Spinach

Chocolate Bomb w/ Crumbs, Cherry & Vanilla Ice Cream

Sticky Toffee Cake w/ Brown Sugar & Butter-Pecan Ice Cream

The Winter 2012 DC Restaurant Week menu for the Oval Room

Overall Opinion? Tough call for Restaurant Week periods. Oval Room outside of Restaurant Week is a treat, due to no restriction of ingredient quality (which for this restaurant seems to impact their normal creativity). The food tongiht was good but nothing particularly 'Wow'. Not sure if I'd come back here & pay their normal pricing if I didn't already have the existing knowledge of seeing Tony Conte at his best (a private dining 5-course affair about 4 years ago in which I was thoroughly impressed with strong creativity and superior tastes, albeit at a pricepoint several times higher than the RW deal).