Acacia Bistro

Restaurant: Acacia Bistro

Address: 4340 Connecticut Ave. NW

Date: January 7, 8:00 pm

We were not crazy about Acacia.

Disclaimer: before I go further, let me make one thing clear.  I am not a tough critic.  I love food, and I love almost any experience dining out.  This blog will not turn into 60+ reviews where 50 are pithy/snarky critiques.  I don't need to be eating something with truffles and receiving a foot massage to be happy, and most of these reviews will be glowing.  That being said...we were underwhelmed by 2 of our first 3 meals so the initial returns are going to make me look a bit Sietsema-like, which I'm not.

I was excited to try Acacia because it is (1) neighborhoody and (2) Italian.  Because WMATA delayed our dinner companions, my wife and I had a nice long time at the restaurant and I have to say the atmosphere is nice.  It is a small, open restaurant with decor that is spare, but not in a bad way.  On a Friday night there was a quiet buzz of conversation that made the place feel energized and relaxing all at once.
We just weren't crazy about the food.

What we ordered
We started with the herbed goat cheese crostini.  (menu)  I am a big fan of the prosciutto + goat cheese crostini at pizzeria paradiso, and that may have set me up for disappointment with the appetizer.  Acacia's crostini was five slices of baguette, toasted and smeared with goat cheese.  That was it.  It tasted fine, but it was something I could have prepared for myself in 3 minutes after leaving Trader Joe's.  (Paradiso's has the prosciutto, of course, but also some fresh chopped herbs, a drizzle of olive oil, and it's cooked briefly in the pizza oven so that the goat cheese has started to melt down into your bread.)

For main course, I had the farfalle with crabmeat sauce.  I thought it was quite good (not great).  I like crabmeat and this was a nice light, fresh dish that combined its ingredients in good proportions.  The bow tie pasta was great.  I would have given my dish an A-.
Unfortunately, I was the only one of four who enjoyed my meal.  

Megan had the tagliatelle with blue prawns.  She will be quick to tell you that she did not dislike the dish simply because it was served with eyeballs, antennae, legs, etc. still attached.  It was tried by multiple parties and the consensus opinion was that the taste was extremely fishy and sort of gross.  (As a second disclaimer, this is not just a thing with prawns generally--we had some very good, very fresh prawns once at Marvin after getting a hard sell from the waiter.  Those were not bad at all.)

One of our companions got the veal, which was surprisingly dry and tough.  Forgive the crudeness of this comment, but the payoff for veal cruelty is supposed to be the tenderness, right?  If you are going to cook all of the moisture out of something, I think you may as well let it grow up and walk around first.  The veal was not good on this night.

Overall impression
Acacia was fine.  But definitely not great and not one of Washington DC's 100 best restaurants.*  Our experience at Acacia was the first time I began to suspect that maybe there is a push for regional diversity with the 100 list.  And in this case, Acacia is sort of a Matt Capps All-Star** of restaurants.  It is not one of the overall best--just the best you could choose from Van Ness apparently.

I noticed that both the Washingtonian and Washington Post reviews make a big deal out of the fact that Acacia is family run (e.g. Sietsema: "One night, I catch [chef Liliana Dumas] bussing a customer's cheek. Another time, I spot her sending out a new dish for a patron to taste...The presence behind the sleek bar is Dumas's son, Michel...").  I really like that about the place.  But at the end of the day, I judge based on the food and I am going to judge the food evenly whether it is prepared by stranger/mercenaries or adorable old native Italians that come out to spoon a soup sample into my mouth.  And as much as it pains me to say this--because our food was indeed prepared by a certified AONI--we just didn't think Acacia's food was great.

FINAL GRADE: B-

*I think a lot of NYCers imagine that DC's best restaurants are Acacia-level; fortunately they're wrong.

**There is a tradition of selecting at least one player from each team for Major League Baseball's All-Star game.  In 2010, that meant that players like Matt Capps and Evan Meek were named All-Stars, not because they were among the league's best players, but because they were the least laughable players that could have possibly been chosen from the Washington Nationals and Pittsburgh Pirates, respectively.