It’s not often that I am disappointed by bacon. It’s also not often that I speak negatively of bacon on this blog. But unfortunately I had a negative bacon-related experience last Friday while eating lunch at BLT Steak in Washington, DC.
The NYC-based BLT restaurant group opened a Washington location late last year, and some of the initial reviews weren’t very good. So I had been waiting to visit in the hope that they would work out the kinks after a few months. I was pretty excited about the idea of a restaurant with the letters “BLT” in the title (even though it doesn’t stand for Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato – it’s a play on words and the chef owner’s name, Bistro Laurent Tourondel), so I wanted to wait and visit when I thought the restaurant would have been open long enough to have found their stride.
Apparently 10 months wasn’t long enough.
Even though the name of the restaurant doesn’t translate into a bacon-focused menu, they do pay tribute to the Best Meat Ever in a few small ways. One of which is the Grilled Double Cut Bacon appetizer. A dish that has so much potential. And that fails miserably.
The dish consists of a few slices of thick cut bacon that have been grilled and topped with a garlic and vinegar based garnish. The bacon was very meaty and had almost no fat (not a good thing in this case). The grill preparation was weak – rather than enhancing the smokiness of the bacon, it just kind of burned it in the spots where the bacon had hit the grill, and the rest of the meat was limp and bland. But I could have gotten past all of that if the garnish hadn’t been so bad it was distracting. The garlic mixture was just too overwhelming. And I admit I have a small personal bias against vinegar, but it just really did not work in this application. I split the appetizer with two friends. I could barely finish my own piece of bacon – something that doesn’t happen very often.
For my main course, I resisted the temptation to have steak, which was really hard given that the smell of grilling beef dominates the dining room (the most positive part of the BLT Steak experience). Instead I decided to continue my quest to have an all bacon meal at the restaurant called BLT by having the soft shell crab BLT special. I’ve had some really good soft shell crab BLTs in the past, so my expectations were high. And I was hoping that the one thing a restaurant called BLT could do well is prepare a BLT. But once again I was disappointed (and the $13 price tag only added insult to injury). The sourdough bread was over-toasted, to the point I actually scraped the roof of my mouth on it. The crab was of average quality – the taste was quite bland. And while the crispy bits of bacon were much nicer than the bacon I had encountered in the appetizer, they weren’t good enough to save the sandwich.
Washington, DC is a city full of top notch steakhouses that charge a lot less than BLT Steak for meals that are much better in quality and service (I haven’t even mentioned the horrible service we experienced at BLT Steak). I love the name of the restaurant, but it’s just not enough for me to return.