Restaurant Eve's Lickity Split lunch menu
By Justin Rude
Friday, May 27, 2011

These days, it's not unusual to find relatively affordable fixed-price lunch menus at some of the area's best restaurants. Ris, Palena, 701, Vidalia and the recently opened Fiola are just a few of the kitchens offering prix-fixe midday meals. In 2004, chef-owner Cathal Armstrong of Restaurant Eve in Alexandria was among the first big names to debut such a deal, and although the field has gotten more crowded, the Lickity Split lunch offered in Eve's lounge space is still among the best.

On the menu: The deal itself is simple: $14.98 gets you a choice of two items from the Lickity Split list. Making the selection is far less straightforward. The menu isn't as simple as starters and entrees: It includes cocktails by house mixologist Todd Thrasher, whimsical desserts and what normally would be considered side dishes. So while one person's lunch might be a gin and house-made tonic alongside a light seasonal salad, another's take might include a rich asparagus soup and wild boar sausage sandwich with pickled spring onions.

Just as with the selections at Restaurant Eve's tasting room and bistro, Armstrong and his chefs change the Lickity Split menu frequently. Sandwiches, soups and salads rotate a couple of times a week, while other items, such as a superlative papri chaat (crispy wafers of fried dough topped with chickpeas, tamarind chutney and yogurt), stick around a while. The menu offers takes on familiar favorites, such as gnoccci, along with dishes that let diners stretch their palates; think antelope scrapple. The common thread is care: These certainly don't look or taste like dishes conceived for a $15 menu.

The scene: Show up early at the chic but comfortable bar and lounge space. This is a lunch service that tends to fill up. As the hostess tells me one afternoon, "We see some of these people practically every day."

Something sweet: One item that has remained on the menu since the beginning of the special is also one of the restaurant's most lighthearted dishes: an individual-size pink birthday cake.

Bottom line: This really is a remarkable deal. Dollar for dollar, it's among the very best dining values in the Washington area.

2010 Spring Dining Guide

By Tom Sietsema
Sunday, May 23, 2010

Can't score a reservation in the exclusive Tasting Room at Restaurant Eve in Alexandria? Book a table at its closest rival, the neighboring Bistro, instead. There, beneath a ceiling-size skylight, you'll find the same suave service and pedigreed ingredients as in the starrier space, but for less money. Dinner in the Bistro doesn't open with a flight of treats from the kitchen, as it does in the Tasting Room, but the warm, house-baked ciabatta and sweet Irish butter make for nice welcomes. So does a cocktail shaken or stirred by the establishment's creative sommelier, Todd Thrasher; vodka, grapefruit juice, bay leaves, sauvignon blanc and bitters light up one of several sublime sensations, the aptly coined Pleasantly Bitter Beginning. From my perch near a window, I can watch the cooks flit from kitchen to garden for fresh herbs and rhubarb. The servers, more polished than ever, charmingly describe the soft-shell crabs as procured "from just an hour away," the beef for the tartare as coming from "happy cows." Sound too precious? The proof is on chef Cathal Armstrong's plates: His minced raw beef, jolted with serrano chilies, is possibly the best I've had, and it comes with terrific rye bread, baked right there, for scooping it up. In another appetizer, seared squares of albacore tuna recline against one another like dominos on a neat row of sauteed baby kale. The garlicky greens and a frothed vinaigrette (made with smoked ham hocks) are perfect foils for the rich fish. Slightly more traditional than its sibling, the Bistro is nevertheless also the place to find sublime sweetbreads, (vegetarian) papri chaat as good as in any Indian restaurant, and a seafood stew made glorious with fish, mussels and prawns that taste as if each component had been cooked separately and carefully before being assembled in a bowl with lashings of aioli. The setting, with its yellow walls and paintings of green apples and purple eggplants, proves warmly luxurious. And the minor points make major statements: Purses are hung not on chairs but from handsome hooks attached to the edges of the tables. The Bistro's petite pink Birthday Cake . . . Just Because is a treat no matter what occasion brings you here, but it has competition now: a dreamy spin on a Butterfinger fashioned from dark chocolate and peanut butter mousse. Haute, haute, haute.