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1819 Columbia Rd. NW
(202) 797-1819
Hours of Operation and Prices
Dinner: T 5:30-10, W-Sat 5:30-11, Sun 5:30-10; Entrees: $11-$17
Brunch: Sun 11:30-2:30; Entrees: $6-$9
Closed: Mon.
Other Information
• MasterCard, Visa
• Dress: casual
• Reservations recommended
• Handicapped accessible
• Valet parking (fee)
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Cashion's serves a worldly array of dishes with an endearing hint of home cooking. It's small, flowing from indoors to out on balmy days, with a long, curved bar and walls full of sepia-toned old family photos. Everybody's friendly: the waiters, the busboys, the other diners. It's a casual, laid-back kind of restaurant, in the best sense - with efficient, professional service that means the diners, not the staff, can be relaxed.
The menu pays homage to vegetables; you'll never find spinach more perfectly cooked, or beets more freshly delicious. Fried green tomatoes are featured in the summer, and the season's fruits show up in tarts and gratins at dessert. I'd go back to Cashion's if only for the crisp, buttery, golden-brown disk of potatoes Anna, an à la carte side dish that's invariably the star of the meal. As for meat and fish, Cashion's seeks out king salmon and buffalo hangar steaks, pearly halibut to pan roast and rabbit to fricassee. Lamb might be spit roasted or the shank braised. And birds - guinea hen, quail or duck - are regulars.
As in most restaurants, appetizers are more exciting than entrees, even an appetizer as simple as sauteed sweetbreads with spinach. Curried mussels are the plumpest, juiciest of bivalves, in a light yellow, fragrant cream with more of that spinach. And spinach shows up, lightened with ricotta, in homey little ravioli. Alsatian onion tart appears among the appetizers from time to time, as do crab cakes, garlic shrimp and gumbo. Desserts are homey, often with seasonal fruits, and they can be spectacular.
The cooking is straightforward; when food is this carefully cooked and well seasoned, it needs no sauce. There's terrific,chewy, crusty bread for mopping up the juices, and the wine list shows an excellent eye at work. All this unfussy sophistication comes at prices substantially below those of the restaurants that are Cashion's peers.
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