Food-Hopping in AdMo

My cousin Stephen and I did some nasty work last week. We decided, as people do, to go food hopping. Not bar hopping, food hopping. Just as disgraceful but much more delicious and economical. Plus, you don’t feel as shitty the next morning. Actually that’s not true. You feel much, much worse. I’m convinced that two Insomnia cookies will fuck you up as much as eight beers. But more on that later. 

We ate so much that it was socially unacceptable. It’s pretty despicable to be honest. I genuinely think we should be in jail, or at the very least have to complete some sort of rehabilitation program in order to be welcomed back into polite society. 

We started the night in Adams Morgan, a hip neighborhood somewhere in DC. It’s like the part of DC for people who wish they lived in Brooklyn. You know, people who are too ambitious for Portland or Burlington but need to distinguish themselves from the Patagonia-wearing part of the city. I think that’s Navy Yard, by the way.  

As for AdMo (I can call it that because I’ve lived here three weeks now), the Main Street slicing through it should for sure be closed off to cars. That’s the only thing I can think about whenever I go there. Pragmatically, there’s so much traffic that it’s literally faster to crawl than drive down it. But more importantly the street would be immeasurably more charming if people were free to walk it without being splattered. 

Noisy and dangerous motor vehicles obliterate beauty and elegance. There’s no reason cars need to ruin what could be the loveliest street in the city, bustling with people rather than pollutants and heavy-machinery. What a waste. 

We decided to start at Taqueria Al Lado. I’ve known about this place for weeks, before I even moved here. I’m not joking. I researched taquerias before I ever gave a thought to my living conditions. I could sleep on the sidewalk for all I care, but I’m not moving to a city without good tacos. Plus, everyone at work confirmed what I suspected already: Taqueria Al Lado is insane. I knew I had to go. 

Here are some green flags I noticed that you, too, can use to gauge whether a restaurant might be good. 

First, the menu is small.

Too many restaurants want to offer some of everything and cater to everyone. I can’t tell you how depressing those identity-less establishments are that have, like, a quesadilla on the same menu as chicken parm on the same menu as fish-n-chips. You know which ones I’m talking about. The kind of restaurants in, like, rural country-clubs for white people with no taste, who think a medium-well steak, mashed potatoes and asparagus is culinary genius.

These restaurants can also be found in halfway decent hotels for shitty businesspeople, like a La Quinta. Either way, avoid them like the plague. 

Seriously though, menus shouldn’t exceed one page. A roving menu doesn’t flex any sort of culinary talent or range. It just evinces a lack of discipline, focus, and philosophy. 

This is as much the fault of customers as it is of owners. Oh, you can’t eat stone-ground masa because you have a corn sensitivity? Cool. Don’t fucking come then. And don’t expect the restaurant to stock soybean tortillas from Erewhon just so you can eventually gentrify them out of existence. 

The second thing I lookout for is aesthetic. If I’m going to a taqueria, I don’t want to see modern, polished surfaces or those fancy white computers where you tap your credit-card as if this were a Sweetgreen. And I definitely don’t want all the chairs to be identical. You can tell how good a restaurant is by its tables and chairs.

A good hole-in-the-wall place will have an eclectic, almost cartoonish assortment of chairs that don’t come close to matching their corresponding table. They should all be different shapes and colors, and you should be sitting at an awkward height. It should be uncomfortable. 

The exterior should match the interior. The building will ideally look run-down and dilapidated. You should question whether it’s even safe to walk inside, lest the entire foundation collapses upon you.

Oh, I also don’t want to hear any English. Not one word. At least not from the servers and cooks. You should have to point and gesture wildly in order to communicate with the waitress. And you should be totally unsure whether you actually ordered what you wanted. That’s part of the fun. 

Before we could eat at Lado, I made the executive decision to smoke a joint. I mean, this is pretty uncontroversial stuff. If you’re going to a taqueria, you get baked beforehand. That’s just standard procedure. 

Once we got inside I was so high I forgot where we were or what we were doing. I was just standing around, scanning the room like an insane person. Finally someone led us to a countertop with stools, which I had trouble with.

You ever been too high to sit down? I had to fuss with the stool for like five minutes, straddling it and gyrating my hips just to get comfortable. I felt like a 98 year old man trying to ride a bull. 

We ordered chips and guac and a frozen margarita to start. I was too high to really taste anything, but I still knew that I was experiencing something transcendent. The chips were warm, and you can watch them being fried fresh in a giant vat in the back. You know the guac was crazy because it came with thinly sliced radish. 

Of course we ordered tacos. We got beef-tongue, carnitas, and quesabirria. The lengua was the tenderest meat I ever felt in my life. It actually dissolved onto my tongue like a snowflake. And the quesabirria, I mean, what’s there to say? I drank the consomme it came with like a wild dog. I think they should use it to baptize babies. I want someone to waterboard me with it.

Also, I’m the only white person allowed to order quesabirria without it being a tired, culturally bastardizing Tik-Tok trend. 

After consuming what normal people would consider a full meal, we prowled for more. That’s not a mark against Lado, where the portions are perfectly generous, I’m just letting you know how insane me and Stephen are. 

There’s so much food on the main Adams Morgan strip alone that it’s disorienting. Everywhere you look there’s empanadas, jumbo pizza slices, falafel, baked goods. When I smelled Julia’s Empanadas, I floated through the air like a cartoon character. And Stephen had to physically restrain me from getting a jumbo slice, which would have ended my night on the spot and probably killed me.

(I once scoffed at the notion that a slice of pizza could be big enough to fill me up. But the DC jumbo slices are seriously obese. Don’t attempt while sober.) 

Stephen had the intelligence to go for a brief walk down to Dupont. That way we could digest what just occurred and accept what was to come.

The journey from AdMo to Dupont felt like what I imagine Lewis and Clark experienced trekking westward across the country. Except I was Lewis and Clark and Stephen was Sacagawea--you know, without the whole kidnapping part. He used Apple Maps to guide us toward new frontiers of food while I trudged uselessly behind.

After what felt like an eternity, but was probably 12 minutes, we came upon Thai Chef Street Food. The place was packed, so we knew it was fire. We waited about an hour to be seated. We waited so long that all we could do was wait longer, even if doing so became increasingly irrational. It’s like when you wait 40 minutes for a bus to arrive, and you know you could have walked there by now, but dammit you already waited this long so now you have to see it through and wait forever. 

We were very, very glad we waited. 

We started with shrimp and pork dumplings and Thai-style fried chicken wings. The dumplings were incredible, and the wings were so good they altered the course of my life. I’m not the same man I was when I first walked in there. I don’t recognize him anymore. 

They were the crunchiest wings I ever had in my life. They were the crunchiest wings that I imagine are scientifically possible. I can’t even fathom a crispier piece of chicken. It’s impossible. And I’ve had some crispy chicken. During the pandemic, my brother Eric and I became fried chicken scientists. Don’t ask. 

What’s crazy is that the wings shattered like glass even after sitting for some time in the sweet-chile wing sauce, which must have disintegrated some of the crunch. 

For our entrees we both got Pad Thai. Make fun of us for being white all you want. I’ve had my fair share of Pad Si Yu, panang, and massaman curry. But I’d never had good, authentic Pad Thai. This was my chance, and I took it. 

It was so good it pissed me off. I felt like I walked out of Plato’s Cave, only to find everything I thought I knew was false. How had I not had this before? How had I not known? Was all the Pad Thai I’d had up until now a lie? 

The morning after, I paced around my room, hands in my hair like a madman, trying to remember the taste in my mind. It had that distinct wok-hei flavor that can only be transmitted through a scalding hot wok. And the portion was mountainous. 

The only critique I can level against the restaurant is they use QR codes instead of menus. I can’t articulate how much I hate that. No sane person wants to go to a restaurant, especially with friends, and immediately have to stare at their phone. Dining is supposed to be a social, in-the-moment experience. QR codes alienate us from that. 

Menus are also one of the fading few physical interactions left in a world rapidly dominated by digital. Books turned to Kindles. Letters turned to texts. Cash turned to Apple Pay. Sex turned to sext. Can’t we at least keep menus? Every time I see a QR code, a righteous, John Brown-esque fury washes over me, and I want to take a baseball bat to those hideous techno-dystopian abominations. 

Anyway, I thought I’d be able to finish the Pad Thai. I had eaten so much already it became a matter of pride. I didn’t want Stephen to think less of me, not that he would, but also I didn’t want to disappoint myself. Through appalling cramps and pain I pushed on, stopping with embarrassment every so often to collect myself. But at a certain point the pain was so profound I had to stop, no longer ignominiously. 

When I waved the white flag I was so full I thought my life had come to an end. I felt like that scene in Saving Private Ryan where Tom Hanks gets dazed by a mortar shell while storming the beach. To this day I don’t know how I got up from our table. An angel must have carried me. Or an ambulance.

I remember walking along the sidewalk wishing I could slice my stomach open with a samurai sword and let my entrails spill out onto the pavement. That would feel really good right now, I thought. 

I wish I could tell you that’s when our night ended. I wish I could say we stopped eating like responsible people. But that’s not what happened. We had business to attend to. After all, we needed a little something sweet.

Thus we headed back toward AdMo for Insomnia Cookies. 

Insomnia Cookies is the greatest business idea ever conceived on American soil. Much better and more life-saving than, say, St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. It’s kinda fucked up that they charge upwards of $5 for a cookie, but to me cookies are an inelastic good. I’d pay $10,000 and live under a bridge for them if it came down to it. 

Insomnia Cookies also had the genius idea of selling oatmeal chocolate chip cookies--far and away the best cookie in existence.

Why, why, why are these not in every grocery store across America? Why the fuck would anyone want oatmeal raisin over chocolate chip? I am actually angry about this. Raisins are objectively worse than chocolate chips. Can you imagine how much better the world would be if oatmeal chocolate chip cookies were as accessible as oatmeal raisin? Who is asking for all these oatmeal raisin cookies anyway? Is Big Raisin behind all this?

As we’re walking back, I had to accept that we were about to eat more food. I had to accept that this might very well be the death of me, and I had to be brave in the face of that fact. It was, after all, a fact. There was no “if” about it. That we were getting Insomnia Cookies was a fact of nature no different from the recognition that the sky is blue or the earth round. 

Alas, I thought I had more time. I hardly regained consciousness when we were already standing in front of Insomnia Cookies. My heart halted. I panicked. I couldn’t do it, I said. Not yet. I needed more time. 

I decided to smoke more weed. Surely that would revitalize my appetite and buy me some time to digest. Somehow, I hadn’t considered the possibility that, given the state of my stomach, if I were to inhale even a molecule of hot smoke, I would almost certainly puke my brains out. Looking back, it’s a miracle that didn’t happen. If it did, I would have laid on the cement and waited to die. 

Feeling reborn, we got our cookies--oatmeal chocolate chip, of course--and walked outside to see my bus blow by us. 

You haven’t felt despair until you’ve missed a late-night bus. I felt like I missed the last helicopter out of Vietnam, and had to wait another half hour for the next one. Which raises the question: why the fuck do buses come less often late into the night, especially on weekends? If anything, that’s when they should come more often!

Like many liberals, I’ve held the position that public transportation should be better funded for a long time as an essentially meaningless cliche. But that moment radicalized me. I now hold that belief as though it were marrow in my bones. I will not rest until there’s a bus stop on every square foot of the city, and you can catch one before aging into a skeleton.  

When I got home, I remembered the most repulsive part of all this is that we both ate dinner right before going out to the taqueria, since we didn’t know we were gonna link up. Looking back, though, I realize it’s that I’m eating my second cookie as I write this the morning after. God, I hate myself.