- Food Quality
- Price
Ardeo Bardeo
3311 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington, DC 20008
202.244.6750
Hours:
Monday – Thursday 5pm – 10:30pm
Friday – Saturday 5pm – 11:30pm
Sunday 5pm – 10pm
At Ardeo Bardeo in Cleveland Park, the underlying current, running through every last morsel, is the idea of proper execution. Every detail, every nuisance is part of an audacious effort to lure the customer into the culinary mind of Executive Chef Nate Garyantes.
To understand the food, you must understand the man. Hesitant at first to become a chef – his family owned a restaurant – Garyantes joined the Army for three years, earning an Expert Infantry Badge in the process. After getting his start in Hawaii, Garyantes soon became an executive sous chef at Jose Andres’ Café Atlántico and Minibar. Before becoming the executive chef at Ardeo + Bardeo, he worked under Chef Tony Conte at the Oval Room.
The combination of obvious skill with an expectation of perfection spills out of Garyantes into his food, creating refined sensory relationships.
My four-course meal started with the crispy brussel sprouts with pistachios, apricots, and yogurt. I found it surprising how well calculated this simple dish was. Every aspect, from the sweet apricots to the creamy yogurt, worked together. The earthy tone of the brussel sprouts was transformed by the low-end smokiness of the pistachios, while the apricots cleansed the pallet.
Staying with vegetables, my next course was the Spinach salad with crisp gnocchi, braised fennel, and white truffle vinaigrette. I loved this dish and would say with utmost confidence that it was the best spinach salad I’ve ever had. The deal breaker was by and large the crisp gnocchi. Warm and chewy, the gnocchi added a hefty dimension to the otherwise light salad. The white truffle vinaigrette also added a touch of oiliness that helped cut through the starchy gnocchi.
The next dish, Day Boat Scallops with butternut puree, spaghetti squash, bacon, lobster emulsion, was a bit of a surprise. After eating at numerous seafood spots around D.C., I’ve come to despise chefs who get in the way of their ingredients. On more than one occasion, I’ve had scallops that were covered in frivolous spices and sauces that absolutely killed the natural sweetness of the scallop. At Ardeo + Bardeo, Chef Garyantes has avoided this incomprehensible sin, focusing instead on accentuating the scallop. The addition of sweet butternut puree with squash and bacon, topped with lobster emulsion, created a dish that retained the natural unrefined sweetness of the scallops while adding interesting layers of varied, but similar, flavors.
The last dish was dessert. A simple Apple cobbler with rum-raisin ice cream was definitely not need but enjoyed nonetheless. The crispy upper layer of cobbler soon divulged into a creamy free-for-all. Sweet and warm, the cobbler was simply decadent.
Though I ordered every item myself, the meal felt orchestrated by someone much more aware than me. Every dish flowed seamlessly into each other, while every ingredient carried its weight. The attention to execution was on another level, pulling me into an experience tailored carefully by Chef Garyantes.
–Amendment202
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