David Pitlyuk

For 2008, Washingtonian Magazine rated Citronelle the best restaurant in Washington DC. There are a lot of places to eat in a city as big as our capitol, so you can imagine what an honor it would be to get this rating. We had to go and see what all the hype was about, so a few of us headed into Georgetown for a night of French fine dining. One of the really cool things about Citronelle is that some of the food is made to look like one food, but made with another. I’ll get more into that when I go over what we go to show you what I mean.

We were originally going to get the promenade gourmande, which is a preset menu. We decided against it because if you do promenade gourmande, everybody on the table has to do it…and we wanted to have more of a selection. Here’s a selection of some of the stuff that we got throughout the night:

We all started off with a pre-appetizer (amuse bouche) to get the pallet ready. From left to right we have quayle egg, salmon, and a chicken lollipop:

For my appetizer I had the lobster “begula” pasta. This is one of the foods that are meant to look like something else. It’s mean to look like caviar, but in reality it’s actually pasta balls covered with ink squid, with lobster underneath. This was to die for.

Stephanie got the escargot, which had a great presentation:

Andrew’s appetizer was another one of those look-a-like foods. He had the “egg symphony”, which was four different plates meant to look like a variety of eggs, but were something else. For example on the bottom left it was actually slices of mozzerela with cheddar on top of it:

For my entree I had the lamb:

CD and Marcel had the chateaubriand, the presentation was absolutely amazing:

For dessert I had the chocolate soufflet:

Andrew had the breakfast sampler dessert…another look-a-like food:

Rather than explain everything, here’s a little video explaining:

Here’s a shot of all of us afterwards, I’m the guy in the font between the two girls:

Citronelle isn’t for the faint of hard. Dinner for the 6 of us including 2 bottles of wine and a bottle of champagne was about $1,600. It was quite an experience in fine french cuisine. There was an obvious amount of effort spent in the presentation, and it showed. If you are looking for a very nice dinner, you can’t go wrong with Citronelle.

Citronelle
3000 M St. NW
Washington, DC
Georgetown
T: (202)625-2150
Wheelchair Accessible: Yes
Kid Friendly: No
Cuisines: French, Modern
Price Range: Very Expensive