It’s hard to criticize earnest, independently-owned restaurants, but given the time and investment it takes to open and run an eatery, it makes me both sad and mad when they don’t get it right.
The Two Pears Café in Kensington and Plaza del Sol in Bethesda are two new restaurants that have gotten off to a disappointing start.
The Two Pears Cafe, which I wrote about in the September 15 blog, replaced Café 1894 at 10417 Armory Avenue.
Marisol Vasquez and Karen Brotherton-Julien, two friends and local residents, took over the charming space, replaced the artwork and painted the walls a brushed gold.
The lunch menu is short and simple, with soups, salads and sandwiches, and that’s just fine. But that’s all the more reason to make each selection shine.
The pear and spinach salad, listed as a “signature” dish, should be a knock-out, but for $9.50, it was a measly portion of spinach, with some thinly sliced pears and a sprinkling of cranberries, goat cheese, walnuts and sliced red onions.
A nice combination, but it looked and tasted like an inconsequential side salad, not the substantial main course promised by the waitress. And the $9 turkey club was layered with below-average turkey roll, making for a pretty hum-drum sandwich.
At Plaza del Sol, a Tex-Mex and Latin American eatery at 4932 St. Elmo Avenue, the menu is far more extensive and ambitious, but the two dishes I tried were pretty forgettable.
The Masitas de Puerco, Cuban-style morsels of pork, was as dry as a sunny Caribbean day, and the faintly orange criollo sauce did little to refresh the dish.
The Marisco Saltado was somewhat better, with decent-quality shrimp and scallops mixed together with tomatoes, onions, peppers and French fries. But it added up to a dull conglomeration, and the Peruvian sauce it sat in had no distinctive flavor or kick.
The cheesecake chimichanga, looking like a Mexican cannoli, was a rolled and fried tortilla stuffed with what tasted like ready-to-eat cheesecake filling, sitting atop what tasted like canned pie filling. Clever idea, processed-tasting execution.
Jesus Reyes, a former executive chef at the longstanding Lauriol Plaza in Adams Morgan, is at the helm here, so the so-so cooking came as a bit of a surprise. Perhaps Reyes and the staff at The Two Pears Café are just working out the early kitchen kinks. I hope so.
