Jaleo

Finally had a chance to try this place out. I enjoyed the selection of cheeses and a number of the dishes. The food was pretty well prepared and tasty. I tried several of the hot tapas, a chicken dish and a beef dish. The service was less then stellar. I did get steered away from the full sized dishes to the Tapas as beeing better tasting which was good. Getting more bread or beverages was a real challenge and really I never felt like any one cared wether we had a good experience or not. I’m not fond of the table layout but I’ve seen worse. Overall not a bad meal though it is certainly not cheap.

[Feb, 2004] OK, I’m getting mighty fed up with the Bethesda location. Steve and I got a free meal there a few days ago. How? Well, they messed up our order so badly that the manager offered to pay for the whole thing (we didn’t ask for that). The waiter/servers/kitchen lost our order not only once, but twice, and in the case of two dishes, three times. There is a serious flaw in the way the place is run. I’m on the verge of declaring the Bethesda location disqualified. Although the food quality remains excellent, the service and ambience are sorely lacking.

[review dated 1/5/2004 follows] Maybe a 7 for the Bethesda location. Every time I eat there I’m less impressed with the overall experience. Although the food quality is very good and consistent, the seating policy and noise level aggravate me too much. This is not a children’s restaurant; Bethesda parents please take note. Please.

[Original review dated 1/12/03 follows]

Jaleo isn’t perfect. It’s hard to get a table (they don’t accept reservations after 6:30). They won’t seat incomplete parties. It’s noisy. The service is slow, and waiters are sometimes forgetful. The dishes arrive whenever they’re ready, which means you might get your lamb chop before your apple and Manchego salad. But since this is primarily a tapas restaurant, that’s not a big deal.

So, you wonder, why do I rate it a 9? Well, I’ve eaten at both locations since each was opened, and the first opened in 1994 or 1995, I think. I’ve probably eaten there well more than 30 times, and not once have I been served a dish that wasn’t outstanding. That’s a pretty darn good record.

The menu is divided into several parts: cold, hot, and seasonal tapas, and a few main course-sized dishes. Outstanding dishes include the spinach, quickly cooked in oil with a small amount of apple, raisins, and pine nuts; endive sprinkled with almonds, oranges, goat cheese, and olive oil; roasted potatoes served with romesco sauce and garlic mayonnaise; and skewers of miniature chorizo sausage, grilled and served on garlic mashed potatoes.

Don’t neglect to order booze. They have a nice selection of sherries, an unusual white sangria, an outstanding red sangria, and my all-time favorite cocktail in the whole wide world, the caipirinha, which is an entire lime cut up and muddled with a good amount of sugar, then shaken with a shot of cachaca, which is a fiery Brazilian liquor distilled from sugar cane. (Imagine a cross between rum and tequilla.) So what if it’s really Portugese and not Spanish. It rocks. It’ll get you toasted really fast.

One culinary quibble: their treatment of gambas al ajillo, “the classic Spanish tapa, found in every region of Spain”*. No dish better typifies the glory of simple food. It’s nothing more than shrimp quickly sauteed in oil, with garlic and hot peppers. But once a year or so, the chef at Jaleo decides to prepare it with onions and tomatoes and God knows what else, as well, and as a result the flavors are muddied instead of being thrown into high relief. Then, without notice, they go back to preparing it the old way (they’re in that phase now). So if you want to try gambas al ajillo, ask how it’s being prepared, and don’t be afraid to tell them you want it the old way, with just shrimp, garlic, and pepper in oil. This is worth having on your table just to dip bread into the oil, which becomes hot and sharp and briny. Yum. God I’m hungry. And I could use a drink.

PS The sorbet specials are usually worth getting, especially the passion fruit. Madeleine from Melbourne was right.

*Penelope Casas, “Tapas: the Little Dishes of Spain”

Bethesda Jaleo is officially and irrevocably a bloody disaster. They can’t even make a decent caipirinha anymore- and if I can’t get drunk and thus ignore the service, then a bad review is bound to follow.

Some notably bad standouts from my last meal there [and I do mean last]:

They now charge for additional olives. I wonder if they now also charge for extra bread, or soda refills? When a restaurant in this bracket starts doing this penny-ante nonsense, it’s not good.

A tuna dish arrived, late... cooked past all redemption. And I could smell it before they even set it down. I’m sorry, it wasn’t monday, and if you still haven’t used last week’s fish by monday, then throw that shit out. Or donate it monday night. I know there’s a program in DC whereby restaurants donate food.

They even managed to ruin my spinach with raisins and pinenuts, which should be a fail-safe dish. The pinenuts were blackened, and so the entire dish smelled and tasted like so much burned popcorn.

Jose, you did it. You broke me of my Jaleo habit. You’re a victim of your own success, and your restaurants are going to seed. Now, stop drinking, and FIX it.

[original review, 2002-11-29] Trendy, tasty, spendy tapas. You can not spend $40 a person, but it is difficult to limit oneself. Dessert, especially, tends to rack up. DC gets the theatre crowd, which isn’t a bad thing.

I like to think of myself as someone who goes out for good food, not for pampering. Sure, I will argue, the restaurant may be a shack, in a terrible location, with no service — but when your food comes out, you forgive them.

Usually I am fairly confident in this attitude; but Jaleo is a real test of it. Two locations, both in “upscale” neighborhoods with no character; both with neglectful service; both with a refusal to seat incomplete parties or take reservations; both with prices high enough to make you think twice about putting up with such a diva of a restaurant. And both with solid, well-conceived, sometimes excellent tapas.

Frankly, Jaleo is annoying. But there is no denying the kitchen’s skill. If it were a quiet mom-and-pop operation on Columbia Pike, I’d consider it a gem. Packed with Bethesda yuppies and screaming children and the flamenco dancers, it requires a lot of suspension of disbelief and maybe more than one $7 drink. But when the food arrives, I do forgive them... usually.