Who: Ankit, Nora, Dano
What: Pastry basket (comes with the deal), olives and cheese (from the bar), eggplant dip (for the table), Greek fritata, unlimited champagne
Where: 17th and K…Downtown

Like most non-New York, non-LA cities in the country, downtown DC can be a desolate place on the weekends. Habitated by sad lawyers in flip flops and polo shirts wasting their Saturdays ‘finishing that brief,’ the occasional lost tourist and lobby security staff headed home from their shift, downtown is a wasteland of closed chain coffee shops and metro stations that don’t even bother opening their gates. Once that last happy hour ends on Friday night, metropolitan DC falls into a quiet, nervous slumber until Monday morning rush hour when the sidewalks that are repacked with obnoxious people in black suits and Street Sense is being sold on every corner. Hell, even the homeless go somewhere else—it’s depressing down there.

Very occasionally there is a reason to go downtown on the weekends—you left something necessary at the office that you NEED to get (aka your only pair of black heels that don’t have a hole in the sole) before the weekend, or you have to do an annoying errand you couldn’t do during work hours, like get your glasses fixed or your tennis racket restrung. Never would I have imagined, as someone living at ground zero for restaurants, bars and eating establishments, that the reason to go down there would be to have brunch. And just not brunch, but at a place that I [gasp] had never even heard of…because it’s DOWNTOWN!

So why the hell did we go there? Two reasons: 1) unlimited champagne 2) Ankit had been there before—and had been struck by their very FRESH offerings. He really thought that stuff was FRESH, that he said it about 100 times. So FRESH that it was worth us all doing daily commute downtown on a Sunday, just to have some eggs. FRESH! And totally not surprisingly, the place was empty. When I say empty, I don’t just mean half full, but M-T. There was one table of what looked to be friends of the hostess, and another couple tables for two, that quickly got the F out of there soon after we arrived. Not that there’s anything wrong with eating in an empty restaurant, as long as the food is good—just makes you wonder: WHY do they keep that place open? Nothing else is open around it! How can they afford it? It must certainly more to run the electricity and pay the staff than our all-you-can-drink champagne brunch, right?

There are some benefits to being in an empty restaurant, however. One is that you can just serve yourself. Well, that may only work if your dining companion is a 6’2” Indian with no sense of shame.  In our case, it worked out great. Straight to the giant block of cheese and olive bowl meant for ‘sharing’ at the bar, which was now our personal buffet. And were our glasses anything less than full? No way! We had 97 people at our beck and call for the 2+ hours we sat in our P-Diddy booth in the back corner of the restaurant. Messed up order? No problem! Only wait .2 seconds for them to make you an entirely different meal and bring out any condiment you could ever imagine (and for the record, tzatziki on eggs [see right] sounds gross but is really good). Moral of the story: No idea how/why these guys are open on the weekends, but no point in not enjoying that FRESH deliciousness and a fancy glass of champagne, just because it’s next to a lobbying firm and 3 different Cosi’s.