Since Celeste was born, I think Evelin and I have managed to get out by ourselves maybe five or six times, usually when one or more of the grand'rents are around (or we're around them). Saturday, however, one of Evelin's friends said thank you for some help with her résumé by watching the girls.
We set it up so both of the girls would be in bed by the time we were to leave, and for the most part it worked. Celeste took her first nap in a week, but still went down a bit past 7:00 p.m. and konked out minutes before we were due to leave. Quinn woke up for some additional nursing as we were getting ready, but we still made it out about the time we'd hoped to.
We figured we had three or so hours before Quinn might wake again, so we weren't planning to run far away, but we did want to try something different. It was Restaurant Week, and we thought about looking for somewhere interesting, but I also checked Upromise to see if we could get a kick-in to the girls' college funds. Looking over the options, I'd suggested Tapatinis to Evelin and she was willing to give it a try.
I hope I wouldn't pick some place to eat just because of a promised 8% contribution to a 529 plan, but that was one of Tapatinis's selling points. Plus it is in Barracks Row, which outside of the usual parts of the region we frequent and it's supposed to be interesting and up-and-coming — <irony>all important to maintaining any shred of indie-hipster cred I might still have.</irony>
It was a little past 8:00 p.m. when we got to Southeast and ended up parking under I-395, near the Navy Yard, with no problems. Despite it being early, I thought it'd be more crowded, maybe not Adams Morgan crowded, but more than it was. Despite not having reservations, we were able to get a table at Tapatinis right away; the place was busy, but not packed ... although it might have been getting fuller as the night went on. It was a bit loud — a mix of old and new disco — but not so much so that we couldn't talk.
As the name implies, Tapatinis is tapas (albeit not really of the traditional sort) and martinis (traditional and otherwise). I had a "classic gin" martini and it was decent; Evelin had a margarita martini, which we're pretty sure was just a margarita mixed/chilled in a cocktail shaker and stirred up. The food was nice, for the most part. The hummos on the sampler platter was a little off (something the women at the table next to us commented on too — they were watching our expressions as we tried it), but the baba ganoush was good as was the pita. I liked the bruschetta caprese and Evelin enjoyed her peppered beef and asparagus. The olives in both my martini and the dishes, were basic canned olives — that was probably the most disappointing thing for me.
After dinner we walked up 8th Street toward Eastern Market and ended up getting coffee and doughnuts at Dunkin' Donuts* before heading home to find that Quinn had woken up about 10 minutes earlier. She was quietly (and sleepily) trying to figure out who this person was who was holding her when we walked in the door.
*Evelin noted a while ago that the music for the "America Runs on Dunkin'" campaign sounded like They Might Be Giants and we finally googled it to find that, yep, she was right. "Lefty Loosey" [Google Video] is a really fun little tune.
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