Senate Dining Room: Where the elite meet

Next to the White House Mess or wherever Alan Greenspan takes his meals these days, it’s the most exclusive dining room in Washington.

Surrounded by instantly recognizable faces such as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) or Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), those lucky souls invited to breakfast or lunch in the Senate Dining Room can be assured of rubbing elbows with some of Washington’s top newsmakers, many of whom have been, are, or soon will be in the headlines or on the Sunday talk shows.

Take Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), for example. Last month, as I sat at a nearby table with a Senate staffer, McCain was having lunch with Deborah McGregor, a reporter for the Financial Times of London. McGregor, who was preparing a “Lunch with the FT” profile of McCain for the peach-colored newspaper’s weekend edition, reported that when she sought his advice on what to order, McCain replied, “It’s all awful.”

Fortunately for the reputation of Don Perez, executive chef of the Capitol, McCain wasn’t serious, as McGregor discovered after she ordered the grilled Atlantic salmon.

“Luckily, the food is not as bad as McCain would have it,” she wrote at the end of June, even though he chose “to apply liberal doses of salt and pepper” to his tuna sandwich on white toast. (For the record, McCain told McGregor that he’d still like to be president but that he “doesn’t envisage a scenario where it would be a possibility,” as he finishes another book, his version of Profiles in Courage, and prepares to run for a fourth Senate term next year.)

The bill for their lunch, by the way, illustrates why this is one of Washington’s better dining bargains. Their piscatorial entrees, with a bowl of chocolate ice cream for McCain and iced tea and sparkling water, came to $32.20 with tip (that’s 27.90 in euros), or about $16 per person, which is dirt cheap by local restaurant standards.

At two subsequent lunches, I found the prices, as well as the food, service and, above all, the power-drenched ambiance as appealing as they were when I last reviewed this restaurant, in June 1998 — when, incidentally, I spotted McCain huddled with former White House National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. Obviously, McCain is a regular; most senators eat here fairly often, or in the senators-only private dining room across the hall.

At the time, I wrote that the Senate Dining Room “is one of those places where you don’t notice, or really care, how good or bad the food is [because] what you eat is strictly secondary to whom you see or speak to in a restaurant literally filled with some of Washington’s top power brokers.”

That’s still true, and although the food is overshadowed by the clientele, it’s almost as good as you’ll find in many of Washington’s top restaurants, and considerably cheaper to boot.

Take, for instance, the lunch I shared with Jill Kozeny, communications director for Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), on June 26, which was a Thursday, when the restaurant features foods from different states. This was Iowa day, so I figured that Kozeny, a native Iowan, and I, who grew up on a farm in southern Minnesota only three miles from the Iowa border, were qualified to pass judgment on the food.

She ordered the chicken potpie ($14.95), but it was apparently a popular choice since it was sold out by 1:30, so she settled for the glazed bacon and scallop salad with shitake mushrooms, baby carrots and plum tomatoes ($14.95). I assume the bacon came from an Iowa hog, perhaps one of those her boss raises on his farm, although the scallops obviously weren’t from the Corn State. But she was very pleased with her meal and gave it high marks.

I ordered the grilled beef medallions ($16.95), served with shitake mushroom sauce atop a bed of creamy polenta. The beef was fork-tender and cooked to medium-rare perfection, and the mushroom sauce and polenta complemented it nicely. It was a dish that deserved a unanimous vote.