Daily dispatches on the Washington, DC area's food, restaurant and dining scene.

How to Make Oyamel's Salt Air-Topped Margaritas

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By Cynthia Hacinli

The best part of the signature margarita at Oyamel, the Mexican small plates restaurant which just reopened in Penn Quarter, is the "salt air" foam that takes the place of a salt-crusted rim. Here's how to do it at home.

Photograph by M.K. Tye.

Salt or no salt? It's always a conundrum. Best to settle on a half-rim so that every gulp of margarita doesn't come with a mouthful of the stuff. Salt does great things to tequila and lime, but in small doses. Too often that gritty too- salty sensation smacks of overkill. Clearly the bartenders at the relocated-from-Crystal City Oyamel (401 7th St., NW, 202-628-1005) have thought about this. Because when you order a margarita at the always-crammed bar of this Jose Andres Mexican, no one asks about salt. They've got it covered. With foam. The Oyamel margarita comes with a cloud of lightly salted foam on top. No grit. No overkill. Just a perfect balance of the sweet, tart, and salty. The secret? Egg whites? A cappuccino foamer? I asked the bartender and found out it was simpler than all that.

Comments

My wife and I visited two so-called top restaurants last week...Bebo Tratoria and Charlie Palmer's Steak. We were VERY disappointed in both. We went to Bebo for lunch. It started off great with great bread and then went down hill from there. They had a very limited wine list and I ordered a glass of Pinot Grigio. Very ordinary. Maybe they have a different more extensive list at dinner. I ordered farfalle with salmon and brocolini. The pasta was al musho rather than al dente. The salmon was not the best part with gray meat and the sauce was very watery. My wife had a grilled whole trout fillet with a lemon herbed butter sauce that was OK. We had panna cotta with a berry coulis for dessert that was good. However, they could not provide any cappucino or espresso because their machine was still inoperable from December! In addition, they had no sambuca and offered pernod as a substitute! What kind of italian joint is that?
We went to Charlie Palmer's for a wine tasting dinner created and prepared by Brian Voltaggio personally. Again, we were disappointed. Ho hum food prepared fairly ordinary. We had Wagu beef as one of the courses and mine was cold and everyone remarked that it was tough. Strange! Some of the courses like the dessert were good (pear served 3 ways). The Hors d'oeuvres were supposed to be 3 different ones, but they only managed to serve one and part of another (not all got some of the second). The dessert wine, a late harvest gewuerztraminer, was served in a champagne flute. When I asked Nadine Browen, the sommelier, why, she replied that they didn't have enough of the right glasses to serve it in. Very tacky for two so-called top rated restaurant. Restaurants of this cost get one chance with me and then I don't waste my money on them ever again. We won't be returning.

Posted by: Roland Young |

We tried Bebo's for dinner on May 4th. All of the food we had was very good. None of it was excellent, but it was all of good quality and quantity. The pasta was good, but the pancetta was definitely only a flavoring agent. No meat present.

The service, on the other hand was very bad. Two requests for bread - with a long wait inbetween; no salt & pepper, skunky draft beer; cancelled my soup order when the entrees appeared about 40 minutes after we odered; no refills on water in 2 hours; no refills on bar drinks; no one checked on the quality of our meals; we passed on dessert after a long wait for the desert menu. Ironically, our mostly absent waiter suggested that we pass on after dinner coffee because the "bus boys are having a bad night."

With more than six months under their belts, Bebo's can no longer pass this off as just being new. If the chef can't find someone who knows how to run the dining area, he's destined to suffer.

Posted by: Jim Bowlin | May 05, 2007 09:17:45 AM

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