Brunch in the city.

I recently visited an exhibit at the American History Museum called Food: Transforming the American Table.  It was amazing and if you are in the DC area or planning a trip to DC you should add it to your agenda.  The American History Museum is one of my favorite free things to do in DC anyway, so I was double excited for this visit.

The featured display at the Food exhibit is Julia Child's kitchen.  She donated her entire kitchen to the Smithsonian and it has been set up, exactly as it was when she cooked in it.  There is also a lot of Americana to see: old microwaves, the evolution of wine making, historical food pyramids.  I spent about 2 hours in the exhibit and still didn't read everything.  I'm going to try to go back on a week day when the crowds will be smaller and get to everything that I didn't see the first time around.

After leaving the exhibit my friends and I headed over to The Hamilton for brunch.  I had never been there before, but I was familiar with the building because it is kind of a big deal.  It's massive, with multiple floors, and features a restaurant, bar, and a performance venue downstairs where there is often live music.  It's just off the metro and pretty centrally located, so if you are planning a visit to the city this might be a good stop.

A classic brunch conundrum for me is always, coffee or booze?  It's hard to get my day started without coffee, but what's brunch without alcohol?  Enter, the Irish Coffee.  An Irish Coffee is a pretty simple drink.  It's made with coffee, Irish whiskey, and sugar.  Some fancy bars will use brown sugar.  You can also order your with Splenda if you don't want the sugar.  The amount of sugar in an Irish coffee is usually pretty small, less than a teaspoon, so I decided to go ahead and get mine with regular sugar, and over ice.

Holy Irish coffee.  This is literally the best alcoholic coffee drink I have ever had in my life.  I had to restrain myself from just chugging the whole thing because it was that good.  As i'm writing this I'm thinking about trekking into DC right now for another one.  

For the meal I ordered a pork belly and egg dish that was also delicious.  The meat was so tender that I was able to break it up with a fork and eat it.  There were two eggs, some kale, and a generous portion of navy beans.  I tried to go easy on the beans (too many carbs), but I gobbled up the pork and the eggs.  The waiter told me that they cook the meat for something crazy, like 12 hours, to get it to fall apart like that. 

After brunch I hopped on the train to head back to the burbs, sleepy and satisfied.  This was a very successful museum and boozy brunch outing.  I'll keep you posted on what we get into next month.