date night dinner & a show: all about hamilton
So this past weekend we got to see Hamilton at the Kennedy Center! If you happen to have been living under a rock and have no idea what I’m talking about, it’s a 2h 45min musical about Alexander Hamilton and the other founding fathers culminating in the duel where Aaron Burr killed Hamilton. It’s got insanely catchy music, fusing hip hop, R&B, pop, soul, and rap, and color-casts non-white actors with deliberation. It’s a crazy piece of history, both in the telling and the making, and it’s also just good old fun.
The Kennedy Center production we saw was amazing. If you are planning or have never listened to the soundtrack, I highly recommend it. I also suggest looking up the lyrics to follow at the same time as it is quick-paced and not knowing or seeing the characters can make it hard to follow the first time through. The lyrics are genius, the motifs provoking, and the characters so relatable. Amongst a good laugh and a good story, you’ll also find some truth bombs, like the feeling of the revolution as “young, scrappy, and hungry” rather than the inevitable outcome we live in, or how simply incredible and incredulous it was that George Washington was “yielding his power and stepping away”. The attention to detail is amazing, where Lin-Manuel Miranda uses exact lines from letters, and paints a colorful picture of humanity. Listen to it. Go see it if you have the chance. Worth every penny!
If you need a way to add some Hamilton to your weekend without the musical itself, check out The Hamilton DC restaurant. It was recommended to us by a friend who also made their Hamilton show a double feature with dinner and a show. Now, up front I will say I have some clash of feelings about our experience at the restaurant. I thoroughly enjoyed the food and the atmosphere, but the service started out wonderfully and then devolved to make me irate at the end. The actual meal service was great, but we had allowed 30 minutes to get from the restaurant to the Kennedy Center (<15 minutes away), and when it took them 20+ minutes to get and process our check, I was pretty livid about the service making us scramble for the show, and we didn’t get to our seats until it had just started. Luckily we didn’t miss too much but it put me in a sour mood for an evening I had so looked forward to.
But to focus on the food for a moment, the food was delicious. To start we went with the cornbread grilled cheese. The cornbread was delicious and buttery and crumbly, though it could have used much more cheese or a much sharper cheese as it was pretty much overpowered by the cornbread. Also it surprised me the size of the two sandwiches that came with the appetizer–Tyler and I forced ourselves to leave some on the plate since we had ordered some more deliciousness for actual dinner, and if you cut each sandwich into four, you could easily serve 4-8 with a couple of bites each of the appetizer.
I had read some good things online about their sushi, so went with the Salmon Bento Box and because I couldn’t resist, also ordered a side of tempura onion rings. Again, everything was delicious, but the onion rings were much more of a heavy beer-battered than the light batter of tempura. They were delicious and had hearty rings of thick onion which I like, but were also on the greasy side. My actual salmon bento was average, I’d say. I enjoyed it, but it was by no means “some of the best sushi in DC” as the waiter informed me. My salmon bento included salmon three ways: spicy salmon roll, salmon over rice, and mildly seared salmon over a seaweed salad.
Tyler went for the Smoked Turkey sandwich: bacon, watercress, red onion, cheddar, blackberry-jalapeño jam, chipotle aioli on a toasted multigrain bread. He even opted for extra decadence with truffle fries! In retrospect we really didn’t need the fries after the onion rings, and it was made more excessive since we had ordered the appetizer as well. But never one to let things go to waste, I took them home of course, along with half the mile-high stacked sandwich tyler got! He liked it a lot and from my small taste it was a great sandwich. Hearty and stuffed full, which I always appreciate in a sandwich that I don’t make myself.
The atmosphere in the Hamilton is upscale without the pomp and circumstance. You can wear casual clothes or dress up a bit like we did for the show and not feel out of place. The food itself gets a 4/5 chips (read:stars), but due to ineptness in getting us and processing our bill I honestly don’t recommend going if you don’t have time to spare. It was likely a fluke and hopefully won’t happen again because I really would like to go back and try more of their food, but I will make sure to leave excess amounts of time to get to another event and also would tell and remind the waiter that we needed to leave by an exact time. Seeing Hamilton the musical has been on the bucket list for a while now, and the stress and unhurried air of processing our check will leave a bitter taste in my Hamilton-filled weekend experience.
Overall, I’ll go with 4/5 chips (read: stars) because I know I’ll be back. However if they fail to impress me with their attentiveness again, I would knock the rating down to a 3. The food is delicious, and the atmosphere is a nice blend of upscale and casual with personality like their sunglasses-wearing Hamilton logo. But I also haven’t often experienced such a 180-degree turn in service in a meal. Our waiter went from asking how we were and preempting my needs quite fantastically to disappearing and making us late for our show. Highly recommend laying out your timetable in advance and making sure you don’t lost track of time if you plan your reservation before an event.
The Hamilton (Restaurant)
The Hamilton Restaurant Website
600 14th Street, NW
Washington D.C. 20005
