Last night, we had dinner with our good friend Bruce, down from New York for the annual meeting of the American Society of International Law. We decided to go to one of the new restaurants in our neighborhood, BirdSong, a Thai restaurant which has received strong reviews. We had tried to get a reservation at BirdSong on a weekend several weeks ago and couldn’t, and I was looking forward to giving it a try. My reaction: disappointment.

The restaurant, on upper Connecticut Avenue in Chevy Chase, is in the spot formerly occupied by Blue 44, and has completely redone the space, taking a comfortable neighborhood restaurant and turning into a very generic restaurant space with no particular personality and certainly nothing to make it apparent that you are in a Thai restaurant. But that is irrelevant, in fact. Let’s get to more important things.

First, the good. The menu includes a number of specialty cocktails, a list that I almost always ignore. But for some reason last night, I gave them a close look, and I actually ordered one. The name (meaningless to me) was Krungthep Fruit Cart, a mixture of tequila, lychee, lemongrass, lime, and mezcal mist. In fact the ingredients were also meaningless to me, but the waiter told me that it tasted like a margarita, and that was enough for me. As a drink, it is smooth, half-way between sweet and not so sweet, and easily drinkable.

What is Krungthep anyway? It turns out it is Thai for City of Angels, and is a name often used to describe Bangkok. Who knew? In fact, the name of the various specialty cocktails are rather unique, and tell you nothing about the drink itself. For example (and only one example), what do you think a Ha-ha-ha is?

The second good thing to point out is that one of the restaurant’s appetizers, deep-fried chive cakes, are a perfect appetizer. Small, two-bite sized pancake like pieces, filled with fried chives (new to me) and a soy dip. Perfect start to a meal.

But then came the main dishes. I had a simple Thai fried rice with chicken, Bruce had a noodle dish with bok choy and chicken, and Edie had a vegaetarian red cabbage curry. The red cabbage curry was tasty and mild, but you had to want a bowlful of cabbage and little else. The fried rice and the noodle dish (called a ba mee) seemed okay. The fried rice was not too different from what you would get at a less expensive Thai restaurant, and perhaps not quite as tasty as you find in many (where basil is more prominent). But the chicken was not cooked with the fried rice, and it was not cooked with the noodle, bok choy combination. Identical chicken, in relatively large pieces, were just placed on top of the two dishes. It seems to me that this is a sign that the kitchen is placing ease of preparation over best preparation. I was disappointed. We probably will not return.

But it is only about a mile up the street, so very convenient. And that got me thinking about how many restaurants were less than a mile, or maybe a mile and a quarter from our house. The one block between Fessenden and Nebraska contains: a coffee shop, a Mexican restaurant, an American restaurant, an ice cream parlor, a pizza house, a French restaurant and an Italian restaurant. If you go towards town about three blocks to the next commercial block, you get a Thai restaurant, another pizza house, an Indian restaurant, a burger joint, and an Asian tea house. If you go north to the neighborhood of Birdsong, you also find a coffee shop, another pizza house, a breakfast-lunch cafe/bakery, a fancy seafood restaurant, a sandwich shop, a Subway, and a few others (like one called Skip) that I know little about. And finally, if you go a mile west to Wisconsin Avenue, you find yourself on a block with two pizza restaurants, a Chinese restaurant, a French restaurant, another French restaurant, an Indian restaurant, a Mexican restaurant, and another coffee shop. That is almost 30 restaurants within a mile and a quarter.

Some time ago, I listed the groceries within about the same distance – Giant, Mom’s, Safeway, Magruders, Trader Joe’s, Wegman’s, Whole Foods, and so on. No food desert here.