Beacon Bar and Grill (and Yelp)

Living in DC, its hard to turn down an invitation to go out for dinner when the other choice is heading home and cooking. My love for cooking is still strong but lately, after a long day at work, I've found myself enjoying sitting down amongst friends and enjoying good food with some good conversation. My friend Monali started pushing me to write Yelp reviews a few months ago and though I have only written a few, I have been surprised by the number of managers who have contacted me regarding those reviews. This is great! I really enjoy the fact that restaurant managers are reading these reviews and it makes me glad to know they care. So, in addition to some recipe sharing, I will be adding restaurant reviews to this blog. Let me know what you think.

This last Sunday, I went to a “Drunk Brunch.” This brunch has been two years coming. Its started off as a suggestion to a group of friends. We planned, cancelled, planned again, and it just never happened. Until this last Sunday. With my friends Monali, Christine, and Sarah, I spent three hours of my Sunday eating, drinking, and gossiping. For $30, you get an all-you-can-eat brunch and all you can drink Mimosas and Bloody Marys.

The food is ok. I was first interested in this brunch because I heard from several people that the food was good which is not something you expect from an all-you-can-eat buffet. I was a little disappointed. They omelet station had a lot of ingredients to choose from but the omelet was more of an egg scramble than an actual omelet. The croissants and bagels looked like something they picked up at Costco. There were a lot of hot dishes to choose from; roast beef, roast chicken, ratatouille, shrimp and grits, clam chowder, corned beef hash, bacon, sausage, breakfast potatoes, waffles, etc. The corned beef has was good but I avoided the dried up sunny side egg that sat on top of it. The cheesy shrimp and grits was tasteless. The blitz was terrible.

I did say the food was ok. Here were the highlights. The salad bar was really fresh looking and their prepared salads were delicious. They had a roasted beet salad with watercress that was great. Their Asian brocolini salad with lo mein noodles was also very good and very refreshing. The other is the dessert table. They had carrot cake, apple pie, chocolate cake, chocolate chip cookies, and lots more. Everything looked good. What I ate the most were the chocolate chip cookies. The chocolate was a dark chocolate and they were chunks of chocolate and they were served warm so they were nice and gooey. They were perfect with a hot cup of coffee and the coffee served there was good. The omelet station was actually pretty good and I was glad to see that they had fresh eggs which isn’t always available at buffets.

Though my review of the food is not that great, I still rate this restaurant pretty high because my friends and I truly had a good time. The waiters kept the Mimosas flowing and never hassled us out. The beauty of the buffet is that you never have to wait for someone to serve you. You can get up at anytime and get what you like. Even after three hours, the waiter still let me order a Bloody Mary just so I could try it. (It was terrible. Don’t order the Bloody Mary. Stick with the Mimosa.) We may not have eaten our $30 worth but we sure drank our $30 worth.

If you can, get there early. We got there at 11:30 a.m. and the lines were two or three people deep. By the time we left at 3 p.m., the line was 15+ people deep. They also ran out of Danishes and the mimosas were more orange juice than champagne later in the afternoon. Overall, it was a great time.