Delectations: Washington on the Danube

Washington is not much of a town for dining out. Recent years have seen the burgeoning of a restaurant industry of sorts, but the bulk of it consists of mediocre steak houses and bogus French and Italian spots with bland, bowdlerized versions of authentic national cuisine. Fortunately, there are a few exceptions and, on a recent Sunday evening, I found myself weaving through a basement corridor of the old Broadmoor on Connecticut Avenue toward one of them, a place called Csikós.

The cuisine at Csikós is mainly Hungarian, the ambiance Viennese. It boasts one of the few gainfully employed cymbalon players in the United States, a skilled musician who once toured with the Kovach and Rabovsky troupe, and whose repertoire of melodies for the mellow Hungarian national instrument is impressive. His violinist partner, another expatriate Magyar, is a storehouse of Viennese operetta tunes, Brahms and native dances. Both of them long ago unearthed my secret fondness for the work of composer Emmerich Kalman, and so my evenings at Csikós usually begin with the pleasant score from Csardasfürstin followed later in the evening, if my lady guests have returned a few of the violinist’s smiles, by a medley from Gräfin Mariza, another Kalman favorite.

AB

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Aram Bakshian Jr.

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Washington is not much of a town for dining out. Recent years have seen the burgeoning of a restaurant industry of sorts, but the bulk of it consists of mediocre steak houses and bogus French and Italian spots with bland, bowdlerized versions of authentic national cuisine. Fortunately, there are a few exceptions and, on a recent Sunday evening, I found myself weaving through a basement corridor of the old Broadmoor on Connecticut Avenue toward one of them, a place called Csikós.

The cuisine at Csikós is mainly Hungarian, the ambiance Viennese. It boasts one of the few gainfully employed cymbalon players in the United States, a skilled musician who once toured with the Kovach and Rabovsky troupe, and whose repertoire of melodies for the mellow Hungarian national instrument is impressive. His violinist partner, another expatriate Magyar, is a storehouse of Viennese operetta tunes, Brahms and native dances. Both of them long ago unearthed my secret fondness for the work of composer Emmerich Kalman, and so my evenings at Csikós usually begin with the pleasant score from Csardasfürstin followed later in the evening, if my lady guests have returned a few of the violinist’s smiles, by a medley from Gräfin Mariza, another Kalman favorite.