When a Restaurant Is Simply Perfect, Not Novel

Washington is a great city for bumping into people. Physically small and compulsively social, it provides a wide range of acquaintance, and a narrow scope of space in which to go about your everyday business. So you are always running into someone you know -- on the street, at the doctor’s office, in the pub you happened to drop into on the other side of town.

This serendipity is usually pleasing, but never more so than when you discover that a couple you’re very fond of has, completely independently of you, hit on the idea of dining at the same place and time as you. We pushed the tables together; the waiter held our order while our friends decided. Then we fell into some of the best food it’s been my pleasure to have in Washington … and also to wondering why it had been so easy to get a reservation there.