Last Saturday night my husband I accomplished what few have ever accomplished: We got a table in a little over a half-hour at Bad Saint, the craved-after Washington, D.C., restaurant which doesn’t take reservations and where the scenesters start lining up for dinner out on the sidewalk as early as 2 p.m. on weekends.
In August 2016 Bon Appetit magazine rated Bad Saint, whose specialty is upscale Filipino food, the number-two new restaurant in America. Restaurant critics for the New York Times and the Washington Post had earlier showered it with stars and rave reviews. Since the place has only 24 seats, mostly stools along counters, in its tiny gentrified-storefront location, and since Washington, like most cities, crawls with status-driven foodies, your wait in line (or the wait in line by the underemployed millennial you have hired as a ringer) is typically at least two hours on weeknights and much, much longer on Saturday. When Bad Saint’s doors finally open, at 5:30 p.m., the first 25 people get right in, and the names of the rest go onto a wait list; the restaurant will text them when a seat frees up. People whose names don’t get onto that list by 6:15 are unlikely to get seated at all that night; Bad Saint’s last seating is at 11 p.m.
Washington-area publications offer strategies for scoring at Bad Saint. Washingtonian magazine suggests bringing along a chair for the line and, if you’re one of the lucky 25 at 5:30, asking to be put at the top of the wait list instead of going right in, which means you’ll be eating at a civilized 7 p.m. instead of at a senior-citizen early bird hour. Washington City Paper suggests trying Bad Saint on a night when Game of Thrones is on.
My husband and I had a better strategy: We brought along a lawyer.
Actually, the lawyer, a law-school classmate of my husband’s who is now enjoying wealth and professional success beyond dreams thanks to his extraordinary skill at litigating and negotiating, brought us along. He’s a member of a restaurant jury in his home city thanks to his impressive practice of sampling the “really good”—that is, really hot—restaurants in every town he visits for business, and he was due to fly in on Saturday night from a vacation home in Nicaragua for a convention in Washington.
The trip to Bad Saint had been in the works for months after he read about that number-two rating in Bon Appetit. His plane was due to land at Dulles Airport at 9:10 p.m. My husband gently warned him via email about clearing customs, the 30 miles from Dulles to downtown Washington, the long lines, the dismal prospects, and the 11 p.m. seating deadline. My husband also prepared a backup list of late-night tapas bars “in case we don’t get in.” Our lawyer friend’s reply was terse: “We’re getting in.”
We ourselves didn’t have much desire to jump through the trendy-restaurant hoops. The gal who cuts my husband’s hair is Filipina, and when he told her about Bad Saint, she said, “I’ve eaten every kind of Filipino food there is, and I’m not going to stand in line to eat any more of it.”
At 9:24 p.m. on Saturday we got a call from our friend: The flight from Managua had landed, and he was already in a D.C.-bound limo. So we grabbed a cab for Bad Saint ourselves. It was well after 10 when we got there, and our lawyer friend was already inside with his rollerboard applying his litigating and negotiating skills to hostess/owner Genevieve Villamora to see if somehow she could find it within herself to bend the rules. Her reaction was: no dice. She did say that if we wanted, we could have a drink at a bar up the street, and she’d text us if any of the completely filled seats happened to empty before 11.
We duly ordered drinks. Our lawyer friend ordered a murky but very up-to-date cocktail that looked as though its ingredients consisted of seawater, fermented mulberry juice, and bits of dandelion greens. My husband and I are classic-cocktail people so we ordered Negronis. Our friend tried—unsuccessfully—to persuade us to have the Negronis made with bourbon instead of gin. Five minutes later, he was out of his chair and on a run back to Bad Saint to inform Villamora about his membership in the restaurant jury. That persuasive tactic wasn’t persuasive. It was still no dice. And no texts on my husband’s phone. It was now 10:50. We paid the bar tab.
Our lawyer friend again rushed down to Bad Saint, then rushed back: no dice again. This time the three of us trundled to the restaurant. It was 10:56 p.m., and our friend blasted through the front door to do some more litigating and negotiating work on Villamora. We waited discreetly outside, on the theory that we might have to go to that restaurant again, and we didn’t want anyone there to recognize us as the boon companions of a would-be line-buster. Three minutes later though, he emerged with a grin: There was one single seat at the counter available. “Take it!” we shouted at him in unison, visions of nice tapas elsewhere dancing in our heads.
But then—with exactly one minute to spare until the 11 p.m. witching hour, two more seats cleared at the counter. We were all in! “I want you to be my lawyer,” I told our friend. And then, just as suddenly, one of the restaurant’s two actual booths cleared. The booth was cramped, but it sure beat the Woolworth’s-style counter with its tiny stools. We now had a catbird perch for watching the Bad Saint staff sizzling our dishes in woks to the thrum of some sort of Filipino punk rock blasting through the restaurant.
Our food? It was . . . fine. My husband and I had given up meat for Lent, so we ordered octopus salad, which was excellent, “Chinese long beans” (they looked like plain old beans with some tasty seasoning), and a dish that consisted of six clams and their shells in a Thai-ish red curry. Our lawyer friend ordered a pork dish along with what was apparently the house pièce de résistance: a marrow bone standing upright in a bowl of broth ringed by what appeared to be bok choy and crowned with a chunk of banana (okay, plaintain). He tried to palm the chunk of plaintain off onto me. I looked the bowl over and decided I was glad it was it was Lent. He ordered a bottle of pinot noir, and as we were drinking it, he checked his Wine Advocate phone app, which told him to his delight that the wine had a 90 rating from grape guru Robert Parker.
We couldn’t complain about the excellent service, not to mention the extraordinary patience of owner Villamora. But this was the number-two new restaurant in America, where the food critics raved deliriously and the customers waited up to eight hours to sit in an uncomfortable seat, listen to punk rock, and eat Filipino street chow?
It was close to 1 a.m. when we emerged from Bad Saint, and the staff was scrubbing down the stove. I was thinking: The food scene these days is like the art scene, where high art consists of diamond-studded skulls, cow carcasses floating in formaldehyde, and somebody’s unmade bed. I’m not saying that Bad Saint was the emperor’s new clothes of restaurants. It wasn’t; it was perfectly decent Southeast Asian cuisine. But nowadays, I’m told, people want to buy experiences, not things, and Bad Saint was, if nothing else, an experience.
