Seventeenth Street is “café-lined,” I guess, if you’re willing to call a restaurant a café. Largest, best-established, and least café-like is the Trio Restaurant, on the south-east corner of 17th and Q. The Trio has been there since the Fifties, surely, and I used to eat there sometimes in the Seventies, when 17th was more black than gay.
In those days the Trio had a breakfast menu with some downhome items I’ve never seen anywhere else, including “pork chop and eggs” and even “liver and eggs,” but pride of place had to go to the deluxe, seven-course dinner served for $4.99, which included tomato juice (pronounced, for the occasion, toe-mah-toe juice, I believe), followed by a Kaiser roll, a salad (that’s the third course, if you’re counting), and then the main course—the classic choice being, in my opinion, Salisbury steak—and two vegetables, usually mashed potatoes and green beans, which gets us up to six, topped by dessert—either jello or bread pudding—(that’s seven).
Brenda K from Takoma Park brings us up to the current day with the following post:
“The service was extremely extremely awful. Like it was hard to even pay our tab because they didn’t seem to care to take our money awful.
“The only thing that saved this place from getting 1 star was the full glass of gin my friend got for $4. We wished we had packed our own ice and mixer though, because those 2 items never made it to the table.”
A full glass of warm gin for $4! You can’t complain! And if you’re nursing a hangover, well, a nice plate of liver and eggs can sure take the edge off.
