Fairfax Hotel – not all Lamburgers are created Equal

The Fairfax at Embassy Row, Washington, D.C. (2100 Massachusetts Avenue NW) has comfortable and well-appointed rooms.  It is convenient to the Metro red line, and there are a couple of decent restaurants just south on P Street.  The staff, however, leave a little something to be desired.  We use the Internet when on the road, and when we asked the bartender about it, his response was “I just work in the bar”.  When we asked the front desk, they very cheerfully let us know about the free wireless areas near the meeting rooms, and about the wireless available for a fee from our room.  Unfortunately, I guess I needed to ask specifically about wired Internet access from the rooms, as it wasn’t until I was checking behind the couch in our suite for lost toys that I discovered the data port for free wired broadband in the room.  Since I had spoken to three different staff members about where I could get Internet access (twice to check on locations for availability, and once for the password) during our stay, and no one mentioned that wired broadband was available in the room, I was a bit shocked when I jacked the Cat-5 cable into my laptop and got right on, no password and no hassle.  I found this same game of twenty questions had to be played throughout our stay there – staff were not really willing to divulge information without repeated questioning, whether it was regarding the fee for valet parking, or when the hotel restaurant was actually going to be open, or any of the other bits of information that I had to extract with persistence learned from watching news reports of Guantanamo Bay interrogations.  While the word disingenuous is a bit strong, I never got the feeling of genuine desire to make our stay better from anyone except housekeeping, who were pretty much spot on if you ignore the pile of fingernails left next to the bathroom trash can in our room that greeted us upon arrival and remained there through the entire stay.

While the hotel restaurant, the Jockey Club, is supposed to be a great place to eat, the food their kitchen served us in the bar was so far below par that we had no interest in being overcharged for a second offering from the same cooks.  Upon arrival, we headed to the hotel bar (since the storied restaurant was closed), and I was excited to see Lamburgers on the menu.  Hoping to get a shot at having a meal as good as Natasha’s, I greedily ordered two plates of the Lamburger sliders and a salad to make sure there was plenty to go around.  Alas, the Lamburgers were dry and lifeless, the sauce resembled a French onion potato chip dip, and the buns were burnt to a carbon-topped crisp.  The salad was OK, but that’s little consolation when a small restaurant in Floyd County, Virginia can serve a meal that is a hundred times better than a supposedly “five star” hotel in Washington D.C.  Here are our burnt Lamburgers, courtesy of the Fairfax Hotel:

Needless to say, for the next four days, we had our meals on P Street and around the Dupont Circle area...more on that later.