la fourchette: un petit morceau de merde

Ass juice. Pronounce those two words slowly in your mind. Pronounce them out loud if you're alone, or, well, if you're in the kind of company that wouldn't projectile vomit upon hearing the word "ass" buttressed by the word "juice."

I don't often ask for reader participation, but for the harrowing and terrifying tale that's about to unfold, I want you to get yourself into that gruesomely disgusting mindset that only the visualization of ass juice can allow; to appreciate as tangibly as possible that which befell upon me that fateful day. Aaaaaaaassssssssss juuuuuuuiiiiiiiiiiicccccccccce.

And now, I recount for you my Sunday brunch at Adams Morgan's La Fourchette.

It's hard to believe now, but when I went to La Fourchette, it was a planned event. Someone, somewhere had recommended it. They said the cooking was "endearingly authentic and sometimes wonderful" over at washingtonpost.com. However, if by "authentic," the Post meant some hairy Frenchman sweat all over my omelette, and by "sometimes wonderful," it meant "always gnarly," then yes, that review is spot on.

But I'll give the Post a break. Phyllis C. Richman wrote that review in 1996, before I even graduated from high school in Minnesota; before I spent my college years frolicking through the prairies and cornfields of Iowa; before I whittled away my good, wrinkle-free years in the love-hate purgatory known as Moscow, Russia; before I wasted two more years going to grad school and reacclimating to a relatively mayonnaise-free society in Boston; before I managed to spend my entire savings in five months while living in lower Manhattan; before I finally decided it was time to work both legally and for a yearly salary in DC... *sigh*

For your benefit and mine, I'll cease recapping my life that's now agonizingly flashing before my eyes to just summarize -- times change.

And so it seems time has taken its ugly toll on La Fourchette, which, I prefer to call The Fork, since I contemplated stabbing one into my own jugular to save myself from choking down the slimy, ass juicy, flat, greasy jaundiced pile of merde this establishment tried to pass off as an omelette.

Now, you may be wondering why I didn't just send it back to la cuisine and aller (oui, j'aime the usage of annoying and often grammatically incorrect foreign languages, c'est la vie! ...désolé). Well, like my experience at Reef, I had been waiting roughly 120 minutes to receive my food. I choked that sh*t down not only out of sheer hunger, but also out of principle -- the principle of being tired, lazy and slightly hungover.

But despite my post-Saturday-night state, I couldn't bring myself to finish it. Honestly, it was physically impossible. That sh*t was just so, so, SO not tight.

In fact, it tips the scales of not-tightness so much that I really can't even talk about it anymore without feeling like I need to turn off all my lights, crank up Celine Dion's "All By Myself" and rock back-and-forth in the fetal position. La Fourchette is dead to me.

Time I'll Never Get Back: 3 hours

Money I'd Have Rather Spent Buying Gerard Depardieu Croque Monsieurs: $14.00