Just when things were moving in the right direction for Roberto Donna, the celebrity chef now finds himself on the hook for potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and the D.C. Wage Payment and Collection Law (DCWPCL). On Tuesday, Judge Royce C. Lamberth of [...]

When last we heard from Roberto Donna, the chef had just 'fessed up to felony embezzlement for withholding more than $140,000 in meals taxes from Arlington County.  The only way Donna avoided a five-year prison sentence was to promise to pay back that cash, which totaled $156,330.96 with penalties and interest. The threat of jail [...]

Roberto’s Rules of Order: Can Donna’s plans for Galileo go through before he settles his debt? In an Arlington County courthouse last week, Roberto Donna—celebrity chef, James Beard Award winner, and onetime chief of a restaurant empire that stretched from Bethesda to Alexandria—answered the question that for months had been bouncing around the local food [...]

Roberto Donna, the chef who put regional Italian cooking on the map in the District with his Galileo restaurant, pleaded guilty today to one count of felony embezzlement in Arlington County, according to the Office of the Commonwealth's Attorney. Donna admitted withholding more than $150,000 in meals taxes, plus penalties and interest, from his now-shuttered [...]

I was eager to see what the Brothers Ouattara would do with Italian cuisine at Kora, so the wife and I jumped into the ol' global warming machine on a recent Sunday to try the brunch at this new Crystal City outpost, located in the old Bebo Trattoria space. Brunch is never my preferred way [...]

Following the closing of Roberto Donna's Bebo Trattoria and the impending closure of Yannick Cam's Le Paradou, news has broken of two more shutterings on the local restaurant scene. Todd Kliman at the Washingtonian reports this afternoon that Farrah Olivia, chef Morou Ouattara's Old Town outpost of modern American cooking, will be closing its doors [...]

Or, more accurately, all the food news Y&H cares to report at 8 p.m. on a Monday. Regardless of my level of enthusiasm at this late hour, much has been going on in the local restaurant world, and here's a taste of it. Metrocurean has a deliciously biting item on yet another celebrity steakhouse coming [...]

The Post's Tom Sietsema broke the news yesterday that Y&H had predicted, with no great aclarity, back in February: Roberto Donna's informal Crystal City restaurant, Bebo Trattoria, has closed. Can we take a forensic pathologist's approach to the death of Bebo and draw any conclusions? Probably not, since we can only examine the patient from [...]

The implication in Tom Sietsema's scoop about Galileo returning to D.C. is that Roberto Donna will keep the doors open at Bebo Trattoria, his informal eatery in Crystal City. Why else would Donna announce that Bebo chef Claudio Sandri is now a partner? Well, let me be the first (or one of the first) to [...]