It's not often that a Restaurant Rater forces Y&H to pick up the phone and talk to the restaurateur under evaluation, but capitolfoodies, in their  meticulously detailed critique of Vidalia during Restaurant Week, dropped this small, tactical bomb: After we paid the bill and were preparing to leave the server asked how we enjoyed the [...]

Restaurant Rater spinwdc is a writer after my own heart: quick to dismiss giant chains, but just as quick to pass along the praise when warranted. Check out this quick take on Ruth's Chris Steak House near Dupont Circle: I have passed by Ruth's Chris Steak House for years and just scoff at the place...all [...]

This weekend, Tiffany Barbalato, director of communications for Zagat, e-mailed to address some of the questions raised in two Y&H posts from last week, the first wondering about Makoto's quick ascendancy to (and permanent place among) D.C.'s top restaurants and the other detailing Zagat's oddly duplicate guides on even years. Barbalato was responding for Olga [...]

Following my post yesterday on Zagat voters' undying love for Makoto, colleague Michael Birchenall, editor and publisher of Foodservice Monthly, did some serious sleuthing through his back issues of the annual restaurant guide, dating back to 1993.  Here's what he found: Makoto, which opened in the early 1990s, made a meteoric appearance among D.C.'s best [...]

There's no mistaking that Young & Hungry readers love their beer. They love it in a glass. They love it in a growler. And they love it in print. The single most-read item of the week — by a wide, wide margin — was Beerspotter Orr Shtuhl's post on the inaugural D.C. Beer Week. I predict [...]

For two years, Leslie Kelly used to walk into restaurants as the feared critic of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (OK, Y&H is taking creative license here; I have no idea whether Kelly was feared or not, but as a general rule, restaurateurs tremble at the thought of a negative review from major daily newspapers, particularly in [...]