One by one, we’re running through the 50 restaurants that made the cut on this year’s Young & Hungry Dining Guide. If you have visited the day’s featured restaurant, let us know what you think. If you’re planning to visit for the first time, tell us about your meal when you return.

If you haven’t yet had the chance to dine under the covered patio at Sea Side, now is the perfect time to sample this Eden Center joint’s unique Cajun-Vietnamese approach to crawfish. As we enter the tail end of the season, crawfish are just now reaching full maturity, which means they’re big and sweet and perfect for owner Tom Vo’s Vietnamese take on Cajun mudbugs. Vo’s crawdaddies are marinated in garlic, ginger, scallions, tangerine juice, lime juice, and fish sauce—that great umami agent of the East—before hitting the kitchen pots roiling with Cajun seasonings, corn, and whatnot. I wasn’t even halfway through my first bag of boiled mudbugs when I decided, right then and there, that these are the best-tasting crawfish anywhere, even without the array of tableside condiments that the Vietnamese so love. Now, if by chance you do miss the crawdad season, which ends in July, you can always check out Sea Side’s version of the soft-shell crab, another delicacy just reaching it prime. Sea Side batters its softie, deep-fries it, and quickly tosses it in a blazing-hot wok with sugar, ginger, scallions, onions, jalapeños, and garlic. Hate to sound like a broken record—hey, do you kids even know what that term means?—but Sea Side’s Vietnamese version is unrivaled in the area.

Sea Side Crab House, 6799 Wilson Blvd., Suite 5, Falls Church, (703) 241-2722

One by one, we’re running through the 50 restaurants that made the cut on this year’s Young & Hungry Dining Guide. If you have visited the day’s featured restaurant, let us know what you think. If you’re planning to visit for the first time, tell us about your meal when you return.

The area’s best Vietnamese restaurant never would have materialized without the persistence of Gene Nguyen, who’s among the most unlikely candidates in Northern Virginia to set out on this lofty path. Until he opened Present in Falls Church last year, Nguyen was best known for peddling pho and running a nightclub in the Eden Center.

But seven years ago at his nightclub, Nguyen met a group of folks visiting from Vietnam; they told him about this chef back home who’s been captivating diners wherever he cooks. Nguyen dutifully recorded Luong Tran’s contact information and began communicating with the chef. They talked. They e-mailed. They traded pictures and tips and recipes. After a while, Nguyen finally felt comfortable enough to drop the big one: Would Tran like to cook in America?

No way. Tran was happy staying in Vietnam.

Read More “Young & Hungry Dining Guide by the Day: Present” »

One by one, we’re running through the 50 restaurants that made the cut on this year’s Young & Hungry Dining Guide. If you have visited the day’s featured restaurant, let us know what you think. If you’re planning to visit for the first time, tell us about your meal when you return.

This pho parlor in the Eden Center turns out stellar noodle soups. My most recent order came swimming with thin slices of richly fatty brisket, crunchy/chewy tripe, perfumed beef broth, and a garnish plate brimming with sliced jalapeños, Thai basil, bean sprouts, and even that rare saw-toothed leaf, culantro. Pho Saigon also pays attention to its noodles; they’re soft, supple, and so easy to slurp. This tiny shop, overstuffed with trinkets and pictures and boxes of kitchen supplies near the bathroom, would remind you of a crowded Vietnamese street stall if not for the overhead flat-screen TV set to the Speed Network, where racing school buses provide a little redneck comfort. Yep, you get a melting pot here along with your noodle soup.

Pho Saigon, 6795 Wilson Blvd., Falls Church, (703) 677-0523

Chef Hoa Lai of Four Sisters

One by one, we’re running through the 50 restaurants that made the cut on this year’s Young & Hungry Dining Guide. If you have visited the day’s featured restaurant, let us know what you think. If you’re planning to visit for the first time, tell us about your meal when you return.

The members of the Lai family have understood one thing better than any other Vietnamese restaurateur: They’re not in Vietnam anymore. So while their institution’s initial success was based on its ability to appeal to transplanted Vietnamese at the Eden Center, the restaurant has shown an ability to adapt to its adopted country. I don’t mean to imply that chef Hoa Lai has sold out Vietnam’s cuisine to cater to the American palate, because he hasn’t. But the Lai family hails from South Vietnam, an area that has two distinct advantages in competing in the American marketplace: It prefers sweet-and-sour flavors over the chile heat of central Vietnam or the hard saltiness of the north, and the region has shown a historical willingness to adopt outside influences. The Lai family has carried on that tradition well, whether emphasizing the fruits and sugars that play to America’s sweet tooth or dropping the odder ingredients that don’t play at all in the United States. Now, the family has built a new restaurant outside of the Eden Center, a gorgeous space full of dark woods and yellow hues, designed to recall the French colonial period in Vietnam. With this, and its other moves large and small, the Lai family has put Vietnamese food squarely in the American mainstream, and it looks great there.

Addendum: To learn more about the Lai family’s rise to prominence, read my cover story, Exit from Eden.

 Four Sisters, 8190 Strawberry Lane, Suite 1, Falls Church, Va., (703) 539-8566

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

The first time I visited Pho Saigon in the Eden Center, at the urging of a Vietnamese acquaintance, I sat there listlessly over my bowl, wondering who or what was most off: my friend, my thin pho, or my tastebuds. Turns out that Pho Saigon was merely having an off day. I have since returned to the Vietnamese noodle house and have found its soups spectacular. My most recent order came swimming with thin slices of richly fatty brisket, crunchy/chewy tripe, exquisitely perfumed beef broth, and a garnish plate brimming with fresh sliced jalapeños, Thai basil, bean sprouts, and even that rare saw-toothed leaf, culantro. Pho Saigon also pays attention to the noodles in its soups; they’re soft, supple, and so easy to slurp. The tiny pho shop, overstuffed with trinkets and pictures and even boxes of kitchen supplies near the bathroom, might remind you of a crowded Vietnamese street stall if not for the overhead flat-screen TV set to the Speed Network, where racing school buses provide a little Southern redneck comfort. Yep, you get a melting pot along with your noodle soup. The truth is, if not for the dark memory of my first visit, I’d rank Pho Saigon over Pho 75, that suburban institution that consistently hits the mark at prices impossible to resist. Perhaps in 12 months that memory will finally be evaporated—by all the steaming bowls of noodle soup I plan to slurp down at Pho Saigon.

Funny thing, but Y&H was supposed to serve as Anthony Bourdain’s tour guide for this trip to Eamonn’s A Dublin Chipper in Old Town, a segment that ultimately didn’t make the cut for the recent D.C. episode of No Reservations. [Watch the deleted segment here.]

But by the time I was done showing Bourdain around the Eden Center and Abay Market, the host was toast, and I had to catch a ride to New York. After we had eaten as much raw beef as we could handle at Abay — or as little in Bourdain’s case, since he wasn’t a fan — the lead producer called me outside and said I was free to go. Tony was still wiped from the previous day’s shoot, the producer told me, and needed to get some shut-eye before heading to Eamonn’s. I have to admit, Bourdain did look pretty rough as he slouched his way outside and smoked a cigarette, a New York punk who still enjoyed a good bender a half century into life.

Regardless, my first reaction was to feel the sting of rejection. You see, the producers had put together a tight, ambitious schedule for the day, in which we would eat, drink, talk, and travel around Northern Virginia from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., hitting the Eden Center, Abay, and Eamonn’s. I was to play Bourdain’s monkey boy all day long—until, that is, Dr. Feelgood got pooped and needed to take nappy-poo.

Read More “Watch the Deleted Eamonn’s Segment from Bourdain’s ‘No Reservations’ Show on D.C.” »

When the Lai family decided to close its signature restaurant, Huong Que/Four Sisters, in the Eden Center this year and move to the more mainstream environs of Merrifield, it left a rather gaping hole at the Vietnamese shopping center in Falls Church. The store fronts that face the parking lot at the Eden Center are coveted positions, the kind of places that businesses located inside the grungy center would kill for (or at least maim for). Fortunately for the Lai clan, they still controlled the lease on the Huong Que space, and they knew exactly what they wanted to do with it: shift their cramped deli, Song Que, into the significantly larger spot.

Read More “Song Que Moves Into the Old Four Sisters Space” »