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 to sample a chef’’s cooking, but I have to say, as far as brunches go, this is a dandy one. It’s three courses for $20, and as for the fare…I’d call it Italian by way of Morou and Amadou Ouattara’s fertile imaginations.

Or maybe by way of Wolfgang Puck, if you’re talking about Kora’s take on Spago’s famous smoked salmon pizza. The Ouattaras’ version is less glam, as you would expect from a place so far removed from El Lay. It’s not as dense with slices of salmon, it features no caviar, and its crust isn’t as sweet as the honey-drizzled dough Wolfie prefers. Yet all in all, it’s a solid pie, though I do think the Kora pizzamaker could stand to leave the rounds in the oven a few seconds longer.

But the dish that really blew me away was something even further removed from Italian cooking. It was the eggplant gazpacho with “tomato pearls,” a holdover from Morou Ouattara’s previous restaurant, Farrah Olivia. This Spanish import is, in a word, spectacular. I could taste fresh cucumbers, tomatoes, green peppers, and eggplant, I guess, if I thought about it really hard. But I could taste about a 1,000 other ingredients, too, which made me curious about the recipe.

So I called Morou Ouattara, who graciously agreed to share the recipe for Y&H readers, who can enjoy it at home before summer comes to a close. The tomato pearls may be tricky to make, if only because you have to purchase agar, but I suspect you won’t miss that garnish much if you can’t find the ingredient. This soup packs plenty of flavor by itself.

The recipe follows the jump.

Read More “Kora’s Eggplant Gazpacho: A Taste of Spain at Morou Ouattara’s Trattoria” »

Somehow any piece of breaking news on the local food/restaurant front seems small and insignificant compared to the reports coming out of Mexico: Pig farming will kill us all!

OK, I exaggerate: The swine flu outbreak is merely, according to the World Health Organization, a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern.” Capital letters are never good; it’s a pronoun just waiting to attach itself to something nasty. WHO also told reporters the virus has pandemic “potential,” a word usually filled with so much hope and promise, like when discussing the upside of the ‘Skins first-round draft choice. Y&H is officially worried.

• Eating Liberally asks Marion Nestle if we shouldn’t be concerned that Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer, could be taken over by a massive Chinese company owned by the state, the same folks who brought us so many other tainted food products. After all, EL notes, Mexican officials believe the swine flu may be linked to the “clouds of flies that thrive in the manure lagoons of the Smithfield-owned industrial hog operations in Vera Cruz.”

More news following the jump.

Read More “Food News You Can Use: When Pig Flies (May Kill Us All)” »

Morou: Hit him with your best question

Given the apparently precarious nature of our local dining scene, we should all jump at the chance to poke and prod at one of the area’s premier chefs, Morou Ouattara, who recently told the Washingtonian’s Todd Kliman that he’ll be pulling the plug on Farrah Olivia in Old Town on April 29.

And now we have the chance: Ouattara will be hosting today’s 11 a.m. edition of Grill Warren at Northern Virginia magazine.

Not that Y&H is asking you to do his work, but here’s what I’d want to know, if I got a chance to grill Morou:

Read More “Want to Know About Morou Ouattara’s Future? Ask Him on ‘Grill Warren’ Right Now” »

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 on April 29 after failing to negotiate a new lease with the landlord, Balducci’s, which is not immune to this closing business either. Kliman notes that Ouattara will be opening a restaurant/bar/lounge in Crystal City this summer and has plans to, eventually, reprise Farrah in downtown D.C.
• The good members of DonRockwell.com inform us that Mark and Orlando’s, just off Dupont Circle, will be closing at the end of April, which elicited this response from the board’s namesake founder: “This isn’t fair.”

Read More “Restaurants, They’re Falling Like Dominoes” »

The Washington Business Journal is reporting that this winter’s D.C. Restaurant Week promotion will be pushed back to February, in deference to the Barack Obama’s inauguration on Jan. 20. The move makes sense to me: The D.C. dining market will be flooded with hundreds of thousands of tourists in mid-January, the traditional period for this mid-winter dining discount. Restaurateurs would be complete tools to sell their plates on the cheap this year.

Which brings me to Alexandria’s “Inaugural Restaurant Week,” which debuts right in the middle of the biggest presidential inauguration in decades. The NoVa version of Restaurant Week runs from Jan. 17-25 and like its D.C. cousin, the promotion allows patrons to order a three-course, prix-fixe dinner for $35 (or, in a few cases, a dinner for two for $35).

The question, of course, is why? Why would Alexandria restaurants offer steep discounts when they already have a captive audience?

Read More “D.C. Restaurant Week Pushed Back to February” »