Attracting a huge lunch crowd is generally a good thing for a restaurant. On Thursday afternoon, however, Haidar Karoum and his crew of cooks at Proof (City Paper's pick for D.C.'s  Best Restaurant 2011) were probably wishing things were a bit slower. Karoum and company had been planning to do a practice run in preparation [...]

Short ribs and baby octopus may dominate many menus in the city, but that doesn't mean local chefs can't find love in an acorn squash. In our ongoing series, Chefs Veg Out, we'll prove D.C.’s chefs can play with more than just meat. Name: Amy Brandwein Title: Executive Chef Restaurant: Casa Nonna Twitter: @CasaNonna Cooking [...]

The first Young & Hungry column I wrote, almost five years ago, was a review of Miss Saigon in Georgetown. I was auditioning for the job of food columnist for Washington City Paper, and these were my marching orders in December 2005: critique a Vietnamese restaurant that no one cared about. I was puzzled, but [...]

On Wednesday, Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema will inaugurate something special for his regular weekly online dining chat. He’s bringing on guest chatters! The first person? Roberto Donna, D.C.’s accomplished Italian super chef and restaurateur better known these days for pleading guilty to felony embezzlement—and escaping jail time. For the Post, having Donna on [...]

Is it just me, or does it feel like the entire dining community has piled on Roberto Donna now that Arlington County has busted him as a tax cheat? Just the karmic payback for a poorly conducted business life, you say? Perhaps. But it’s probably good for our own karma to remember that Donna’s outstanding [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

As the primary author of the Young & Hungry blog, I release a lot of gas into the ether. Sometimes you readers find it noxious enough to disperse with your own counterattack. It can make for an engaging round of online gasbagging. Just take a look at the four examples that Editor Andrew and I [...]

All together now: It's pronounced "A-beets." This is a random category, yes, and I'm not sure what it says other than that some putz kept this page open on his browser for hours, presumably while doing other things, like typing out TPS reports or surfing for porn. But, hey, it's amusing to speculate who kept [...]