Y&H has already listed his 10 favorite new restaurants for 2009. Now it's time to start pondering the possibilities for 2010. Here's a short list of the upcoming restaurants I'm itching to dine in this year. Galileo III: Can Roberto Donna overcome his dwindling reputation and poor recent track record to reclaim the heavyweight crown [...]
Following Y&H's recent column on Italian restaurants in or near downtown D.C., a reader wondered why I didn't include Dino among the contenders for Galileo's heavyweight crown. I had a simple answer: Dino isn't in or near downtown D.C. But last fall, I did chime in on Dino after owner Dean Gold installed himself as [...]
Buck's fresh apricot summer punch Buck's Fishing and Camping owner James Alefantis first met chef Vickie Reh not at Food Matters in Alexandria, where she was once sous chef, but through a wine importer. Alefantis, in fact, never ate Reh's food at her previous gig. So how exactly did Reh end up as head chef [...]
It has been four months since the Post's Tom Sietsema reported that Roberto Donna would resurrect his once-powerhouse Italian restaurant, Galileo, in the old Butterfield 9 spot on 14th Street NW. Enough time has passed, in other words, to crank the gossip mill to a fevered pitch. One source told Y&H that the landlord of [...]
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 [...]
When Galileo was forced to leave town in 2006, downtown D.C. was left with only a handful of decent Italian restaurants, including Tosca and the woefully underrated Spezie. But in recent months, the dearth has turned into a near glut. (Relax, you word mavens; I understand that "near glut" has all the contradictory overtones of [...]
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 [...]
