"The customers never have to know," Matthew Carroll told me during a party for Gilt City's D.C. launch, as he explains the hand gestures that will govern front-of-house service at Rogue 24. The hugely hyped eatery from former Vidalia chef R.J. Cooper opens tonight in Shaw's Bladgen Alley. At first, it looks like every other restaurant [...]
Zagat’s updated "2012 Washington, DC/Baltimore Restaurants Survey," is officially released on Wednesday. In it, you'll find D.C.'s most popular restaurants listed as follows: Zaytinya, 2 Amys, Central, Citronelle, Inn at Little Washington. And the city's top rated places for food: Marcel’s (29 out of 30 points), Inn at Little Washington (29) Komi (29), CityZen (28), [...]
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 [...]
As you might remember, Y&H last year made something of a fuss about Makoto's strange stranglehold on the top spots in the annual Zagat Guide, which really isn't so annual after all. Well, the new 2011 Washington D.C./Baltimore survey just hit the streets today, and guess what? Makoto is nowhere to be found among the [...]
As Y&H's colleague Warren Rojas points out over on Gut Check, tonight's episode of Top Chef is all about NoVa. Well, mostly about NoVa. The quickfire challenge will involve Maryland blue crab as the main ingredient and Inn at Little Washington chef/owner Patrick O'Connell as the guest judge. The elimination challenge will ask the contestants [...]
When Tiffany Short applied for a job at the Black Cat, she wasn't even old enough to drink. The Texas transplant was a few weeks shy of her 21st birthday. The owners made her wait until she was officially legal before hiring her to flip burgers at the 14th Street NW club. Over the course [...]
The Washington Post placed in four separate categories in the Association of Food Journalists 2009 awards contest in New Orleans last week, including nods for Tom Sietsema, Jane Black, and the Food Section as a whole. Black won or shared two awards. She earned a second-place finish for Best Newspaper Food Feature, circulation 250,001 and [...]
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 [...]
I obviously have nothing against Makoto, the meditative Japanese bento box of a restaurant in the Palisades, which specializes in kaiseki cuisine. I mean, I included the place among my 50 favorite restaurants in the D.C. area. What does bother me about Makoto, however, is its stranglehold on the top spot in the annual D.C./Baltimore [...]
This morning, I got into a small online argument with a fellow D.C. gastronome (can I just pause here and say that I hate almost all the words used to describe a food lover; they all carry the connotation that you can't tie your shoes without the help of a sommelier or bus boy) who disagreed [...]
