Coming soon to Penn Quarter: Ping Pong Dim Sum

The dining gods giveth. The dining gods taketh away.

Missy Frederick at Washington Business Journal is reporting that D’Acqua, the downtown Italian eatery with the emphasis on fresh seafood, shut its doors for good on Oct. 30. Writes Frederick on her Top Shelf blog today:

I just spoke to [D'Acqua chef/owner Enzo] Febbraro about the closing. He declined to reveal specific numbers, but said that “the landlord got a little too greedy” and asked for a dramatic rent increase on the space. Febbraro wasn’t willing to pay it, and decided “to play hardball.”

“We’re trying to find new location, because we did a good amount of business there,” Febbraro said. The new location likely will be a smaller one, he said.

The Verizon Center D’Acqua and Forno will remain open, he said.

Meanwhile, the London-based Ping Pong Dim Sum will open its first U.S. outlet next month in Penn Quarter. According to a press release issued today, the restaurant will be located at 900 7th St. NW, between the Verizon Center and the Washington Convention Center.

Just don’t expect to see any carts at this modern dim-sum palace. So says the release:

Read More “D’Acqua Shutters, Ping Pong Dim Sum Set to Open Next Month” »

It’s official. People have gone batshit for Select 55. Or at least batshit for our post on the beer. It tops the list once again this week.

I think I’ll go drown my sorrows in a real beer.

1. Budweiser Launches Select 55, Light Beer Arms Race Gets Absurd
2. Looking for a Little Practice, Bibiana Jumps the Gun and Opens for Service Today
3. Oh, the Noise, Noise, Noise, Noise in Restaurants
4. ‘Two Left Feet’ for One Big Steak
5. Did Vidalia Use “Inferior” Ingredients During Restaurant Week?

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

You can’t throw a meatball — no, sorry, a gnocco slathered in goat ragu — without hitting some downtown Italian restaurant these days. I wrote about the crowded field in a recent Y&H column, but since that piece, Bibiana has opened and more Italian places are planned for neighborhoods just around the perimeter of downtown, including a Penn Quarter outlet of the NYC red sauce house, Carmine’s, and a Cap Hill location of the Italian export, Acqua al 2.

What’s going on here?

It’s a good question, and it’s one that host David Furst put to me during this week’s edition of Metro Connection.  You can hear Furst and I delve into the subject today at 1 p.m. (and 5 a.m. on Saturday) on WAMU. That’s 88.5 FM on whatever the hell device people use nowadays to listen to the radio.

I don’t know what frequency that is for Rep. Joe Wilson. He’ll just have to turn the foil-wrapped strainer on his head until the signal comes in loud and clear.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

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 chef. Now it’s the Raters’ turn. They have mixed feelings about Gold’s place — and Gold himself.

Writes Rater E1009:

Read More “Vox Populi: Restaurant Raters Have Differing Perspectives on Dino” »

Regardless of the veracity of overboard’s account — and I should inject here that I didn’t verify the story — I think this mini-review of Sfizi Deli Cafe in Fairfax points out a very real fear for restaurateurs in the digital age: A burned diner is their worst enemy.

Get this: Overboard not only posted a review here at City Paper but also one on Sfizi’s page at washingtonpost.com. The very same review in fact. This is a diner on the warpath. Y&H is very sympathetic to burned diners, but I’d like to interject one question to overboard: Did you contact the managers and give them a chance to make good before slapping Sfizi upside the head on a couple of Web sites? If so, good for you.

I’m not saying that contacting management is a prerequisite for posting a review online, but I am saying that your gripe would have more impact if you actually tried to talk to the manager about this — and the manager showed no interest in making you happy and turning you into a life-long customer. That, to me, says so much more about a restaurant.

Good restaurant owners, after all, are trying to create a relationship with you, not just provide you a dinner

Here is overboard’s take on the situation at Sfizi:

Read More “Vox Populi: Restaurant Rater overboard on Sfizi Deli Cafe” »

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” »

Ashok Bajaj put his Bibiana cooks and servers through six different practice runs this week, in preparation for what was supposed to be a Monday, Sept. 7, opening. So why did the downtown osteria and enoteca open today instead?

“Practice, practice, practice,” Bajaj tells Y&H this afternoon. “Like everything else, we needed a little bit of work.”

Because Congress returns to work next week, Bajaj wanted to make sure that his latest restaurant would be performing at its peak before the power players start to stumble in following their fisticuffs over health-care reform. “No matter how good you think you are, you can always get better,” he says.

Read More “Looking for a Little Practice, Bibiana Jumps the Gun and Opens for Service Today” »

Bibiana Osteria and Enoteca, the latest entrant in the area’s escalating Italian Restaurant Wars, will indeed serve pizza, just like a number of other combatants in this wide-scale skirmish, including Potenza, Ristorante Posto, and Kora. But owner Ashok Bajaj doesn’t want pies to define his new place at 1100 New York Ave. NW, which will have its soft opening on Monday, Sept. 7.

Y&H spoke with Bajaj yesterday, and he told me that chef Nicholas Stefanelli’s offerings will be purely regional Italian, none of this Italian-American silliness that creeps into some menus around town. The pastas, the owner added, would be made in-house, with prices ranging from around $14 to $20. Pizza will also be available, he said, but only at lunch and only at the lounge during dinner service.

So why downplay the pie?

Read More “Owner: Bibiana Osteria Will NOT be a Pizza Joint” »

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.

Before he was installed as chef at Teatro Goldoni, that once-fading K Street institution, Enzo Fargione was perhaps best known as a Roberto Donna acolyte. Isn’t it funny how things have changed? These days, chef Donna, once lord over a vast empire, has no working restaurant to his name, while Fargione leads a kitchen that’s cooking up the most inventive Italian dishes I’ve tasted around these parts since Fabio Trabocchi left McLean for the hollow promise of New York City.

Addendum: Read Young & Hungry’s full review of Teatro Goldoni.

 Teatro Goldoni, 1909 K St. NW, (202) 955-9494

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

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.

From the moment I first walked into Pete’s, I thought I had good grasp of its operating ethos—a sort of sloppy, garlic-breathed hug of New Haven, Italian-American traditions, with just enough refinement to appease the magazine-toting foodies. But with each subsequent visit to the Columbia Heights pizzeria, I realize just how wrong my initial impression was. I’ve come to see that Pete’s is actually a cool urban outpost dedicated to classic Italian/Mediterranean ways. Perhaps it has always been thus, and I was just bamboozled by the “Apizza” in Pete’s name. Whatever the concept, though, this operation turns out raised, crispy crusts with a slightly airy, slightly chewy crumb, which strike me as New Haven in style, even without the coal ovens. Pete’s may be more refined than its Connecticut cousins, but the pie parlor still aims for an honest homemade simplicity, which in our processed age has become a strange signifier of quality and class. I have no doubt that Pete’s has 2Amys in its sights.

 Pete’s Apizza, 1400 Irving St. NW, (202) 332-7383

Photo by Darrow Montgomery