Ruta emerged from Palena’s kitchen, pictured with Maddy Beckwith

So how unique was last night’s opening reception for Sou’Wester? So unique that Frank Ruta showed up. In all the years Y&H has been covering the dining scene in D.C., I’ve never seen the semi-reclusive Palena chef and owner at an industry event. I barely recognized him out of his whites.

“This is only the second time I’ve been to one of these,” Ruta told Y&H.

“Only the second ever?” I asked Ruta, knowing his years on the scene.

“No, this is the second time this year,” he responded.

Ruta’s presence wasn’t the only unusual thing about this dual-themed party, which celebrated both the fifth anniversary of CityZen and the launch of Sou’Wester, the latest project from Eric Ziebold, chef of the City Paper’s reigning Best Restaurant. There was a tattooed DJ spinning rap and funk tunes in the CityZen dining room, one of the most formal spaces in town, where food stations had been set up to pass out samples of Sou’Wester’s menu. That’s right, people were dancing in the CityZen dining room (including Y&H, but it’s best not to think about that). The cognitive dissonance was palpable.

Read More “Two Things Y&H Didn’t Expect to See at Sou’Wester’s Opening Party: Frank Ruta and Dancing” »

At the end of our discussion on Vidalia’s Restaurant Week menu, owner Jeffrey Buben told Y&H about an experiment he conducted during last summer’s promotion, which offers some evidence that the bi-annual RW event isn’t as beneficial to restaurants as Open Table would like us to believe.

Open Table conducted a survey in 2007, which revealed that 92 percent of diners said they would return to the restaurant they just tried for the first time during RW. Now that stat, all by itself, doesn’t tell you much because it’s based only on an oral commitment. But Lynne Breaux, president of the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington, tells Y&H that 61 percent of diners actually return to the restaurant they try for the first time during RW. That’s according to the same 2007 survey, Breaux says, which presumably is based only on Open Table users.

Read More “Does Restaurant Week Actually Benefit Restaurants?” »

It’s not often that a Restaurant Rater forces Y&H to pick up the phone and talk to the restaurateur under evaluation, but capitolfoodies, in their  meticulously detailed critique of Vidalia during Restaurant Week, dropped this small, tactical bomb:

After we paid the bill and were preparing to leave the server asked how we enjoyed the meal. Parry and I exchanged looks. This is that embarrassing part of a bad meal where guests feel compelled to lie. We opted for the truth. Parry asked to speak with the manager and seconds later Michael Nevarez, the General Manager of Vidalia appeared. We carefully and somewhat gently explained that we had been eager to dine at Vidalia because of Chef Buben’s reputation and the rave reviews many have afforded the establishment but that we were gravely disappointed in the five-course tasting menu because so much of the food was either bland or overcooked. I suspect many of you will doubt what you are about to read but Parry and I swear it is the absolute truth. Mr. Nevarez responded by telling us that the dishes we were served fell short of our expectations because it is Restaurant Week and that in order to provide the five-course tasting menu at the price of $45 the chefs had to cut costs and use inferior ingredients. I swear Parry’s mouth slipped open during this horrendous explanation. I wish I’d had a camera with me to capture it. My response differed from Parry’s. I looked right at Mr. Nevarez and asked why Vidalia would risk their fine reputation by participating in Restaurant Week if doing so meant serving shoddy food. His response? In this economy, Vidalia wouldn’t survive if they didn’t especially since Congress is out on a break and business has been so slow.

It’s a serious charge that required a serious phone call to Jeffrey Buben, the owner of both Vidalia and Bistro Bis. He was hesitant to talk about the issue on the record. He didn’t think any good could come from refuting a customer’s experience; his main goal is to make his diners happy, he says, not treat them disrespectfully in the media.

Read More “Did Vidalia Use “Inferior” Ingredients During Restaurant Week?” »

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.

The influx of celebrity chefs to D.C. can excite local diners, but it can deflate local chefs, who see these carpetbaggers stealing their customers, their line cooks, maybe even their thunder. Back in 2007, before Eric Ripert or Michael Mina or even Alain Ducasse opened doors here, chef R.J. Cooper at Vidalia was one of the reigning badasses in the kitchen, fresh off his Mid-Atlantic Beard Award, which he split with Frank Ruta at Palena. But if Cooper and/or Vidalia have suffered since these culinary hawks have swooped into town, you wouldn’t know it from eating at this downtown institution. Cooper, in fact, seems to be cooking with a renewed passion since the competition increased. My most recent meal at Vidalia included a number of dishes that blew me away, notably a pigtail croquette with strawberry-rhubarb mostarda and an artistic plate of mix-and-match bites, from raw cubes of hamachi to squares of lime gelee to tiny diced pieces of watermelon to little slivers of jalapeño. Cooper even plated something I had never seen before—a deep-fried blowfish from the lower Chesapeake, commonly known as the “sugar toad.” It tasted a thousand times better than the name would suggest.

 Vidalia, 1990 M St. NW, (202) 659-1990

Jeffrey Buben is a glass act.

Jeffrey Buben’s an old pro at examining every inch of Vidalia and Bistro Bis to find cost savings. He’ll review phone bills, ordering imbalances (too much product for too few customers), and overtime costs, anything to save cash and keep his staff employed in a bad economy. But one trick he’s currently using really caught my attention: It’s a contest to encourage the staff to be more careful with glassware.

As in please, please, please don’t break those long-stemmed wine glasses that can cost $4 each to replace.

Read More “One Method to Save Money in a Recession? Encourage the Staff Not to Break the Stemware.” »

Members of the esteemed Southern Foodways Alliance descended upon D.C. this past weekend to down potlikker and spread the gospel on the deep-fried ways of the South.

Ann Cashion, an SFA board member, hosted the Potlikker Film Festival on Saturday at Johnny’s Half Shell, an event that featured not only some of the District’s best Southern-flavored chefs (Vidalia’s Jeffrey Buben, the General Store’s Gillian Clark, and Creme’s Terrell Danley) but also four documentaries on subjects ranging from sweet potato pie to Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack in Nashville.

(Let me pause here and say for the record that Buben’s version of pigs in a blanket — which he called, with a flair for the highfalutin, “heirloom pigs in handstitched blankets” — was the best goddamn thing I put in my mouth all weekend, a sort of rich, fragrant homemade sausage wrapped in buttery pastry.)

One of the visitors this weekend was John T. Edge, director of the SFA and writer for…well, everyone. He conveniently Twittered his way through his dining adventures while in D.C. You can read his purloined Tweets after the jump. (Text has been boldfaced by Y&H.)

Read More “John T. Edge Eats and Tweets His Way Through D.C.” »