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 [...]
Restaurant Rater kzimmer wrote a thoughtfully detailed review of his/her Restaurant Week lunch at Zola, the Penn Quarter spot owned by the same group that recently opened Potenza, one of the subjects of this week's Y&H column. Here's what kzimmer had to say about Zola:
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 [...]
French Non-Resistance: Petits Plats goes Italian with Pizze. It's a sign of the times that local restaurateurs continue to place their trust in the good ol' Italian pie. Cheaper to produce than many other dishes — and one with an expansive, built-in fan base — pizza has become the low-risk option for a number of new and/or [...]
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 [...]
