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

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 Hamilton Square, the historic building that housed Butterfield 9, no longer wanted Donna because of the chef’s checkered financial past.

Bill Miller can only shake his head in mock disgust at the rumors. Well, that’s the impression I got yesterday evening as I talked to Miller, the director of retail leasing for Transwestern Commercial Services, who’s handling negotiations for the Butterfield 9 spot. Miller’s a pro; he’s been working in the restaurant world for 25 years. Neither he nor the landlord are naive about Donna’s history, Miller says, which includes the recent shuttering of Bebo Trattoria.

“Roberto went to culinary school,” Miller says, “not accounting school.”

Read More “The Latest on Roberto Donna and the Resurrection of Galileo” »

Following the closing of Roberto Donna’s Bebo Trattoria and the impending closure of Yannick Cam’s Le Paradou, news has broken of two more shutterings on the local restaurant scene.

• Todd Kliman at the Washingtonian reports this afternoon that Farrah Olivia, chef Morou Ouattara’s Old Town outpost of modern American cooking, will be closing its doors on April 29 after failing to negotiate a new lease with the landlord, Balducci’s, which is not immune to this closing business either. Kliman notes that Ouattara will be opening a restaurant/bar/lounge in Crystal City this summer and has plans to, eventually, reprise Farrah in downtown D.C.
• The good members of DonRockwell.com inform us that Mark and Orlando’s, just off Dupont Circle, will be closing at the end of April, which elicited this response from the board’s namesake founder: “This isn’t fair.”

Read More “Restaurants, They’re Falling Like Dominoes” »

Or, more accurately, all the food news Y&H cares to report at 8 p.m. on a Monday.

Regardless of my level of enthusiasm at this late hour, much has been going on in the local restaurant world, and here’s a taste of it.

• Metrocurean has a deliciously biting item on yet another celebrity steakhouse coming our way: Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s J&G Steakhouse in the new W Hotel.
• ZagatBuzz reports that Todd English is out as chef of the still-in-development Cha restaurant at the Donovan House. Toronto chef Susur Lee, who leads the kitchen at Shang at a sister hotel in Manhattan, will apparently step in. (And hey, memo to ZagatBuzz: Give credit when you steal other people’s items.)

Read More “All the Food News You Can Use” »

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 a distance, but the trattoria, born in late 2006, didn’t even live to see its third birthday. If this were just another restaurant, you might not think twice about its brief existence, particularly in this economy. But Bebo was the product of Donna, one of the most influential (and talented) chefs who has ever worked in this area.

Read More “What to Make of Bebo’s Closing and Donna’s Future?” »

When Michael Kosmides and Jose Garcia took control of Teatro Goldoni on K Street NW, the owners did something that few thought possible: They made the old power-alley, commedia dell’Arte haunt an actual player again on the restaurant scene. They did so by hiring former Roberto Donna acolyte, Enzo Fargione, who’s not only developed his own style of cooking in recent years, but has also quickly established himself as one of the top chefs in the District.

Kosmides and Garcia hope to strike gold again when they open another place, still unnamed, just a couple of blocks from Teatro Goldoni. According to a well-placed source who requested anonymity, the partners signed a lease on a space near 19th and I streets for a planned Mediterranean-style restaurant. The concept hasn’t been finalized yet, but it could include tapas and Neapolitan-style pizzas.

Read More “Teatro Goldoni Owners Plan to Open Mediterranean-Style Restaurant” »

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 say that Bebo won’t be around long enough to revel in the glorious return of Galileo, and I’ll offer up my recent dinner at the restaurant as evidence. Read More “My Dinner at Bebo Trattoria: Will It Be the Last?” »