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 [...]
Today was Roberto Donna's day to face some of the most discriminating food minds and dining cranks around: the reader-questioners on Tom Sietsema's weekly Washington Post dining chat. You already know about Donna's past troubles with taxes and embezzlement. The esteemed Italian chef was Sietsema's first-ever guest chat-host. The whole hour wasn't just questions for [...]
On Wednesday, Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema will inaugurate something special for his regular weekly online dining chat. He’s bringing on guest chatters! The first person? Roberto Donna, D.C.’s accomplished Italian super chef and restaurateur better known these days for pleading guilty to felony embezzlement—and escaping jail time. For the Post, having Donna on [...]
Two cable TV comedians are coming to town to stage a rally on the National Mall, and the political establishment isn’t sure whether to laugh, cry, or declare its own irrelevancy in the presence of fake pundits who have the drawing power of Sarah Palin at an NRA swimsuit contest. Y&H doesn’t have the bona [...]
Roberto Donna extended an olive branch to Y&H this week. I think it's fairly safe to say he didn't like the pot shots I had taken on the blog about the opening-date delays of Galileo III. He suggested, quite correctly, that his was not the first restaurant to see predicted launch dates come and go. [...]
According to a photo that the chef posted on his Facebook page, Roberto Donna was supposed to open Galileo III last week. WaPo's J. Freedom du Lac followed up with some timely Tweets: first about Galileo's certificate of occupancy from DCRA, and then about its pending opening last Thursday. As of today, there's still no [...]
Or maybe he wants them all to "eat shallot"! It's hard to say for sure, given the number of blank spaces between the "s" and the "t" in the caption that accompanied a photo that Donna posted of Galileo III on his Facebook page: Galileo III is coming next week!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! All the evil eyes look [...]
Is it just me, or does it feel like the entire dining community has piled on Roberto Donna now that Arlington County has busted him as a tax cheat? Just the karmic payback for a poorly conducted business life, you say? Perhaps. But it’s probably good for our own karma to remember that Donna’s outstanding [...]
Just when things were moving in the right direction for Roberto Donna, the celebrity chef now finds himself on the hook for potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and the D.C. Wage Payment and Collection Law (DCWPCL). On Tuesday, Judge Royce C. Lamberth of [...]
When last we heard from Roberto Donna, the chef had just 'fessed up to felony embezzlement for withholding more than $140,000 in meals taxes from Arlington County. The only way Donna avoided a five-year prison sentence was to promise to pay back that cash, which totaled $156,330.96 with penalties and interest. The threat of jail [...]
