The owners of Urban Bar-B-Que plan to open a third location of their small smokehouse chain in the former Willoughby’s Market in Sandy Spring, pitmaster David Calkins told Y&H over the weekend.

The lease has been signed, and since the space won’t require a massive build-out for the restaurant, Calkins expects to open the latest Urban within a month, if not sooner. Even better, Urban will install a Southern Pride XLR-600 smoker in the Sandy Spring spot; the giant machine, able to smoke hundreds of pounds of meat for 12 hours with split logs, was in large part responsible for Y&H’s recent re-evaluationof the barbecue joint in Rockville. (The lack of an XLR-600 at the Urban location in Silver Spring also explains its inferior meats.)

Read More “Urban Bar-B-Que to Open Third Store in Sandy Spring” »

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.

Of all the local restaurants I have frequented, both as critic and regular ol’ diner, few get me as excited as Joe’s Noodle House in Rockville. Sometimes I get keyed up just thinking about going here. Part of it is the simple thrill of discovery as you work your way through Joe’s long and diverse menu, from the steamed dumplings and boiled peanuts to the double-cooked pork and Szechwan-style beef noodle soup. But part of it is just the pleasure of returning to old favorites, like the golden, green-flecked scallion pancake, the crispiest anywhere, or the soft, almost slurp-worthy cubes of bean curd in the ma-po tofu, which mixes toe-curling heat with the refreshing, pine-needle coolness of Szechwan peppercorns. Besides, where else can you watch employees snap beans in the corner of the dining room?

Joe’s Noodle House, 1488-C Rockville Pike, Rockville, Md., (301) 881-5518

Photo courtesy of Joe’s Noodle House

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 how your meal was when you return.

The steep decline of the Maryland blue crab population has turned chefs and restaurateurs to alternative sources for quality crabmeat. Some turn to Mexico, but many others look east—to Indonesia or Thailand or other inferior Asian outlets. Not Bobby Bloch, owner and chef of Bobby’s Crabcakes in Rockville. He settles for nothing less than fresh, nonpasteurized, jumbo-lump meat, from the Chesapeake, if possible, or from the Gulf otherwise. Bloch swears that Gulf blue crabs, if chosen well, can be as sweet and delicious as those from our celebrated shores. Given what I’ve tasted at his casual, retro-cool restaurant, I’d have to agree. His jumbo-lump cakes contain an absolute minimum of binder and are seasoned just enough to provide spice without drowning out the meat’s pure oceanic flavor. These cakes are the purest expression of the blue crab I’ve ever tasted.

 Bobby’s Crabcakes, 101 Gibbs St., Rockville, Md., (301) 217-0858

Each day, we’ll run 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 how your meal was when you return.

Addie’s is easy to overlook. I don’t mean that literally, although that’s true, too. As you’re trolling the corporate canyon that is Rockville Pike, you can zip right past that persimmon-colored house as readily as Next Day Blinds. But Addie’s is also easy to take for granted because it’s so neighborly. Its menu, in the name of pleasing its many regulars, doesn’t change much and its offerings are more comforting than cutting-edge. But sometimes comfort, a friendly face, and damn fine rib-eye are all that you want from a restaurant. Under Nate Waugaman, former executive sous at Black’s, Addie’s feels invigorated, as if the new chef has adopted the restaurant’s clientele as his own flesh and blood. Waugaman’s pushing them a little, too, by adding a line of house-made charcuterie, but it’s the chef’s attention to detail and his stubborn insistence on freshness that make me want to drop by regularly.

Addie’s, 11120 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Md., (301) 881-0081

Over the years, I’ve sampled garlic naan, naan stuffed with goat cheese, kashmiri naan with nuts and raisins, and, of course, regular ol’ naan blackened and blistered straight from the tandoor. But until I dined recently at Spice Xing, the new Rockville restaurant opened by Passage to India’s Sudhir Seth, I had never tried khurmi naan. It’s naan covered with tomato sauce and sprinkled generously with shredded cheese. It is, in other words, pizza naan. The naan fits into Seth’s precise vision of Spice Xing, which features Indian dishes influenced by those European cultures that have had a presence on the Subcontinent, whether British, Portuguese, Spanish, or French. But since the Italians never laid a colonial finger on India, the natives had to improvise their own version of the classic Neapolitan flatbread, which wasn’t so easy in a country with few pizza or conventional gas/electric ovens. Even tandoor ovens are hard to find in certain regions in India, Seth tells me. Sometimes eight or more families will share one communal tandoor, or some enterprising soul will open a tandoori shop, where the locals will bring their own homemade dough to bake in the blazing hot clay ovens. Likewise, Seth notes, the ingredients that usually go into khurmi naan–commercial ketchup and processed cheese–are not always widely available in India. All of which is to say that khurmi naan is typically a restaurant item in India, not something made at home. Seth’s own version doesn’t stray far from the original back in the home country. About 40 percent of the sauce slathered onto his naan comes straight out of a ketchup bottle; the rest is homemade, a reduced tomato sauce infused with cloves, peppercorns, and bay leaves. The hybrid sauce is then topped with two kinds of processed shredded cheese–cheddar and white cheddar. So how is the naan? The sauce, which is ladled on thick, immediately creates a problem for those who like their naan (or their pizza, for that matter) to be both chewy and crispy; these slices go limp. The sauce itself is rather sweet, no doubt due to the large percentage of sugar-laden ketchup. The partially melted shredded cheese adds only a cold element of fat to the bread. The naan sort of reminds me of those Totino’s frozen pizzas from the 1970s, back before Wolfgang Puck and California Pizza Kitchen got into the freezer section of your local grocery store. I suspect that khurmi naan, in its own way, must hold a certain nostalgia for Indian immigrants in America. As for me, though, the flatbread’s fascination is limited pretty much to its history, not its taste.

“It glows,” says the woman at Gilly’s Craft Beer & Fine Wine in Rockville, placing my Timmy G’s Ham Cruncher in front of me. And she’s right. The sandwich, about four inches high, sits in a paper basket emitting an eerie fluorescent visual hum: ham and cheddar on white bread, slathered with a nice spicy mustard and stuffed with almost a Grab Bag’s worth of Cheetos. Mercifully, I didn’t request a side, since my order is already a sandwich and a side in one.

“That looks disgusting, dude,” says Sami Cardak, a friend joining me for lunch. Sami opts for the Roast Beef Sammy (”Because my name is Sami,” he reasons), while I go for the creation I invented about three decades ago.

Read More “Timmy G’s Ham Cruncher: The Sandwich That Glows” »