Forget hamburgers for a moment. Here’s a beef dish you can believe in, even at a place like Lotus Cafe, which casts a wider net than your average tuna fisherman. Seriously, a Vietnamese restaurant that serves calamari fries, coconut shrimp, and a Sex on the Beach cocktail?  Is this place channeling Saigon or Cancun?

Read More “Dish of the Week: Pho with Eye of Round at Lotus Cafe” »

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” »

For reasons that I can’t fully explain, I ordered the muffaletta at Nicaro, which recently reopened under chef Luis Martinez, who has tons of experience opening and running restaurants of all sizes, from Cubano’s in Silver Spring to Cheesecake Factories here and in California.

I think I was feeling nostalgic for New Orleans after reading Martinez’s menu, which dabbles in some Crescent City favorites, including this iconic sandwich, which I’ve enjoyed at one of the finest places to ever stake its name on this righteous sammie with the Italian origins: Napoleon House in the French Quarter.

Rule No. 1 about eating muffalettas: never compare the one in front of you to the heated muffaletta served at Napoleon House unless you enjoy wallowing in disappointment. (I know, I know, some of you will argue that a muffaletta should never be served hot, but this is an argument for another day, all right?)

Read More “Beware the Sandwich That Dares to Call Itself a Muffaletta” »

Each day, for the next few weeks, 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 went when you return.

Abol occupies a modest storefront along Colesville Road in Silver Spring, just across the street from the AFI Silver. Through the windows, you can see that the softly lit interior is more inviting than the average Ethiopian joint in D.C.—more Etete than, say, Awash. But it’s only after you grab a table and the food starts arriving that you realize how special Abol is. You’ll notice it before your first bite. The kitchen doesn’t just dump its stews and tibs and kitfo onto a large oval of injera and slap it down in front of you, as if it were just another trough of comestibles in which everything melds into one indiscriminate Ethiopian food wad. The cooks plate their dishes in elegant white bowls and trays, accompanied with a basket or two of rolled-up injera. Presentation, however, gets you only so far, a point well understood by the husband-and-wife team behind Abol. Their vegetarian platter includes not only the sweetest yefasolia you’ll ever taste but also something I’ve never seen before on Ethiopian menus: beets and potatoes sautéed in oil, garlic, and ginger, which are unbelievably good. The servers, to their credit, will even take you at your word when you say you prefer kitfo rare and hot. They’ll bring you a bowl of raw atomic beef that is, by no means, for the faint of heart.

Abol, 8626 Colesville Road, Silver Spring, (301) 650-0061

The scrambled eggs are not fluffy; more than anything, they look like flat, ragged pieces of torn cloth as they lie there limply on the plate. The butter for the hot stack is the whipped, salted variety—from tiny plastic containers. And the stale, thin coffee tastes like it’s been extracted from yesterday’s grounds. So why do I love the Tastee Diner? Maybe it’s nostalgia for a time when chefs didn’t feel the need to brag about their local, seasonal ingredients. Maybe it’s a need to eat around people who don’t consider dinner at Central Michel Richard a “casual” meal. Maybe it’s just that sometimes I want to down a meal—and read a newspaper—without having to ponder every damn detail about it. It’s easy to do that in a place where Sysco serves as a main supplier. But the Tastee Diner also has history (the stainless-steel dining cab has been around since 1946 and the restaurant itself since 1935) and charm (the hon-heavy waitresses, the cheesy tchotchke collection) on its side, too. These things seem to make everything taste better, even burgers and fish plates and crab-cake platters that can’t even begin to compare with the best in town.

The wife and I stopped by the General Store late on Sunday night, around 9, hoping against hope that chef/owner Gillian Clark might still have some fried chicken and collards available for take out. She didn’t. She had sold the last of her birds about three hours earlier, so we had to satisfy our General Store itch with some face time with Clark’s partner, Robin Smith, who told us the story behind the bear diorama and the slogan, “Grab a Root ‘n’ Growl.” (See picture.)

As a child growing up in California, Smith knew it was dinner time whenever her mom used to holler, “Grab a root and growl!” Smith, somewhat sheepishly, admits she never gave the phrase much thought until one day, in her teens, she suddenly realized that it had ursine connections. Up until then she always considered the phrase merely a call to chow.

Read More “The General Store Opens With a Growl” »