If you ever had any doubts about a dish’s ability to cross cultural boundaries, all you need to do is look at the trajectory of chicken and waffles. Once considered a staple of soul-food joints, chicken and waffles has become a fixture at trendy neighborhood operations like Marvin and Creme, where gentrification has ensured that the dish enjoys a much wider audience.

It has even filtered down to genuine suburban haunts like Restaurant 3, the Southern-minded eatery in Clarendon that, believe it or not, does a version of C&W far superior to the one at Marvin. And for $15 a plate on the brunch menu, Restaurant 3 also does it a buck cheaper than Marvin.*

Read More “Dish of the Week: Chicken and Waffles at Restaurant 3″ »

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.

The influx of celebrity chefs to D.C. can excite local diners, but it can deflate local chefs, who see these carpetbaggers stealing their customers, their line cooks, maybe even their thunder. Back in 2007, before Eric Ripert or Michael Mina or even Alain Ducasse opened doors here, chef R.J. Cooper at Vidalia was one of the reigning badasses in the kitchen, fresh off his Mid-Atlantic Beard Award, which he split with Frank Ruta at Palena. But if Cooper and/or Vidalia have suffered since these culinary hawks have swooped into town, you wouldn’t know it from eating at this downtown institution. Cooper, in fact, seems to be cooking with a renewed passion since the competition increased. My most recent meal at Vidalia included a number of dishes that blew me away, notably a pigtail croquette with strawberry-rhubarb mostarda and an artistic plate of mix-and-match bites, from raw cubes of hamachi to squares of lime gelee to tiny diced pieces of watermelon to little slivers of jalapeño. Cooper even plated something I had never seen before—a deep-fried blowfish from the lower Chesapeake, commonly known as the “sugar toad.” It tasted a thousand times better than the name would suggest.

 Vidalia, 1990 M St. NW, (202) 659-1990

Chef Rusty Holman, the chef at Eatonville

My tablemate and I are sitting at a two-top by the large picture window at Eatonville, which provides a semi-comfortable, climate-controlled view of the parade of mini-skirts and flesh that walks up and down the bustling 14th Street NW corridor.  We’re half way through our appetizers when the food runner brings our entrees. She seems oblivious to the fact that we’re still eating our first course; she’s also a little slow on the basic laws of physics. Our tiny table barely contains all the plates she has just unceremoniously dropped off, her job here done.

Read More “Spot Check: Eatonville” »

When last we checked in with Eric Ziebold — to hear him defend the name of his latest project, South by Southwest, which is actually a restaurant, not an excuse to get drunk in Austin — the esteemed chef said the Southern-minded operation would open in early summer.

Scratch that.

During a phone conversation yesterday, Ziebold said that South by Southwest, which replaces Cafe MoZU at the Mandarin Oriental, wouldn’t open until September. The problem, Ziebold said, is that the original designer envisioned a “bold, bright” space. Unfortunately, that wasn’t Ziebold’s vision.

“We were looking to make a statement by not making a statement. You know what I mean?” Ziebold told Y&H. “I’m a less-is-more kind of person…It wasn’t going in that direction.”

Read More “Mandarin’s South by Southwest Is Running Behind Schedule” »

Imagine Y&H’s surprise when, just two hours after posting this item, chef Eric Ziebold was on the phone defending the decision to rename Cafe MoZU and identify it by the restaurant’s location within the District.

Ziebold was not at all defensive. He even agreed with my basic premise: that MoZU’s new name, South by Southwest, said more about the hotel where the restaurant is housed than the cuisine itself, which presumably will funnel Eastern Shore flavors. But he wanted me to understand where he was coming from. His concept, as you might expect from the City Paper’s top toque, was pretty well thought out.

Read More “Eric Ziebold Responds to Y&H’s Pot Shot at South by Southwest” »

Note: Busboys & Poets owner Andy Shallal is taking an Iron Chef approach to hiring the chef for his forthcoming Eatonville, a Southern-oriented restaurant that pays homage to Zora Neale Hurston. This is the second in a series of blog posts chronicling the competition. This series will not announce the winner; it will be revealed later in the City Paper.

After four previous rounds and God knows how many tastings in CulinAerie’s smaller classroom, the competition for Eatonville’s chef had come down to two men. Both had grown up in the South, which no doubt helped them grasp the cuisine they were expected to prepare, but both chefs also had dramatically different personalities. One had the gift of gab, the other a gift for silence.

Read More “Finale from the Eatonville Chef Contest: We Have a Winner” »

Note: Busboys & Poets owner Andy Shallal is taking an Iron Chef approach to hiring the chef for his forthcoming Eatonville, a Southern-oriented restaurant that pays homage to Zora Neale Hurston. This is the second in a series of blog posts chronicling the competition. This series will not announce the winner; it will be revealed later in the City Paper.

The chef, one of five left standing in Andy Shallal’s unorthodox hiring process, didn’t waste a second letting the judges know that he had absorbed their criticisms from the previous round. He had taken the fuss out of his Southern-minded food. “The tutu came off,” he told the judges.

Read More “Scene 2 from Eatonville Chef Contest: Something for Vegetarians” »

Note: Busboys & Poets owner Andy Shallal is taking an Iron Chef approach to hiring the chef for his forthcoming Eatonville, a Southern-oriented restaurant that pays homage to Zora Neale Hurston. This is the first in a series of blog posts chronicling the competition. This series will not announce the winner; it will be revealed later in the City Paper.

Six cooks have gathered at CulineAerie, the new cooking school near Thomas Circle, to see if they can earn the top prize in Andy Shallal’s unusual hiring competition: the executive chef gig at Eatonville, a job that comes with a $75,000 a year salary. The candidates have been whittled down from the more than 200 who originally applied, and before this session is over, these half-dozen will be further downsized to four.

Their task for this second phase of the competition? Prepare fried chicken and a Southern-minded sandwich, plus sides.

Read More “Scene 1 from the Eatonville Chef Contest: Fried Chicken” »