Shut Up, Foodies! is a delightfully cheeky site — sort of the thinking man's Food Network Humor. It's a destination that loves to skewer the pretensions of the food world, as declared in SUF's in-your face manifesto, which reads in part: Your chickens won't save the world and we don't want the life story of [...]
If you want Ethiopian cooking, you head to 9th Street NW. If you want Vietnamese, you program your GPS for the Eden Center. But Mexican food? You might as well fly to San Antonio. At least that’s how desperate I sometimes feel when discussing Washington’s south-of-the-border offerings. Seriously, when one of the area’s favorite “Mexican” [...]
Let me acknowledge from the start that this is an unfair comparison. You can't begin to compare the costs and value of a Penn Quarter Mexican restaurant run by a celebrity chef with a suburban taqueria designed for Latinos. Still, look at the difference in these photos: The top one is the pancita de puerco [...]
First it was a Penn Quarter chatter who wanted to know why everyone kisses José Andrés' ass. Now it's Restaurant Rater, DanniZ, who takes down the celebrity chef for charging for chips and salsa at Oyamel. (To be clear, the first round of chips and salsa is free here; after that, you pay $4 per [...]
Tacos took off in D.C. in 2009 Good God, I can even begin to wrap my mind around all the things that happened on the D.C. dining scene during the past 12 months. Fortunately, not all of them were as apocalyptic as the closing of your favorite restaurant or the passing of Ben Ali. For [...]
Osiris Hoil tells me that he's from Yucatan, Mexico, near Merida, and I tell him that I just visited the peninsula this summer. We instantly bond. Specifically, we bond over the famous longaniza from Valladolid, these long ropes of sour and smokey sausages sold from roadside stands throughout the central part of the Yucatan. Then, [...]
In response to yesterday's admittedly cheap-and-easy post on Pica Taco's name (hey, I blame Loose Lips for any cultural slights caused by this!), Stefanie Gans at Endless Simmer wrote in to explain the true inspiration behind the shop's moniker. Writes Gans (mostly known as Gansie in local food circles):
Tacos, I'm beginning to think, are the trendiest food in town, which, if nothing else, helps justify my reckless appetite for these hand-held babies. The evidence: At Masa 14, I devoured the brilliantly conceived and simply executed pork belly al pastor taco, in which a sweet, slightly deflated Chinese steamed bun stands in for corn [...]
Part of what I love about ethnic eateries (you know, I'm beginning to hate the term "ethnic" in conjunction with restaurants, but I can't come up with an umbrella term that works in its place) is the sense of being dropped into another world. To me, it's part of the pleasure of eating at small, [...]
The jukebox is thumping at Taqueria La Placita, this humble Hyattsville operation with the rusting-metal mariachi frogs perched on the roof. The song is Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," whose bass line is almost rattling the wood tables, where Latino families have gathered on a Saturday afternoon to socialize and sample some of the best tacos in the metro [...]
