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” »

For those who have pawed through Y&H’s 2009 Dining Guide, you know that I’m a serious fan of Present, a Vietnamese restaurant unlike any other in the area. Y&H, of course, is just one of a number of media sources beating the drum for Present.

But what do eaters who don’t get paid to chew think of the place? Here’s what Restaurant Rater RMF9 had to say about Present, which is really a comment more about the price of becoming famous:

Read More “Vox Populi: Restaurant Raters on Present in Falls Church” »

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.

If you haven’t yet had the chance to dine under the covered patio at Sea Side, now is the perfect time to sample this Eden Center joint’s unique Cajun-Vietnamese approach to crawfish. As we enter the tail end of the season, crawfish are just now reaching full maturity, which means they’re big and sweet and perfect for owner Tom Vo’s Vietnamese take on Cajun mudbugs. Vo’s crawdaddies are marinated in garlic, ginger, scallions, tangerine juice, lime juice, and fish sauce—that great umami agent of the East—before hitting the kitchen pots roiling with Cajun seasonings, corn, and whatnot. I wasn’t even halfway through my first bag of boiled mudbugs when I decided, right then and there, that these are the best-tasting crawfish anywhere, even without the array of tableside condiments that the Vietnamese so love. Now, if by chance you do miss the crawdad season, which ends in July, you can always check out Sea Side’s version of the soft-shell crab, another delicacy just reaching it prime. Sea Side batters its softie, deep-fries it, and quickly tosses it in a blazing-hot wok with sugar, ginger, scallions, onions, jalapeños, and garlic. Hate to sound like a broken record—hey, do you kids even know what that term means?—but Sea Side’s Vietnamese version is unrivaled in the area.

Sea Side Crab House, 6799 Wilson Blvd., Suite 5, Falls Church, (703) 241-2722

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 area’s best Vietnamese restaurant never would have materialized without the persistence of Gene Nguyen, who’s among the most unlikely candidates in Northern Virginia to set out on this lofty path. Until he opened Present in Falls Church last year, Nguyen was best known for peddling pho and running a nightclub in the Eden Center.

But seven years ago at his nightclub, Nguyen met a group of folks visiting from Vietnam; they told him about this chef back home who’s been captivating diners wherever he cooks. Nguyen dutifully recorded Luong Tran’s contact information and began communicating with the chef. They talked. They e-mailed. They traded pictures and tips and recipes. After a while, Nguyen finally felt comfortable enough to drop the big one: Would Tran like to cook in America?

No way. Tran was happy staying in Vietnam.

Read More “Young & Hungry Dining Guide by the Day: Present” »

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.

This pho parlor in the Eden Center turns out stellar noodle soups. My most recent order came swimming with thin slices of richly fatty brisket, crunchy/chewy tripe, perfumed beef broth, and a garnish plate brimming with sliced jalapeños, Thai basil, bean sprouts, and even that rare saw-toothed leaf, culantro. Pho Saigon also pays attention to its noodles; they’re soft, supple, and so easy to slurp. This tiny shop, overstuffed with trinkets and pictures and boxes of kitchen supplies near the bathroom, would remind you of a crowded Vietnamese street stall if not for the overhead flat-screen TV set to the Speed Network, where racing school buses provide a little redneck comfort. Yep, you get a melting pot here along with your noodle soup.

Pho Saigon, 6795 Wilson Blvd., Falls Church, (703) 677-0523

In researching this week’s Young & Hungry column on pho in the District, I had a long conversation with Gene Nguyen, owner of the Pho Hot shops in Annandale and Centreville. As  I noted in the column, Nguyen hopes to open one, if not more, pho parlors in the District, but in order to make the economics work in the pricey neighborhoods where he’d like to drop anchor, Nguyen plans to make the Vietnamese noodle-soup experience more gourmet.

If you think that sounds odd, given the stark, white-washed ambiance of most suburban pho houses, consider what Nguyen did with Vietnamese cuisine in general. He’s the brains behind Present, the hyper-fresh, ingredient-driven operation in Falls Church. He wants to put a similar spin on pho in the District. Nguyen wants to build a pho parlor with an open kitchen where diners can literally review the meats they would like to add to their noodle soup.

“You have to add something to [the experience], to attract people a little bit more,” Nguyen told Y&H. “It should be a little bit of a show.”

Read More “Gene Nguyen May Know the Secret to Building a Successful Pho House in D.C.” »

The District’s latest pho parlor is not really one at all. It’s Wagshal’s Delicatessen on Massachusetts Avenue NW, where executive chef Ann-Marie James has devised an ingenious take-out version of the Vietnamese noodle soup. Actually, it’s less a take-out version, which implies that Wagshal’s pho is ready to eat, than it is the adult version of Lunchables.

The sectioned container includes a bowl of homemade beef broth, parboiled rice noodles, raw slices of prime eye of round, sprouts, jalapeno slices, raw red and Spanish onion rings, a small container of Sriracha and hoisin sauce, a wedge of lime, and leaves of cilantro, mint, and Thai basil. Once you get the package home, you remove the small bowl of broth and microwave it for a few minutes. While it’s nuking, you arrange your preferred ingredients at the bottom of the larger section of the plastic container and then dump the hot broth over them.

Voila, pho!

Read More “It’s My Pho in a Box” »

Chef Hoa Lai of Four Sisters

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 members of the Lai family have understood one thing better than any other Vietnamese restaurateur: They’re not in Vietnam anymore. So while their institution’s initial success was based on its ability to appeal to transplanted Vietnamese at the Eden Center, the restaurant has shown an ability to adapt to its adopted country. I don’t mean to imply that chef Hoa Lai has sold out Vietnam’s cuisine to cater to the American palate, because he hasn’t. But the Lai family hails from South Vietnam, an area that has two distinct advantages in competing in the American marketplace: It prefers sweet-and-sour flavors over the chile heat of central Vietnam or the hard saltiness of the north, and the region has shown a historical willingness to adopt outside influences. The Lai family has carried on that tradition well, whether emphasizing the fruits and sugars that play to America’s sweet tooth or dropping the odder ingredients that don’t play at all in the United States. Now, the family has built a new restaurant outside of the Eden Center, a gorgeous space full of dark woods and yellow hues, designed to recall the French colonial period in Vietnam. With this, and its other moves large and small, the Lai family has put Vietnamese food squarely in the American mainstream, and it looks great there.

Addendum: To learn more about the Lai family’s rise to prominence, read my cover story, Exit from Eden.

 Four Sisters, 8190 Strawberry Lane, Suite 1, Falls Church, Va., (703) 539-8566

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

If you live in the District and suddenly get a case of the Pho-king Shakes — that weak-in-the-knees condition that will be cured only with a bowl of rice noodles, fatty brisket, raw round steak, and veggies drowning in beef broth — your remedy requires a long Metro ride to some gray strip-mall outpost in the ‘burbs. It’s like the coke addict who has to brave the projects for a fix.

Fortunately, some noodles houses have now popped up in the District to satisfy our cravings for pho, including Saigon Bistro off Dupont Circle, which features not one but two chefs who recently emigrated from Vietnam. Huong T. Van handles soup duties here, and her offerings include not only pho but also hu tieu (a rice noodle soup with seafood or pork stock) and mi (an egg noodle soup with seafood or pork stock).

Read More “Is It Now Possible to Get Good Pho in the District? Well, Sometimes.” »

One by one, over the next several 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 was when you return.

How many banh mi shops bake their own bread? Until I visited this Vietnamese deli in Falls Church, I would have said zero, which is strange, if not downright wrong, given the banh mi’s roots in French bread-making culture. Other shops may serve better pâtés or prepare more interesting spreads, but none bake their own mini-baguettes, as do the folks at Banh Mi D.C. Sandwich. Every morning, dozens upon dozens of fresh rolls are pulled from the oven racks, ready to serve as the base for the shop’s 24 different sandwiches. The wheat-flour breads are really more like crusty rolls than baguettes, which is fine. They still serve their purpose, which is to provide that all-important crunch when you bite into them. The key here is to demand that your sandwich-maker add extra garnishes—crisp pickled slivers of radish and carrot, flame-throwing rounds of jalapeños, a small garden of cilantro—to ensure that there is harmonic convergence among protein, vegetable, and bread.

 Banh Mi D.C. Sandwich, 3103 Graham Road, Falls Church, (703) 205-9300

Photo by Darrow Montgomery