WaPo checks in with chef Jeff Tunks about his new side-by-side eateries, Burger Tap & Shake and District Commons, in the West End. Both venues are tentatively scheduled to open this week. Some highlights: the burger meat at BTS is "a mix of organic, wet-aged whole chuck roasts and briskets, ground in-house (a 3:1 ratio)" [...]
Ashok Bajaj, the D.C. restaurateur who owns 701, Bibiana, Ardeo + Bardeo, Bombay Club, Oval Room, and Rasika, is known for his nightly circuit of his businesses, checking in on his dining rooms, chefs, general managers, and loyal customers. With a valet stand at each of his restaurants, he doesn't really need to worry about [...]
I have a love-hate relationship with pasta. I think a bit of my mother’s distaste for pasta-heavy dishes has rubbed off on me—her sourness was fostered in a Bavarian refugee camp with box after box of pasta from U.S. care packages. When I’m in the mood for something creamy, a bowl full of linguini carbonara [...]
While it's hard to quantify whether today's weather as "a big snow," it's easy to agree that today is a great day for soup. For me, a giant bowl of soup with chunky vegetables—with some sort of cream base—always seems like a great idea as winter weather sets in. But I've been in the mood [...]
Chef Ris Lacoste’s mentor, the Beard-winning Bob Kinkead, always pushed his prize pupil to open a diner. Kinkead wasn’t trying to suggest that Lacoste lacks the skills to lead her own fine-dining establishment. He was acknowledging something true about the woman who kept his restaurants humming for years: Lacoste always wanted her own diner—or, more [...]
During an interview I conducted late last year with Ris Lacoste, the fixture for a decade at 1789, the chef revealed some of the inspiration behind her new place, RIS, in the West End: Bob Kinkead, my dearest friend and mentor, said, ‘Ris, you look for an underserved neighborhood, you know.’ He would always say, [...]
Chef Ris Lacoste cooked her last meal at 1789 on New Year's Eve 2005. She had decided to leave the Georgetown fine-dining destination owned by Clyde's Restaurant Group to open her own place. Nearly four years later, she finally did. She and co-owner Mitchell Herman debuted RIS on Dec. 7 in the West End, forever quieting the tedious [...]
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 [...]
The Standard-Times, which covers the southern Massachusetts area where Ris Lacoste grew up, profiles the chef who has been working for years now to open her own restaurant, Ris, in the West End. It's a fine, in-depth look at the former 1789 chef's history, including this delightful part about the teen-age Lacoste working at Friendly's:
