We're halfway through the calendar, so it's time to check in to see how accurately Young & Hungry has predicted the 2011 food scene so far. OUT   →   IN Burgers   → Hot Dogs Verdict: No. No new specialty dog shops have opened yet–just a cart called Frank–but Shake Shack is now in Dupont. It [...]

Bethesda magazine delivers some very good news for lovers of good soup. Ren's Ramen, which shut its doors in Bethesda last year because of increasing rent, has relocated to Wheaton. This should make Tim Carman, who has professed his adoration for Ren's, very happy. As he wrote for Young & Hungry at the time: As [...]

Food trucks flooded our streets and Twitter feeds. Connecticut Avenue welcomed a whole lot of ground-meat options (and then kicked one out.) In an age of comfort food, family-style Italian filled our carb-deprived bellies. But will mobile food, burgers and comfort food dominate 2011? Will small plates finally die? Here's our break down on what [...]

My colleague, Lydia DePillis, in her Housing Complex column this week, examines the what-ifs related to downtown Wheaton, the unincorporated Montgomery County crossroads full of small businesses—including many ethnic restaurants. It's also slated for redevelopment. "The tricky thing is, in a few very important ways, [many] want Wheaton to change as little as possible," DePillis [...]

It was hard enough swallowing the idea that my beloved hole-in-the-wall Nava Thai had moved into more spacious digs, which essentially forced the owners to expand their concise, noodle-soup-heavy menu to cater to the expansive new location. But now this: The Wheaton operation has added sushi to its offerings. Several months back, Suchart and Ladavan [...]

This week's Young & Hungry column takes a look at two very different dim sum parlors, Hollywood East Cafe in Wheaton and Ping Pong Dim Sum in Chinatown. One is a local, family-owned operation, the other an import from London. We're publishing the full version of the column in the blog, so that you can [...]

This week's Young & Hungry column takes a look at two different dim sum palaces: the sleek, lounge-y, London-import Ping Pong Dim Sum in Chinatown and the informal, family-oriented Hollywood East Cafe, which recently reopened in the Westfield Shopping Center. In preparation for the story, I asked Hollywood East owner Janet Yu if she would [...]

Every time Hollywood East Cafe owner Janet Yu thought she was on the verge of reopening her esteemed dim sum parlor, there'd be yet another delay. Maybe it was because the cranes needed to install some rooftop units weren't allowed to clog up the Westfield Shopping Center parking lot during Christmas season. Or maybe it [...]

Maybe this trend has been around awhile and I've just overlooked it, but this weekend while I was tooling around Wheaton, I found not one but two restaurants that mix Latin and Vietnamese food. Technically this isn't fusion fusion, in that these establishments aren't combining ingredients from the two cuisines into something unique. It's more like [...]

Hollywood East Cafe's construction delays would be almost comical if they weren't costing owner Janet Yu money. She has already started paying rent on her space inside the Westfield Shopping Center in Wheaton, and she could really use some revenue to offset her overhead. "It better be [open] before the end of the month," Yu [...]