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.

Before its move into more spacious digs just down the road in Wheaton, Nava Thai was everyone’s favorite hole-in-the-wall, that secret little place in the back of a cramped parking lot where natives and foodies alike went for an authentic taste of Thailand. These days at the new location, the waits can stretch to 30 minutes or longer, as if Nava had somehow morphed into the Cheesecake Factory. Some, in fact, will tell you that the place might as well call itself the PadThai Factory. Don’t believe it. While the space may seem flat, Suchart and Ladavan Srigatesook’s cooking remains vibrant. The floating market noodle soup still sends my mouth to the burn unit. The tom kha soup still curls my tongue with its sharp galangal sourness. And the sweet heat of the panang curry still makes all other versions seem like children’s plates. The wait, in other words, is worth it.

 Addenda:  Y&H’s original review of Nava Thai from 2007, and the Y&H column, from earlier this year, about the restaurant’s move into a larger space.

Nava Thai, 11301 Fern St., Wheaton, Md., (240) 430-0495

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

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.

Let me boil this recommendation down to two words: patty melt. For all their innovative flavor combinations, chefs Jonathan Krinn and Jon Mathieson have devised a rather safe, if regal, interpretation of the humble hamburger melt. The patty in their version features ground, exquisitely beefy culotte, which is topped with two cheeses and black truffles, and then pressed between buttery, beautifully fried slices of crustless brioche. I ate this fine example of handheld decadence with a big fruity glass of Lopez de Heredia Rioja, for the kind of lunch that business types would have downed several decades ago, when excess equaled success. You can discover far more subtle delicacies on the chefs’ dinner menu, but whatever you choose, I predict great things for this pricy Tysons playpen as Krinn and Mathieson continue to explore the high and low ends of American gastronomy.

Inox, 1800 Tysons Blvd., Suite 70, McLean, Va., (703) 790-4669

Photo courtesy of Inox

A meaty homage to Michel Richard?

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.

Unlike some fine-dining restaurants that aim for the conspicuous-consumption set, Eventide has carved out a different niche for itself: It’s Arlington’s eccentric foodie destination. Eventide combines Komi’s OCD-like attention to detail with the chic intensity of the Source’s downstairs lounge. What’s more, chef Miles Vaden strikes me as a toque who will never be satisfied with his work. His menu reads (and tastes) like a man who pushes things about as far as you can in the typically conservative Clarendon dining scene. His bison carpaccio already assumes an air of Michel Richard; like a red-meat version of Richard’s famous “Mosaic,” Vaden plates thin circles of crimson-bright bison meat on a square of white china so that the dish looks like some monochromatic Pop-Art piece. The appetizer’s flavors and textures, however, are altogether original—the crunch of citrus-marinated jicama, the bite of ancho-chocolate mole, the salty umami of Parmesan, the plodding meatiness of the bison. While not as jaw-dropping as the carpaccio, other dishes on Vaden’s menu display enough invention and technique to justify any wild-eyed optimism you may have about this restaurant. Hell, even the upstairs dining room at Eventide, a former meeting hall for the Odd Fellows fraternal organization, strikes an odd, engaging tone. The ceiling is high, and the walls have an exposed, terra-cotta austerity about them. The long elegant drapes and the intimidating emptiness all around you—above your head and between the widely spaced tables—complete the image: You feel like you’re dining in some cool medieval castle.

Eventide, 3165 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, (703) 276-3165

Photo by Darrow Montgomery