On a recent Friday morning, Bryan Duggan is asking the dozen or so people assembled in front of him what they think the grounds of an Ecuadorian roast smell like. Self-professed coffee philistines and scruffy, plaid-bedecked twentysomethings I recognize as baristas at Filter Coffeehouse and Big Bear Café offer up “tamarind,” “sweet potatoes,” and “moss” [...]
Good news! Molecular sandwich-making Rogue 24 chef R.J. Cooper is resting after making it through open-heart surgery. [WaPo] Bummed about the Twinkies bankruptcy? Head to Ted's Bulletin for the "reverse" version—the filling’s on the outside, not within the cake. [WaPo] Take a peek inside Mintwood Place [Eater DC] Fruit Bat has a new cocktails menu. [...]
In my first year as your trusty guide to matters culinary in Washington, I’ve sampled an awful lot of meals. I took down a 24-course tasting menu at R.J. Cooper’s Rogue 24, sampled an assembly-line Vietnamese hoagie at ShopHouse Southeast Asian Kitchen, and slurped ramen after braving the grueling wait at Toki Underground. But as [...]
A national restaurant workers’ organization on Thursday unveiled a handy new dining guide. This one rates restaurants not on their food, service and decor but instead on working conditions: things like wages, paid sick leave, occupational segregation—appetizing topics like that. A number of D.C.-area eateries are featured in the guide, not always in a positive [...]
Zagat’s updated "2012 Washington, DC/Baltimore Restaurants Survey," is officially released on Wednesday. In it, you'll find D.C.'s most popular restaurants listed as follows: Zaytinya, 2 Amys, Central, Citronelle, Inn at Little Washington. And the city's top rated places for food: Marcel’s (29 out of 30 points), Inn at Little Washington (29) Komi (29), CityZen (28), [...]
In the rarified world of restaurant criticism, it was once customary to wait a few months after a restaurant’s opening before reviewing the place—long enough to let staffers work out the kinks that critics will inevitably savage. By most rights, a heralded chef like José Andrés would be offered such a courtesy even today, in [...]
"It's really only us as Americans that focus on huge pieces of meat," Mike Costa, executive chef at Zaytinya, tells me when I ask him about the Mediterranean restaurant's new vegetable dishes. He admits, of course, that in places, people also kiss the toes of lamb roasting on an all-day spinning spit. "But if you [...]
With just one week to go until the debut of his much anticipated new Penn Quarter restaurant, Graffiato, Mike Isabella was feeling a little nervous about the pizza. "Because when we get busy, and you have 120 seats, people are going to order pizza," he says. Like many Italian-American chefs, Isabella considers pie-making an art. [...]
Easter Sunday arrives this weekend. What would Jesus do? Brunch, of course. An estimated 33 million Americans are expected to dine out on Sunday, according to the National Restaurant Association; 29 percent of them plan to attend brunch. The prophet himself would probably show up in sandals, but these places might actually require shoes: José [...]
Red Hook Lobster Pound truck: street food makes the Dining Guide WaPo's Tom Sietsema released his 2010 Dining Guide online yesterday, and in between other tasks, I've been combing through it to understand how the critic views the current restaurant scene. Before I get to the nuggets that I've mined, though, I should note what [...]
