| Address | 950 15th St., Washington, DC 20005 |
|---|---|
| Hours | Mon-Thur, 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m., Fri, 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m., Sat, 12 p.m.-11 p.m., Sunday Brunch, 10 a.m.-2:30 p.m., Sunday Dinner, 5:30 p.m.-10 p.m. |
| Phone | (202) 393-4499 |
| Fax | (202) 393-7134 |
| Website | http://www.gbrowns.com |
This is a pretty overrated spot for southern style home cooking. The food was exponentially better first time I went in 2005 than the last time I went about a month ago. Since exploring other American style restaurants that serve southern cooking, I have realized that the fried green tomatoes (their signature appetizer) are fairly greasy and soggy as is most of the food on the menu. While everything on the menu is tasty, be forewarned to only eat small portions to avoid a stomach ache. Also the service is pretty slow and the restaurant gets extremely noisy.
We went there with 2 friends for a brunch and it was the best brunch I have ever had. The buffet is excellent, I still remember the taste of the spicy potatoes and the eggs benedict...mmmm..You can just eat with the buffet of appetizers and dessert (great chocolate fountain with fresh fruits and biscotti to dip in) and keep the main course to take away.I highly recommand this place for a sunday brunch.
I recently celebrated my birthday here and it was a very nice experience. The waiter acknowledged that it was my birthday when he took us to our table and the food reminded me of my family's southern cooking. Try the fried green tomatoes and the catfish. Yum!
Beautifl Decor, Knowledgeable & friendly staff, Nice portions, Great food. Personal Fav is the Fried Green Tomatoes. Celebrated a birthday dinner there, it was an overall great time.
The food quality and quantity is excellent -- for lunch and dinner. Service is attentive and the decor is as pretty is ever. This is a DC "must do" -- and while their food and execution has been hit or miss for the past several years -- under the extraordinary guidance of the new executive chef, the restaurant is well on its way back to its glory days. While it has recently won several awards for its brunch service, including best brunch in DC, I concur with the other rater who indicates that they should cut back to all menu or all buffet -- both is just too overwhelming. Overall, I highly recommend it.
Georgia Browns is a wonderful place to celebrate a special occasion. I have been there several times and the food and service were sublime during each visit.
This is perhaps the best restaurant I've eaten at in DC and one of my favorites in general. The fried green tomatoes are to die for. They're stuffed with an herb thing and on a bed of vegetable salad that is a perfect complement to it! Amazing.
The cornbread is great, the seafood stew thing is great...the cobbler is amazing.
The she crab soup is very rich. The chicken fried steak was not good.
Sunday brunch at Georgia Brown's is a very popular event. It was packed! Too packed. They squeezed us into a tiny space, in what felt like an afterthought, which was not very comfortable and very loud. Since part of this brunch is a buffet, it was a bit difficult to maneuver.
There is WAY too much food offered overall for this brunch - course 1 at the buffet, course 2 off the menu (which most people just box up and take home) and course 3 (dessert) from the buffet. I'd rather just have all buffet or all menu, personally. The buffet was not great for vegetarians - but adequate - and the menu only had one vegetarian option (which is also one of GB's dinner options - I would have liked something I had never eaten before). The jazz was so-so. Overall, it was a fun, festive atmosphere and good value for the price (about $35 per person). You don't have to eat again for the rest of the day.
Not a huge vegetarian selection, but a great sensitivity to vegetarian diets. Waiter had good information on what was vegetarian and what wasn't -- and volunteered that information: warned against the complimentary biscuits (the corn bread was fine, though). Special vegetarian market vegetable soup and vegetarian black-eyed peas cakes were wonderful. Holiday wine special (Garcia Zinfandel) and dessert (key lime pie) were also very good.
Georgia Brown's looks like your typical expense-account restaurant downtown but the menu is unique and the prices are very inviting. So are the portions. This place would be too good to be true if not for the fact that the food, while unique in offering, was poor in execution.
I grew up in Chicago. I am not southern. I have never seen grits, my tomatoes have always come unfried and red, and I'm not sure what the first chicken in chicken fried chicken is there for. My boyfriend, however, is from Kentucky, and Friday night was a celebration dinner for him, not me. So I found myself at Georgia Brown's with a plate of cornbread and biscuits in front of me. These were delicious slathered in peach butter and I had decided to begin affecting a southern drawl but changed my mind when I realized I was sweating in a very un-southern belle like manner due to our table's proximity to the restaurant's entrance and the summer weather outside of it. Fried green tomatoes followed the bread. I'm not too familiar with them, so I don't know if they always come with cream cheese fried right in, but these were possibly the world's most perfect food. I tend to say that about anything I'm currently eating, but this time I really mean it. As our waitress took the plate away, I noticed that she was mumbling to herself. Watching her then, I became aware that every time she walked by, she was pointing at each one of her tables, mouth moving as she passed. Minutes later I saw her circling, confused and somewhat aimlessly, with a glass of water before heading back to the kitchen, water still in hand. Later, the couple next to us began to mock her after she stood at their table and talked to herself for several minutes. I was not allowed to mock with them, however, as my boyfriend found her very attractive. The rest of the meal was uneventful. I had the grouper, which was good but not terribly exciting. My boyfriend had the fried chicken, which was excellent, but it came with collard greens, another southern dish I'd never heard of but now know to be vile. It seems to me to be common sense that a spinach-like flavor cannot be masked by a bacon fat-like flavor, but, coming as I do from a place where the sauce goes on top of the pizza cheese and ketchup does not belong on hot dogs, I'm not sure if I have room to talk. I'm told that the collard greens were actually very good and that the problem was me, not them. This is probably true. I'm not sure if I'm a convert to southern food, but I do know that I left feeling a little sick from eating so much, and that must mean I liked it.
This is nice restaurant, but not great value for money when compared to other similarly priced restaurants in the DC area. The ingredients are quality and the taste is good, but this is a big place that seems a little bit on autopilot.
My wife had a crabcake which was delicious, but she had to pick numerous pieces of shell out. I had the filet mignon, which was good but not nearly as good as some other places in town. My $7 salad was tasty but tiny; I would have felt gipped about it's pathetic size if I'd been the one paying.
The waiter was annoying. He kept trying to refill our wine glasses every 2 minutes. It was so bad that I had to shoo him away. I was offended that we were not permitted to eat and drink in peace. The restaurant seemed concerned primarily with foisting more of their highest margin product (ie, wine) onto us. Hey, back off dudes. It's about the customer, not about you.
After eating here for dinner and lunch, we decided to try the brunch. Overall, it was good - not great, but good. The best element of it is that you are entitled to a complete entree selection if you order the brunch buffet. The buffet itself contains traditional, Southern-inspired breakfast foods (sausage, bacon, grits, country ham, etc), the omelette bar is wonderful and fresh. The grits stand out - they use butter and cream - as the best item bar none. In general, I prefer more non-breakfast foods on the buffet, but having an entree to take home later and eat for dinner was a good value. I'd recommend it, but make sure to contact your cardiologist on Monday morning!!!
The service here is always impeccable. The food is delicious, too. Always get dessert here. In season, the berries with chocolate and raspberry sauce is a perfect ending to a heavy meal.
This is by far one of my favorite restaurants in the Washington, DC area. I have been so many times, I've lost count. The serive is great, the atmosphere is something to be looked at everytime like it was your first time there and the food is excellent. Look up at the ceiling! Instead of your usual bread and butter, they set biscuits and cornbread sticks with a rich, sweet, creamy butter out on each table. I usually never get an appetizer b/c I can't put the bread down. I leave that to whoever is accompanying me and sneak some of theirs. The dinner is delightful and well proportioned. I didn't like the gumbo, it was too dense and the consistency wasn't right. The taste of the actual ingredients was bland. Other than that, everything is heavenly. I've had the Southern Fried Chicken, which came with greens and mashed potatoes. I felt like I was at home on Sunday evening. I do not eat greens out too many places because most places cannot season them like Mom. I have had their dish with the andouille sausage, ham, and grits. Perfect flavor rotation in your mouth. I've had the duck with chicken and rice. Duck is usually too dry or too greasy; not there. I'm a duck fan when I eat there. I have gone during restaurant week. That is a true palatial treat. The prices are very reasonable by themselves but that just adds to the excitement of going. The drinks are made just right, just to your liking. I think I have tried every specialty drink they make. I have never been disappointed here in terms of an overall experience or separate items. Please go here at least 5 times in your life.
Georgia Brown's has a brunch formula that confused and disappointed me. The restaurant seems determined to feed you not just for a meal, but for a day. You are stuck with the $27 package and with it receive not only all-you-can-eat brunch and dessert buffets, but also a main dish from the regular lunch menu. All drinks -- even coffee and juice -- are charged in addition to that. Our server said up front that the main dish could be served in its to go container, and indeed most diners were taking theirs to go. When I asked to be charged only for the buffet brunch, I was charged just $6 less than the standard package.
Some aspects of the brunch showed potential for loveliness, like the music of the jazz trio, which was the perfect volume and style for a Sunday noon. Some of the food was truly excellent, like the grits and the sausage. But I was more struck by the pedestrian, even downright bad quality of many of the offerings -- dry, greasy french toast, ordinary tartlettes, less-than-fresh fruit. And the service was slow and somewhat surly. My coffee cup was too often empty, and my silverware disappeared more than once. Nor does Georgia Brown's have a grip on its table rotation, as we waited quite a while for our reserved table.
Georgia Brown's is a lovely place for lunch or dinner. Some of the brunch menu showed promise. But the present formula does not impress -- in short, it was a rip off, and not a very tasty one.
Georgia Brown's serves good sized portions of well prepared food, situating it in between the high-end, tiny portion and cheap, cheap-tasting but large portion establishments one usually finds in DC. Professional and pleasant service and lovely ambiance round out the experience.
I went to Georgia Brown's for the second time to try their special Cherry Blossom Festival menu -- having had a good enough meal to recommend a second visit. It is my great hope that they might bring some of these special menu items into the regular menu, especially the exceptional corn fritters with a sour cherry marmalade. This alone got my top "texture" rating -- they were fried but not oily, with the slightly crisp exterior contrasting nicely with the warm soft dough and the chewy corn kernels -- and each bite's various textures softened only slightly by the sauce, which added layers of texture and taste of its own, bits of fruit sweet and firm in a slighly tangy sauce. An exceptional dish! The salad was quite good with a cherry dressing, and my rockfish cooked nicely with a wonderful mound of spinach (my favorite) and a huge hill of mashed potatoes. Boyfriend chomped happily on pork chops which I would never make at home and complemented them highly for the meat and the cherry sauce. Desserts were fine -- cheesecake was standard, bread pudding better, neither worth writing more about. Service was the only downer -- I ordered the specialty cherry cocktail, a chocolate-cherry concoction, and several sips into my Shirley-Temple-like drink thought to add where the chocolate was. Turns out the drink was a disaster but menus had already been printed before it had been tasted (a strange sequence?); so he delivered me the substitute drink -- not offering that information before, or offering to compensate me after. The manager came around during the meal and when he heard this story comped the drink, quite appropriately, we thought. But this level of sneakiness is something that should be addressed -- I'm quite capable of deciding whether I want the substitute offering on my very own.
Went to GB's for the restaurant week $30.04 dinner. Definitely got a bang for your buck. I don't usually use butter, but the peach-honey butter served with the biscuits and cornbread was to die for. The corn chowder was impeccable. And, to top it all off, I almost melted when I ate the pumpkin bread pudding with caramel. I couldn't have asked for more. Service was excellent, meals were timely and the peach martini was great, just a bit strong.
Eating at Georgia Brown's is like dinning in a surreal pumpkin patch. The metal work creeping along the ceiling is intriguing and slightly offsetting, however, all is made right by the attention and care of the experienced wait staff. Presentation was playful and without pretension. The only disappointment of the evening was the size and lack of variety in wine selections. All in all it is the best Shrimp and Grits outside of Charleston South Carolina.
