A website devoted to eating in DC
When DGS Deli closed last year, we lost the area’s most ambitious Jewish deli. You may not have noticed the vacuum if you’re craving a bagel and lox with a schmear or a pastrami on rye. Places like Call Your Mother, Ivy City Smokehouse and Stachowski’s can scratch those itches. But matzo ball soup is different. Like chopped liver and ...READ MORE »
Fried rice is having a moment. It’s gone from familiar standby to popping up on every street corner, like a late ’90s Wall Street Deli. Part of the reason is mutability. The only constants are rice and a pan. After that, it’s chef’s choice. Fried rice will take just about whatever ingredients and flavor profile you throw at it. You can ...READ MORE »
Posted September 15, 2019 I recently started a strict new diet with a single loophole: I can eat whatever I want for the blog. Which makes it the perfect time to put together my definitive rating of DC-area falafel shops. There’s nothing that makes a diet more bearable than a comprehensive survey of fried chickpea-fritter sandwiches. Stay tuned for next week’s ...READ MORE »
I love year-end retrospectives and “best of” lists. That used to include the montage Facebook puts together as my “Year-End Review.” But for some reason Amazon, Apple and Netflix started showing me the exact same montage, so it’s lost some of its punch. Which means I had to make my own year-end review. I just scrolled through the food pics on ...READ MORE »
It’s time for a new top-25 list. How do I know? Well, for starters, my current list has two Mike Isabella restaurants on it. Not only have they all closed, but it was the better part of a year before that since I’d set foot in one. More importantly, the current list doesn’t reflect the continuing froth of the DC ...READ MORE »
If you had 2017 or early 2018 in the office pool predicting when the DC restaurant bubble would burst, sorry, you’re out of contention (but not as quickly as me for picking Virginia to get to the Final Four). The openings of ambitious new restaurants just keep coming. And while there are always some losses along the way, it’s hard ...READ MORE »
Welcome to my first installment of Rick’s Cheap Eats. It won’t be the last. There are a lot of holes left to fill, including Korean, Vietnamese, BBQ, ‘Po boys, and kabobs (see separate posts on pizza and burgers). But these are some of my longtime favorites. What I love about these places is that they do so much with so little. ...READ MORE »
It seems like you can’t get away from burgers these days. Look at the menu the next time you sit down to dinner. If you don’t see a burger, enjoy the sushi or the vindaloo. It wasn’t that long ago that things were different. In 2001, Five Guys was a local mini-chain with five locations scattered around the DC area. It ...READ MORE »
DC was once a sleepy pizza town. We didn’t have much of an identity or an iconic pizza style. Sure, we had lots of pizza places serving decent pies — it’s almost impossible to make a truly bad pizza, unless you’re one of those lost souls who insist that pineapple is an acceptable pizza topping — but none that anyone ...READ MORE »
Here they are. The twenty restaurants that, right now, are my favorites in the DC area. They have the energy, the service, the atmosphere, and, above all, the food. They are not necessarily what some would consider the “finest” restaurants in DC — a term that implicitly gives a leg up to highbrow establishments with fancy trappings and expensive ingredients. ...READ MORE »