might be heading there in a few weeks and I would have a lot of time to kill.
I don’t see Starburns on here, but his recommendations are excellent and experience is more current. If you want a less staid vibe, Zaytinya would fit the bill. Rasika is Indian and has outstanding food.
Many of the better restaurants aren't what I'd call "high end" so much as "high quality". In that category Elle in Mount Pleasant is a can't miss.
If Japanese is "ethnic", that's too bad. Going ham at Izakaya Seki is a low-key pleasure for anyone who enjoys food.
Crab cake season at Old Ebbitt is still my happy place.
adhering to your criteria, go throw all of Jose Andres’ DC restaurants into a hat and a pick one and you’ll have a great meal.
More of a multi-course culinary experience than a traditional meal but the food was amazing. Price wise it is certainly on the high side of high-end, but worth it IMO.
or set menu kinds of places.
but understood. That and no ethnic really narrows down the options, but here are a couple more worth checking out that are not your run-of-the-mill options that someone who lives in MD/VA and eats a dinner in DC once every 2 years could rattle off:
- Iron Gate
- Kinship
2 great Italian restaurants
- Obelisk
- Sfoglina
Avoid DC's version of Nobu like the plague.
I really dislike tasking menu restaurants. I don't care what the chef wants to prepare. I care about what I feel like eating, and that usually is a function of what wine I feel like drinking.
About a block or 2 from the St Regis and it was great, right up my alley.
Can you be a bit more specific?
are we being ethnic-ist by not counting those people as ethnic? Granted, I normally just refer to them as dishonest thieves, but they are an ethnicity beyond that one would think.
bread and fish stew? Is that ethnic food?
that's just garbage.
Italian: Fiola/Fiola Mare; Masseria; Tosca
French: Marcel's; Metier; Le Diplomate (I wouldn't call it high-end, but it is regarded by many as such)
American: Blue Duck Tavern; St, Anselm; 1789
I know you said no steakhouses, but Bourbon Steak at the Four Seasons is pretty elevated, and the lounge has an interesting scene. Similarly, Spanish may be a bridge too ethnic, but Del Mar at The Wharf is excellent.
It’s wonderful.
which has experienced more year-to-year turnover with respect to fine dining. Very few of the highly-rated places from 5 years ago are still highly-rated (or even still in business). Washington also reflects the ethnic craze. You want Thai, Vietnamese, Turkish/Middle Eastern (friends tell me Zaytinya is very good—I haven’t been there), fine. You want classical French or continental, not so much. The Washington restaurant scene is very different from what one experienced in the years I lived there when the ghost of Jackie K. permeated. The last time I was in the Nation's Capital, my hosts said, "Let's go to Adams-Morgan--you like Ethiopian?". Eight different kinds of lentils? Seeds. Starvation food. Starving--what Ethiopians really do well.
One place that has survived for a decade and which I have always found to be reliable is Fiola (ditto its fish sister restaurant, Fiola Mare). I’m fond of Italian, and generally opt for Italian if a good one is close at hand.
I probably shouldn’t opine. My preferences are skewed by my extensive exposure to (1) Europe; and (2) Napa/Sonoma, SF, California in general. And I like to eat in NYC and Chicago. Call me a snob, but finding good restaurants is hard unless you are happy with ethnic ad nauseum. I’d put Frasca in little ol’ Boulder up against most anything. Ditto Bobby Stuckey’s other place in Denver, Tavernetta.
It was run by an Iranian guy. The food was incredible. I think that the place caught on fire or something...anyways, it's gone now.
I'm with you on Ethiopian food. The whole eating with my hands part isn't for me.
I had a eat-with-hands iteration years ago. When we lived in Singapore, I would often visit these Indian places on Serangoon Road for lunch. The served fiery Madras curry dishes on a banana leaf. You rolled your rice into little balls and dipped them into the curry. You did not want to have a hangnail.
Even even food critics are useless. Ours at the St Louis Post Dispatch eschews any restaurant that is frequented by affluent or professional people or really anybody with any refinement in favor of hipster food and ethnic food. Our critic almost never mentions wine but always mentions "craft cocktails."
And with the death of Zagat there really is no reliable resource. The Infatuation is goddamned useless, so is Yelp, as are all the other "crowd sourced" review sites. The Infatuation is all aboard the ethnic and hipster bullshit.
I want a service that identifies the kind of restaurant I enjoy - like dearly departed MK, NAHA in Chicago, Union Square Cafe in NYC, Restaurant August in New Orleans, Cafe Navarre in South Bend, Spruce in SF, Herbie's and Annie Gunns in St Louis, etc, dearly departered Wildwood in Portnalnd, the Tom Douglas restaurants in Seattle, Canlis, any of the dozen or so in Napa (from Mustards Grill to Brix to Farmstead to Charter Oak to Auberge du Soleil to La Toque). And I never want to eat any kind of ethnic food when I travel.
I wish these restaurant sites could give me a box to click -"no riff raff, no hipsters, no ethnic food, or no shit wine"
I am so over the tasting menu thing. Craft cocktails--I haven't had anything that would be called a cocktail since 1998 when my dad died. He and I used to get snockered on Manhattans, but that ended long ago. Well, I do enjoy rum tonics in the summer.
Fiola Mare was and is exceptional. Then again, so were the fried oysters, catfish, and hush puppies from the Captain White's barge at the Main Avenue Fish Market. I'm reading that new development has since pushed them out to a wharf somewhere in Maryland. Infrequent visitor I am, I'll mourn that loss over some staid French-continental institution where McCarthy-era senators used to get shitfaced and flash their genitals to one another.*
I'll grant the two of you this: it's at least an improvement over the RH thread of a bunch of middle-aged white guys trying to crowdsource the next hype/entrance song for the football team.
* - Dramatization. May not have happened.
avec shrieking faux Irish (who would want to sound Irish) prelude.
I did remark that the Cult's tune would be superior. So would Baby Shark.
You can go ahead an enjoy your more au courant shit music, as if you weren't a middle aged white guy. I bet you like to sprinkle in hip hop couplets into your daily conversation like that dipshit MSNBC host or excructiating lyrics froom your fave Vampire Weekend.
And who mentioned continental dining? Does that fish shack you mentioned serve wine or just prole beer?
about how we can't have nice things anymore. It was total prole food. Didn't even have a liquor license. You'd just stoop down to grab your lunch from the people in the boat and take it out to the deck where you'd eat standing up and chuck the shells into the water for the gulls.
I'm told it was a DC institution. The larger market had an impressive selection of fresh fish, so my friend and I tried to grill whole Bronzino. The technique is best left to the folks at Fiola Mare.
In France, it's called Loup de Mer. Same fish. In the US, we call them striped bass, but only if they're wild.
Gutting and scaling is actually the easy part compared to filleting. They make it look so damn easy. After cooking, remove the head, grab the backbone just below, and use the back of a spoon or fork to gently coax that meat from each side off the bones where it then falls, whole, onto the plate. Mine looked like shredded taco meat with the additional task of picking out the bones as we ate.
I recommend grilling them whole with lemon, thyme, and olives.
win, the Ethiopians or the Irish?
I lived at 1234 34th Street NW, corner of 34th and N. They didn't have $54 entrees in those years.