Pizza discussions are not a safe space. They’re fraught with strong feelings and trip wires. No one cares if you put pineapple on your hamburger. Go nuts, you weirdo. But pineapple on pizza? That’s torn whole families asunder — and as everyone knows, asunder is the worst way a family can be torn. So I approach this topic with some trepidation. I thought it might be helpful to start with my personal biases so you can discount my rankings (or not): Pizza should be thin. The ratio of crust to cheese and other toppings should be roughly 1:1 and the toppings should be evenly distributed. I want b ..read more

  Someone asked me this weekend whether any recent restaurant meals have been disappointing. I mostly demurred because I’m still in pandemic mode when we all agreed not to say anything critical about restaurants just trying to survive. But things feel different now. Restaurants are bustling. Reservations at hotspots like Albi and Daru are impossible to come by. And people (like the person I was talking to) want to know as much as they can about where to spend their money for a night out. Plus, I’d never punch down or take on an easy target. So let’s start talking openly again. It might f ..read more

Hanumanh, 1604 7th St NW (Shaw); Rating 9.3; $$ (moderate) There are singular works of art that cement the reputation of the artist who created them. DaVinci didn’t need to pick up a brush again after the Mona Lisa. Shakespeare could have hung it up after Hamlet. And Chef Seng Luangrath could have clapped her hands in the air like a blackjack dealer and walked away from the cutting board for good after she created her Lao crispy rice salad. I’ll never forget my first encounter with Chef Seng’s masterwork. It was around 2011 at Bangkok Golden (now Padaek), a restaurant she’d just opened in a ..read more

Queen’s English, 3410 11th Street NW, Washington DC (Columbia Heights); Rick’s Rating 9.2; $$$ (Expensive) “The Queen’s English” — the grammatically correct and coherent expression of the English language — traditionally becomes “The King’s English” when the sovereign is a king. Let’s hope nothing like that happens at Queen’s English in Columbia Heights. For one, I prefer to minimize any focus on Charles, particularly before eating. I watched this season of The Crown and even Jimmy McNulty couldn’t make Charles likable.  More broadly, I want as little at Queen’s English to change as poss ..read more

  I was smitten with Venezuelan-born Chef Enrique Limardo’s cooking the first time I ate at his first DC outpost, Seven Reasons, back in 2019. His food was gutsy and flavorful, not precious and muted. He wove together Latin, Asian, and other global flavors into something uniquely his own. Plus he knew how to execute a dish, which isn’t faint praise these days when the cooking part can’t be assumed. I call chef-as-purveyor syndrome. There’s a school of thought that says a chef’s job is to find the most pristine ingredients available and then do as little as possible to them before putting ..read more

  You may have seen that Tom Sietsema, the longtime Washington Post food critic, recently decided to permanently end the awarding of stars. His column explaining his decision made a powerful case, just not the one he was trying to make. He didn’t convince me that he did the right thing by dropping ratings from his reviews; he convinced me that I needed to add them to mine. Let’s start with why ratings are a good thing. People like them and use them. Indeed, before he explains why he’s dumping them, Tom notes that he originally used them to give readers “an immediate take on a restaurant ..read more

I’m back. I didn’t know I was taking a blogging sabbatical but that’s how it worked out. Things just kept coming up — volunteering in Poland with World Central Kitchen, my son’s wedding, new episodes of Guy’s Grocery Games — that made it impossible for me to find time to write. Oh, and then I got Covid and lost my sense of taste for two weeks in July. That last bit was actually pretty scary. What if it never came back? How could I write about restaurants if I had no sense of taste? Sure, Tom Sietsema has been doing it for years but that’s his niche. (There’s no way Tom ever sees this post, bu ..read more

It’s tempting to skip the typical end-of-year hoo-hah and just be grateful for the restaurants that managed to keep their doors open in 2021. But I decided to plow ahead with my own recap. We’re all craving a semblance of normalcy — and a hefty dose of distraction — as we slog into Covid’s terrible twos. More than ever, I want the diversion of a year-end Washington Post list telling me Cousin Greg is in and Bobby Axelrod is out, or to lose myself in speculation over why Jake Gyllenhaal doesn’t just return Taylor’s damn scarf. It’s in that spirit of the holidays that I give you the best things ..read more

This is the week I got my groove back. Thamee and Taqueria Xochi reminded me how much I love searching for that perfect bite and the absolute thrill of sometimes finding it. Suddenly I was Anthony Bourdain again, intrepidly connecting with people and cultures through food, as opposed to what it’s felt like these past eighteen months: Andy Dufresne down in The Hole shuffling to his cell door to retrieve whatever warmed-over bowl of gruel DoorDash left for me there. Thamee serves Burmese food and Xochi serves Mexican, but they have a lot in common. They’re both led by immigrant women who serve ..read more

The New York Times is trying to kill me. I don’t know what I did, but obviously it was something that hurt them a lot. Because their new list of the 50 top US restaurants hit me like a Tyson Fury right hook. Despite a lifetime obsession with finding the best places to eat, it turns out I’ve been to exactly one of the fifty restaurants on the list — DC’s Thip Khao (I haven’t even been to Cane, the other DC restaurant named). If a .333 batting average gets you into the Hall of Fame, I don’t know where .020 gets you, other than maybe a lead-off slot for the Nats. I’ve spent the better part of th ..read more