The Pastiche of Pastis Quick Hits Seeing lots of social media posts wondering how we ever cared so much about ramp season. Like Beaujolais Nouveau never happened. The world seems to be spinning faster and faster, sometimes it feels impossible not to be overwhelmed by the constantly changing landscape. On the other hand, Crisfield Seafood. The ratio of eggs-to-sauce in shakshuka should be reversed. Congress can’t compete with a toffee-flavored creme brûlée — one is bi-cameral but the other is bi-caramel. My favorite restaurants are ones where the waitress tells you to take your fork. If I’m ou ..read more

    Quick Hits It’s hard to believe that the same country that invented tiramisu also produced the cannoli Tip for first-daters hoping to live up to their profile pics: Buck’s has the best golden-hour lighting in the DC area My kids can marry anyone they want except for people who back into parking spaces DC has the lowest Jews-to-Jewish-delis ratio in the free world Cake doughnuts > raised doughnuts Stephen Starr has gotta be using oompa loompas The best thing at Popeye’s is the red beans & rice Note to restaurateurs: dehydrating food and turning it into a powder is only a g ..read more

    Thinking of my readers on vacation in Antelope Canyon, Paige Arizona    I took most of the summer off, so my notebook is pretty full. Let me catch you up, starting with some stray musings and then turning to my best summertime bites. Deep Thoughts, by Jack “Rick Eats DC” Handy Puns are the lowest form of humor, unless you’re a Thai restaurant. Then they’re charming. Peter Chang’s food tasted better when he was a fugitive. I have nightmares that all the empty storefronts in Union Station become Tattes. I have an unnatural aversion to penne. I don’t believe in the death ..read more

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