For the best Korean food in DC, you have to leave DC, and make the drive to Annandale, Virginia. However, if you ever develop a desperate craving for bibimbap, there are a couple places in the city that aren’t so bad. Yee Hwa, unobtrusively settled in the Downtown district, is one. Clean, spacious, and orderly, it feels like a replica of a higher-end, informal diner in Asia. Down-to-earth service and endearingly faded napkins add to the mom-and-pop feel.
Like many Asian restaurants in DC, Yee Hwa’s menu has caved and offers “pan-Asian” cuisine, mixing a sushi bar and Chinese appetizers with traditional Korean fare to attract as many clients as possible. Given their quality, you would do best to stick with the traditional offerings.
Meals at Yee Hwa begin with the standard complimentary banchan (small dishes). This includes ubiquitous pickled vegetables (kimchi—sharp, pungent, bitter, acidly spicy; cucumber—mild at first bite but filled… [More]
9.6 CityZen
9.6 2 Amys Pizza
9.5 Minibar
9.4 Makoto
9.4 Westend Bistro
9.3 Obelisk
9.2 Vermilion
9.2 Poste Moderne Brasserie
9.1 Adour
Top Indian: [More]
Even in a world of fluffy credentialling organizations, the Relais & Châteaux experience tends to be specific and consistent. A drink before dinner—in the evocative garden, perhaps, or the warm, cozy library—is an aristocratic expectation. Servers strike a fine balance: unpretentious yet encyclopedic, personal yet not too folksy. A series of rooms is illuminated by a genteel gauze of orange light, appeasing the geezers with sufficient quantities of blown glass and patterned wallpapers without coming off like shiny Rococo ballrooms. The room smells of candles and fresh flowers. A meal here—an hour’s drive from DC—is a full evening’s entertainment. It is expensive. It is civilized. It is life-affirming.
Relais & Châteaux has a problem on its hands, though, when one of its restaurants doesn’t seem to have noticed that romance-novel nouns (it’s a “fantasia,” not a salad; a “marriage,” not a pairing) were long ago relegated to the first-class cabins… [More]
My talk at the International Food Blogger Conference in Seattle, “Recent Advances in Bullshit Reduction,” along with my panel session and discussion/debate with Robert Schroeder of the Federal Trade Commission and Foodista.com CEO Barnaby Dorfman about the new FTC guide to the disclosure of freebies and financial relationships in blog reviews, will be broadcast live on UStream at 3pm Pacific time. was scheduled for streaming video, but the video had technical problems and dropped out in the middle of my panel session, so for those who are interested, I’ve posted the PowerPoint presentation (with images downsampled) here. If you’re interested, you can also check out the original Osteria L’Intrepido post, my followup to Wine Spectator’s response, and a few other related entries on my blog.
