Below is the text of my monthly “Editor’s Letter” in the new issue of Washingtonian.
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Eating at all of our 100 Very Best Restaurants is a daunting task—so much so that I know only one person other than our food critics who has ever accomplished it. In 2009, a Capitol Hill staffer, Ashley Messick, challenged herself to eat at all of them within a year. She wrote about the experience on her food blog and found herself exhausted by the eating treadmill—she limped through her final meal at Obelisk just a week before the one-year mark.
Try as I might, it’s hard even for me to keep up with our food writers. I hardly ever see Todd Kliman, our lead critic, in the office, and food-and-wine editor Ann Limpert is sometimes out for days at a time, especially at this time of year while finishing the 100 Very Best list. They’re out exploring, ringing up restaurant tabs of $100,000-plus annually—always under fake names.
Their knowledge seems as close to encyclopedic as anyone’s can be. I often wonder, as I follow in their footsteps, how they find the places they do. Earlier this year, my wife and I drove to Sugar Palm Thai, just inside the Beltway in Alexandria, to eat the red curry with duck that Todd had loved. Even with GPS, it took us two loops around the neighborhood before we discovered the place, behind a gas station in what looked like a condo parking lot.
Then, in mid-October, I got a note from a reader pointing out that Todd had been wrong about a line in his September review of Rus Uz—a tiny, easy-to-overlook restaurant on the first floor of a Ballston apartment building. Todd had said it was the only Russian-Uzbek restaurant in the area, but the reader pointed us to Silk Road Choyhona in Gaithersburg’s Diamond Square Shopping Center, near the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Research editor Michael Gaynor and our fact-checkers rarely miss much, so I forwarded the letter to them and Todd, asking if it was true and, if so, how we had made such a mistake.
Todd replied that he’d eaten at Choyhona the week before and that it had only opened August 16, right after our September issue had gone to press, so his Rus Uz review had been correct at the time.
Each Wednesday morning, I sit down with the food team and we talk through new openings, chef changes, and the master list of places to evaluate. Their task gets harder every year, expanding as the region has sprawled and the eating scene has grown. As late as the 1990s, we used to feature only the 50 best restaurants—but now it’s hard even to narrow our favorites down to 100.
We track close to 600 restaurants across the region, and the list in this issue started as a scouting roster of nearly 200. The past year has been a banner one for openings—about two dozen debuts on Northwest DC’s 14th Street alone—and we’re already following more than 30 new eateries for early 2014.
Given all that, it’s no surprise that this year’s installment of 100 Very Best Restaurants features the greatest diversity we’ve ever seen: From Alegria to Zaytinya, five continents are represented.
It’s an exciting time to eat in Washington. I distinctly remember my favorite dishes of the year—pork-sausage-and-lychee salad at Rose’s Luxury, cabbage cakes at Rasika West End, larb gai at Ruan Thai, smoky eggplant melitzanosalata at Kapnos, heirloom-tomato salad at Casa Luca, ricotta crostini at the Red Hen, and—as silly as it sounds—the bread basket at Le Diplomate.
The highlight for me, though, might have been the fried chicken at Arlington’s Bonchon, where servers wear T-shirts that say addicted yet? I knew the first time my molars crunched down on the twice-fried, brined, spicy chicken wing that I’d be back. In fact, I’ve probably eaten there more than at any other restaurant that’s opened in the last year.
But I’ve got a lot of work ahead. Over many years and with a lot of effort, I’ve managed to eat at just 74 of the places on the latest 100 Very Best list. How many have you tried?
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