100 Very Best Restaurants 2015: No. 48 Etto

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One of the many terrific vegetable dishes at Etto: a simple but sublime salad of celery, walnuts, and pecorino enlivened with lemon and sour-orange juices. Photograph by Scott Suchman

About Etto

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cuisines
Italian

Among the first things you’ll notice when you walk into this tiny, no-reservations dining room is a blackboard scrawled with specials and a gleaming wooden bar arrayed with bowls of veggies and meats. And although pizza might seem like it should be the centerpiece of your table—2 Amys proprietor Peter Pastan is a co-owner—those are the two areas you’ll want to focus on when cobbling together a grazer’s feast. (The pies tend to be over-charred.) The daily specials might include cocktail nibbles (a cracker with creamy rabbit-liver mousse), vividly dressed salads (roasted leeks with Gorgonzola), and terrific ice creams. But don’t ignore the paper menu entirely—it offers excellent salumi and some of the richest burrata we’ve found.

Don’t miss:

  • Celery salad with walnuts and pecorino
  • Grilled eggplant
  • Cotechino-sausage pizza with a runny egg
  • Prosciutto ice cream
  • Negroni cocktail


Ann Limpert
Executive Food Editor/Critic

Ann Limpert joined Washingtonian in late 2003. She was previously an editorial assistant at Entertainment Weekly and a cook in New York restaurant kitchens, and she is a graduate of the Institute of Culinary Education. She lives in Petworth.

Food Editor

Anna Spiegel covers the dining and drinking scene in her native DC. Prior to joining Washingtonian in 2010, she attended the French Culinary Institute and Columbia University’s MFA program in New York, and held various cooking and writing positions in NYC and in St. John, US Virgin Islands.