Food

Neighborhood Eats: Coastal Flats

This fudgy waffle is the signature dessert at Coastal Flats. Photograph by Stacy Zarin-Goldberg.

With chandeliers that look as though they were pulled from a Hemingway estate sale, these dining rooms—part of the Great American Restaurants chain—are full of thoughtful touches: all-booth seating, soda refills before you ask, and a bread basket brimming with savory doughnut holes and fresh cheese bread. The fusiony menu pulls inspiration from the Atlantic shoreline but also from the Yucatán, Hong Kong, and beyond.

What to get: Crab-and-rock-shrimp fritters in ginger butter; goat-cheese salad with pecans and cranberries; fried salt-and-pepper shrimp on a grilled bun; steamed sea bass in soy and sherry; tangy smoked beef ribs; plump crab cakes; banana pudding; chocolate waffle.

-March, 2008 

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.