Only the top 40 restaurants were ranked in 2011's Best Restaurants list.
In an era when many chefs change their menus as often as they change clothes, there’s something reassuring about a restaurant content to produce the same couple of dozen plates year after year.
Better still, chef Rob Weland and crew are capable of genuine excellence, including delicately wrought soups, gently roasted, crisp-skinned chicken, ravioli to rival that of a top-flight Italian kitchen. This is contemporary bistro cooking as it ought to be—quietly revelatory but mindful of what’s most important: flavor. Likewise, Weland’s brunch is everything a modern brunch ought to be. There are few weekend repasts we’d rather sit down to: fried-to-order doughnuts, eggs and cured salmon, and duck-pastrami Reuben, all washed down with a glass of sparkling wine or an excellent half bottle of wine from France or California.
Also good: Bay oysters on the half shell; steak tartare on brioche; creamy gazpacho; house-made charcuterie board; French fries; heirloom-apple tarte Tatin; Eighth Street Market cobbler for two.
Open Monday through Friday for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, Saturday and Sunday for brunch and dinner. Expensive.
>> See all of 2011's Best Restaurants
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.
