100 Very Best 2014
100 Very Best 2020How in the world has our number-one-ranked restaurant for the past two years fallen so far so fast?
We’ll get to that, but first we want to point out that one thing hasn’t changed, and that’s that there’s simply no experience like this in the region. No staff is more prepared to please you (if you show up with the sniffles, they’ll bring over a pot of ginger-honey tea in no time). Chef/owner Patrick O’Connell has long understood the importance of the little things, which is why he employs two full-time florists (yes, really) and insists that the ornate rooms be dusted twice a day.
So what’s not to like?
Start with the recent shift to a tasting-menu format, which strips away a lot of what made the restaurant so memorable: its too-muchness. If any dish captured the over-the-top indulgence of dining here, it was a thick, peppered steak of tuna (flown in that morning from Hawaii) capped with an outsize lobe of foie gras. In its shrunken state, it loses its grandiosity and excitement.
A new vegetarian menu is great in theory; in practice, it looks stinting, particularly when you compare the constituent parts—half a beet, a slice of cauliflower—with the luxury ingredients on the other menus. The new format is largely to blame, but not only to blame; recent meals exposed flaws that seemed out of character: an oversalted foie gras torchon, a gritty scallop.
Don’t miss:
- Lamb carpaccio with Caesar-salad ice cream
- Bourbon-glazed sweetbreads with pappardelle
- Butter-pecan ice-cream sandwich
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.
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.
