Eat Great Cheap 2015Twenty years ago, the internet was just a baby, phones only made calls, and we were all was less scattered in our lives. But if you were to hop into a time machine, travel back to 1995, and sit down at this small Persian kebab house, you wouldn’t detect much of a difference between the place then and the place now. In an industry where a fraction of restaurants survive their first year, Moby Dick’s quality and consistency are remarkable (at least at the Bethesda location; the others aren’t worth your time). You can taste it in the hot, lightly blistered rounds of pita, in the marvelously juicy minced-meat kebab called kubideh, and in the delicately cooked mounds of basmati rice—each as good and fresh as it was then. Even Dorian Gray didn’t age so well.
Cuisine: Persian
Where you can get it: 7027 Wisconsin Ave., Bethesda; 301-654-1838
Also good: Hummus; swordfish kebab.
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.
