Eat Great Cheap 2015 Good for Groups |
 On the List for 10 Years |
If you’re looking for Korean barbecue, you can find half a dozen restaurants in Koreatown (a.k.a. Annandale) for that, from industrial and trendy to dowdy and traditional. Korean fusion or ramen? Annandale has plenty of those, too. Gom Ba Woo, on the other hand, is a small, cozy restaurant with a self-effacing humility. Its excellence lies in the perfect steaming of its mandu (large, pork-filled dumplings), the crisp edges of its seafood pancake—striped with green onion and studded with bites of octopus—and the delicate sweetness of its lightly glazed short ribs dressed with sesame seeds. Not the subject of breathless blog posts, perhaps, but they’ll leave you feeling nourished and sustained, with a quiet sort of joy.
Also good: Spicy pork; bibim bap.
See what other restaurants made our 2016 Cheap Eats list. This article appears in our May 2016 issue of Washingtonian.
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.
