Albi

Lamb-Stuffed Grape Leaves

If you’re into lamb, Michael Rafidi’s Levantine hit in Navy Yard is the place to go. While the dramatic skewers of barbecue lamb capture a lot of the attention (they’re delicious), we’re just as enamored with Rafidi’s riff on the grape leaves he grew up on, which took his Palestinian grandmother days to prepare. Here, they’re filled with lamb belly, baked in a wood-fired hearth, and brightened with tangy tomato molasses and lemon.

Reveler’s Hour

Fried Half Chicken

This wine-centric Adams Morgan restaurant is well known for its handmade pastas, but on a recent visit, it was the half chicken that seemed to be on every table. Rightly so: The sweet-spicy bird is glazed straight from the fryer in a saffron-infused hot honey, then encrust-ed in crushed fennel seeds, fennel pollen, and flaky Maldon salt. It’s paired with even more hot honey and a fresh fennel salad.

La Tejana

Loaded Queso

Texas native and co-owner Ana-Maria Jaramillo wanted to pay homage to the famous “Bob Armstrong dip” from Austin institution Matt’s El Rancho when she and her husband, Gus May, opened a cocktail bar in their popular Mount Pleasant breakfast-taco joint this year. The dip combines La Tejana’s housemade refried beans, queso, guacamole, and brisket from barbecue favorite 2Fifty. “It’s basically like the dreamiest Tex-Mex combo you could imagine,” Jaramillo says.

Cucina Morini

Zuppa di Pesce

Traveling throughout coastal Sicily, chef Matt Adler loved the tableside servings of traditional seafood soup. He’s recreated the experience at this Southern Italian restaurant with a pot of tomatoey shellfish broth loaded with scallops, calamari, mussels, clams, and shrimp—all carefully added in stages so they don’t overcook. Pearls of fregola pasta add a little texture, while Calabrian-chili butter, fresh herbs, and a squeeze of lemon bring some extra zip.

Mita

Arepas

Arepas get the fine-dining treatment at this plant-based Latin American restaurant. Five bite-size variations—plantain, corn, wheat, yuca, and smoked potato—are presented in a basket. Mix and match them with a trio of dips, including tropical-peach/palm-fruit “butter,” creamy guac, and a cashew “sour cream” with chili oil. The dish is an opener on the top-tier tasting menu, but you can also add it to shorter prix-fixe menus or order it à la carte at the bar.

Songbird

General Tso’s Chicken

Owners Jason Lau and Angela Zhang make this Chinese American restaurant hip with sophisticated cocktails and nightlife vibes. Still, Zhang’s mom, Helen, who leads the kitchen, used to run a more traditional Chinese American spot in McLean and has carried over her signature General Tso’s chicken. While others often make the dish syrupy-sweet, this version is more tangy, with a nice kick of heat.

Truong Tien

Bún Bò Huế

Tucked away in the depths of Eden Center, this Vietnamese gem specializes in Hue-style cooking from the central Vietnamese city once home to emperors. Our go-to: this spicy lemongrass noodle soup with rustic meatballs, pork blood, and other gelatinous bits. Sure, you can find it at many other area Vietnamese restaurants, but this is one of the best renditions around.

Chaatwala

Stuffed Chole Kulcha

No indulgence is spared at this Bollywood-themed vegetarian snack bar, where the ghee flows like water and even diehard carnivores won’t miss kebabs. One particularly satisfying plate: pockets of pillowy bread filled with a chunky chickpea curry and decorated with slender pieces of raw white onion and rough-chopped cilantro.

Desi Breakfast Club

Halwa Puri

Malik Ahmad, the owner of this Pakistani strip-mall spot, insists it’s a kind of diner. If that’s true, then the halwa puri is the chicken and waffles here—a sweet, savory, slightly greasy, and soul-warming start to the morning. The classic Pakistani breakfast consists of two huge puris, ballooned up in the deep fryer like funnel cakes from a county fair, beside modest portions of halwa (sweet, saffron-scented semolina porridge), chickpea curry, and a cardamom-spiced ground-chicken keema with green peas.

Pascual

Chayote Salad

Isabel Coss and Matt Conroy, the co-chefs at this new-wave Mexican spot, were looking for, in Conroy’s words, “a crunchy, fresh thing to have on the table while you’re picking at everything else.” Thanks to chayote—an under-appreciated vegetable that tastes like a cross between jícama and apple—the side dish has become the star. The chefs serve the chayote raw, with Asian pear, a sunflower-seed/agave crumble, and a piquant dressing made with sunflower tahini, chilies, lime, and rice-wine vinegar. Coss calls the salad an Easter egg for fans of Lutèce, the pair’s French restaurant in Georgetown, where napa cabbage with sesame tahini is one of the must-get dishes.

Parachute Pizza

Cacio e Pepe Pizza

Cacio e pepe fever has died down, but our love of this Union Market stall’s pizza-fied rendition of the peppery Roman pasta dish sure hasn’t. The crusts—made from two-day-fermented dough baked in an olive-oil-slicked pan—are square, crisp on the bottom, and airy on top. This pie (you can also order it by the slice) gets layered with provolone, a garlic-confit/cream sauce, deeply caramelized onions, and—the key—enough black pepper to cut through the richness.

Your Only Friend

Cool Ranch Onion Rings

Think of this beer-battered bar snack at Shaw’s nostalgia-seeking cocktail-and-sandwich bar as a cross between a Bloomin’ Onion and Cool Ranch Doritos. Owners Paul Taylor and Sherra Kurtz nailed the addictive chip flavor with a dusting of buttermilk and cheddar powders, classic ranch herbs (dill, parsley, and chives), plus lactic and citric acid—the secret ingredients behind that irresistible tang. On the side: their own “fancy” ranch dipper.

Northwest Chinese Food

Shanxi Zhajiang Noodles

The scrambled-egg-and-tomato stir-fry is a staple of Chinese home cooking. So is zhajiang, a fermented black-bean sauce, and minced pork braised with cooking wine and star anise. At Northwest Chinese Food—the reigning champ of the UMD food scene—you get all three dishes in one, spooned generously onto chewy knife-cut noodles. The menu is so wide-ranging, with so many tempting items, that this do-everything bowl of noodles is a welcome compromise.

Hello Vietnam

Summer Rolls

Summer rolls—rice-paper sheaths filled with vermicelli, mint, cilantro, cucumber, carrots, and shrimp—are a pretty standard offering at area Vietnamese restaurants. At this Rockville strip-mall spot, chef/owner Luc Pham adds his own smoky-sweet spin, switching out the typical plain, boiled shrimp for crustaceans that are marinated in brown sugar and pepper, then grilled. His peanut-butter dipping sauce gets points for being more tangy with lime than cloyingly sweet.

Mecho’s Dominican Kitchen

Shrimp Mofongo

At this fast-casual Dominican outpost in a Northeast DC shopping center, the simple plantain mash with shrimp is elevated by a scream of garlic from its golden mojo sauce. The garlic oil seems to make the shrimp juicier and the mounded lumps of plantain mofongo more exciting—and as filling as the mofongo is, you’ll still search for some bread or more starch to soak up the delicious remains of the sauce.

Beloved BBQ

Wagyu Fried Rice

Fried rice—that workhorse of a dish that brings together any veggies hanging around your fridge—turns fancy at this Japanese steakhouse. Its inspiration isn’t a Chinese takeout joint but sobameshi, a mix of stir-fried rice and noodles that’s a popular street food in Kobe. Chef Makoto Okuwa starts with a mix of rice and sweet-potato noodles, gives it a dash of smoky charred-garlic oil, scorches it all in an iron bowl, then adds accents such as ginger aïoli and pickled cabbage. It’s tossed tableside with an onsen egg and lush Wagyu-beef tartare.

 L’Ardente

Pappardelle With White Ragu

What do you get when you put a French chef in charge of an Italian restaurant? If you’re lucky, winning creations like this pasta from David Deshaies, inspired by the blanquette de veau, or veal stew, he grew up on. Ribbons of housemade pappardelle are gilded in a creamy sauce made from braised veal, morel mushrooms, bone marrow, crème fraîche, and egg yolk. What catapults it to greatness is its palate-awakening garnishes: serrano chilies and pickled beech mushrooms.

Compliments Only

Hot Pants

No sandwich is boring at Compliments Only, which packs a lot of playful oomph into the format of the basic Italian-style sub. It would be wrong to ignore everyone’s potato-chip-filled favorite Crunchy Boi, but lately our attention has turned to the Hot Pants, a classic Italian combo hero that slowly warms your mouth with buzzing spice from pepperoni, hot and sweet peppers, and a shot of vinegar heat from a house Cholula mayo.

Joon

Fava Bean and Dill Rice With Tahdig

Cooks in Iran work marvels with rice, from fluffy pilafs laced with herbs and dried fruits to crispy tahdig rice crusts. At Joon, Najmieh Batmanglij’s paean to all things Persian, an impossibly good dish combines the two. A circular pan of baghali polo—fava-bean rice redolent with earthy dill—is inverted onto a plate so that the layer of crunchy rice at the bottom becomes a buttery shell on top. It’s hard to imagine a higher form of rice and beans.

Medina

Mezze Board

The mezze spread at this Bedouin-tent-style cocktail bar is as beautiful as it is bountiful: Tunisian olives, tea-poached dates, fresh figs, extra-plump grapes, tomato-eggplant jam, mint-lemon cucumber salad, a soft housemade cheese drizzled with Tunisian olive oil and chermoula, and more. It all comes with warm pita and tins of branzino or tuna (swap in canned oysters or mussels for a little extra). A brunch version includes other goodies, such as lamb merguez sausage, Tunisian baked-egg tagine, and bomboloni doughnuts.

Taqueria Sabor Mixteco

Chileajo

Chileajo, a pungent Oaxacan pork stew with potatoes, roasted garlic, and a rainbow of dried chilies, grabbed our attention when we first visited this new Wheaton eatery. With a base of red rice and black beans seasoned with anise-scented epazote, the stew makes a heady and distinctive dinner. Co-owner Juan Solano says he’s not sure suburban Maryland diners are interested in a full slate of Oaxacan regional dishes, but we say bring them on!

Chay

Vegan Clam Dip

Chef Lan Tran does an impressive job making vegetarian versions of classic Vietnamese dishes, and her “clam dip” has quickly become a signature. Chopped soy protein mimics baby clams with lime, vegetarian fish sauce, and a sprinkling of peanuts. Scooping it up with rice crackers, you’ll forget it’s vegan.

Dōgon

Hoe Crab

The year’s hottest restaurant? This newcomer in the Salamander hotel, which marks former Kith and Kin chef Kwame Onwuachi’s return to DC. (He travels between here and New York, where he runs Tatiana, deemed the city’s number-one restaurant this year by the New York Times.) If you manage to land a table, we have two pieces of advice: Dress up in something chic and order Onwuachi’s contribution to the blue-crab canon. Lump meat is served inside a crab shell and topped with a chili crunch made from a peppery Ghanaian sauce. Take one of the tiny plantain hoecakes served on the side, pile it with crab, and finish it with the terrific ají verde sauce, which was inspired by DC’s Peruvian-chicken joints.

This article appears in the December 2024 issue of Washingtonian.