Our Food Critic’s Favorite Fall Comfort Dishes

Lucky Danger

Crab Lo Mein

Lucky Danger—which began as a pandemic pop-up and has evolved into a sleek Penn Quarter dining room/mahjong parlor—aims to make tweaked but still recognizable versions of Chinese/American classics. But the heaping pile of lo mein here is far more luxe than anything you’ll find in a takeout box. For starters, it’s tossed with hunks of buttered Maryland blue crab. The best part of the dish, though, is the umami bomb of a sauce, the result of a happy accident when a cook spilled creamy, caramelized whey into dashi. Its richness is tempered by fragrant kaffir lime, plus a scattering of finely diced chilies and cilantro.

The Occidental

Buttermilk Biscuits

Until recently, the best biscuits in DC could be found at Stephen Starr’s Union Market steakhouse, St. Anselm. Then, this spring, Starr’s revamp of the historic Occidental restaurant arrived—with buttermilk biscuits that are somehow even better. The kitchen’s secret is freezing and grating lots of high-quality butter into the dough, then serving even more butter—sweetened with honey—on the side.

Minetta Tavern

Onion Soup

Food-wise, 2025 will go down as the year of the NYC transplant. One of the best arrivals is Keith McNally’s Greenwich Village–born hangout, which now has a sibling in a Union Market alley. (Though not even a year old, it feels like it’s been around for decades.) The menu borrows heavily from the New York original, including this straightforward but stellar onion soup. It’s everything you want in the bowl: a deeply flavorful beef broth packed with caramelized onions, just enough crusty bread, and a seriously generous cap of burnished Gruyère. “A lot of people tell me it’s the best they’ve had outside of France,” our server said. Count me among them.

Bouboulina

Chocolate Cake

The most sophisticated dining room at the Pike & Rose development is easily this chic, moodily lit steakhouse from the guys behind Cava (and nearby restaurants Julii and Melina). The kitchen grills up a terrific dry-aged New York strip, and it turns out that executive chef Aris Tsekouras has a knack for desserts, too. His slab of chocolate cake—with layers of sponge cake and Valrhona ganache soaked in espresso syrup and accessorized with housemade espresso gelato, crunchy cocoa nibs, and just enough Maldon salt—is even a hit with people who don’t like chocolate. Plus, you’d never guess it’s gluten-free.

Brasserie Royale

Halibut With Mushrooms, Leeks, and Mashed Potatoes

It seems our area has a bottomless appetite for French restaurants—they just keep on coming. My favorite of the fresh crop is this charming brasserie, which sits right behind owners Ally and Michael Stebner’s other hit spot, the folksy American Local Provisions. Pretty much any dish that starts with the late chef Joel Robuchon’s famously buttery mashed potatoes could land on this list, but there’s much more than that in the Stebners’ star entrée: a thick filet of lightly grilled halibut; caramelized mushrooms and leeks; and a rich sauce conjured from veal stock, whole-grain mustard, and sherry vinegar.

Sorn Thai

Curry Puffs

Supisa Teawbut, who runs both Donsak Thai in DC and this stylish McLean newcomer, says that in Thailand, curry puffs are an anytime snack: “Morning, afternoon, late night—even with a cup of coffee.” Around here, you’ll find the flaky turnovers in the appetizer section of most Thai restaurants. But Teawbut’s version stands out for both its double-layer dough—soft on the inside, crispy on the outside—and its savory chicken-and-potato filling, stir-fried in soy sauce, curry powder, sugar, and more. It’s common to see the pastries served with a sweet dipping sauce, but Teawbut’s puffs are so flavorful you won’t need one.

Mélange

Fish Tacos

Chef Elias Taddesse has been brilliantly imbuing things like burgers and mac and cheese with Ethiopian flavors since he opened his burger place, Mélange, and his fried-chicken shop, Doro Soul Food. Now he’s consolidated both concepts into an arty Shaw space—and, even better, added a taco menu. His fish tacos start with black-cumin-studded corn tortillas. Next, Taddesse adds Atlantic cod that’s dredged in a batter incorporating the flavors of shiro (the Ethiopian chickpea stew), then fried until supremely crunchy. Punchy tomatillo sauce finishes off a pretty perfect bite.

Chiko

“The Chicken and the Egg” Fried Rice

Chefs get inspo in all sorts of places. Take Scott Drewno, who listened to the Beastie Boys song “Egg Man” and thought: fried rice. You’ll find his riff on the lyric “Which came first, the chicken or the egg,” at the Dupont location of this Chinese/Korean fast-casual outfit. Fluffy rice is tossed with chicken legs cooked in duck fat, plus bacon, a jammy egg marinated in vinegar-and-soy sauce, and fermented chili paste. In other words, nothing like the empty-the-fridge fried rice you may make at home.

Kayu

Ube Bao Buns

Paolo Dungca recently transplanted his mod-Filipino dining room from H Street to a cozy Dupont space. Before that, though, he was the brains behind the popular but short-lived burger place Pogiboy, so it makes sense he can make a memorable patty. Here, that comes in the form of juicy, slider-size chorizo burgers loaded with pickled-papaya slaw and special sauce and set on ube-tinted purple bao buns.

This article appears in the October 2025 issue of Washingtonian.

Ann Limpert

Executive Food Editor/Critic

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.