FOOD NOTES/The Fearless Critic's Restaurant Guide

Photo by FLICKR/Jonathan Epp Fearless Critic is a new kind of restaurant guide, distinguished by its relentlessly opinionated full-page reviews, its comprehensive indexes, and its policy of total independence from restaurants. Advertisements are not offered, free meals are not accepted and critics only dine incognito.

In its new ad-free, reader-supported book and web site, feisty local food critics review 500 places to eat in the District and Maryland and Virginia suburbs.
                             
The nation’s capital now has its most comprehensive print dining resource ever: the brand-new Fearless Critic Washington DC Area Restaurant Guide (paperback, 608 pages, US$15.95) has arrived in stores, and dc.fearlesscritic.com, its web site, is now live.
 
The book covers the District and suburbs, including Silver Spring, Chevy Chase, Bethesda, Arlington, Alexandria, Falls Church, Annandale and more.
Fearless Critic is a new kind of restaurant guide, distinguished by its relentlessly opinionated full-page reviews, its comprehensive indexes, and its policy of total independence from restaurants. Advertisements are not offered, free meals are not accepted and critics only dine incognito.

“A food critic should be the diner’s advocate, not the restaurant’s promoter,” says Fearless Critic founder and editor-in-chief Robin Goldstein, a Yale Law School and French Culinary Institute graduate who launched the series to offer a fresh new alternative to traditional food criticism.

“Our reviews don’t wax on about celebrity chefs,” explains Goldstein, “and they don’t parrot lists of fancy ingredients from menus or PR kits. We simply offer our honest, critical, sometimes cheeky judgment of how the food tastes, what the place feels like, and whether we’d come back. Imagine how an irreverent food-critic friend might respond if you asked him or her, over a beer, ‘Just between you and me, putting aside its reputation, what do you really think of this restaurant?’”

To put together the book, Goldstein assembled a panel of local food writers that “share an ability to question conventional wisdom—to fight the bias that expectations create,” he says. The critics share a few other things, too: they’re all avid cooks and obsessive culture geeks, and they all hold degrees from Harvard or Yale.

Fearless Critic’s numerical ratings for food and feel, each on a 10-point scale, are determined by the panel with serious rigor: only 23 restaurants in the book achieve food ratings above 9.0, led by Komi (9.7, described as “the pure, ingredient-driven love child of an obsessive local chef”) and CityZen (9.6, “elemental pleasure…Parker House rolls are irresistibly undercooked, glazed with butter…and, perhaps, a dash of crack”).

When the Fearless Critics think that a restaurant is more about style than substance, they’ll say so. Of the pricey Italian restaurant Il Mulino, they write: “If [the] rose-strewn, wrought-iron-chandeliered Italhambra…were just outfitted with a few vibrating beds and ceiling mirrors, the management could potentially dispense with the ill-fated restaurant idea entirely and just turn it into a full-on hourly-rate hotel.”

The book compares Georgetown’s famed 1789, meanwhile, to a “you’re-not-allowed-to-touch-anything drawing room…it’s not that the food is bad, exactly…[but] the bitter truth is that our favorite part of a meal at 1789 is going downstairs to The Tombs afterwards and getting wasted with the college kids.”

Readers might be surprised to find some inexpensive ethnic restaurants in DC’s diverse suburbs beat out some of the District’s pricey power spots. A tiny Cameroonian spot in Silver Spring, MD, for instance—Roger Miller Restaurant—wins an 8.9 on the strength of its “superb goat pepper soup, [which] sings with faraway fragrances, reducing goat’s gaminess to a mere whisper.”

A relatively unknown Korean restaurant called Seoul Soondae, in Annandale, VA, vaults into the DC area’s top 25 restaurants with its rich, aromatic blood sausage. And Hai Duong, a shopping-mall eatery in Falls Church, VA’s Eden Center, scores a 9.0 with an authentic Vietnamese menu headlined by a deep, expressive chao long (rice porridge).

While the book finds certain high-priced restaurants worth the money—the elusive Minibar gets a food rating of 9.5, the discreet sushi temple Makoto a 9.4, and the intimate Italian restaurant Obelisk a 9.3—the high prices and pretense at Prime Rib (the only restaurant in DC that requires not just a jacket but also a tie) move the authors to verse: “Get ready to deal with the staff / They might glare you down if you laugh / But when check-time arrives / They’ll be trading high-fives / Over dinner’s long, cruel epitaph.”

The Fearless Critic Washington DC Area Restaurant Guide is available at all major DC-area bookstores, including Politics & Prose, Kramerbooks, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-A-Million; other bookstores, food and wine stores, and retail stores around the metro area; and online at amazon.com and bn.com.

At dc.fearlesscritic.com, the Fearless Critic’s ratings and sortable lists are free, while the complete text of the book along with advanced search functionality can be unlocked for a subscription fee of $2 per month or $10 per year.