Three restaurants in the Washington, D.C., area have been granted two stars and nine have been given one star by Michelin’s inaugural guide to restaurants in the city.
No restaurants were granted three stars, the guide’s highest honor.
The Michelin Guide describes two-star restaurants as “excellent cuisine, worth a detour.”
That will be necessary for one of the recipients, Patrick O’Connell’s The Inn at Little Washington, which is actually 70 miles away from the nation’s capital in Washington, Va.
The other two are Minibar, José Andrés’s bastion for culinary experimentation, and Pineapple and Pearls, a fine-dining restaurant by chef Aaron Silverman that has won rave reviews from local critics; Washington Post critic Tom Sietsema said the best steakhouse in town was Pineapple and Pearl’s last savory course on its tasting menu, which is a rib eye from a dairy cow.
Michelin describes a one-star restaurant as “a very good restaurant in its category,” and gave that distinction to the following restaurants:
- Blue Duck Tavern at the Park Hyatt hotel, with chef de cuisine Brad Deboy
- The Dabney, the first executive chef gig for Jeremiah Langhorne’s, former chef de cuisine at McCrady’s in Charleston, S.C.
- Fiola, a fine-dining Italian restaurant by much-lauded chef Fabio Trabocchi
- Kinship, the new restaurant by Thomas Keller protégé Eric Ziebold, formerly of CityZen at DC’s Mandarin Oriental hotel
- Masseria, a restaurant by local chef Nicholas Stefanelli that focuses on the cuisine of Puglia at the heel in Italy’s boot.
- Plume, whose executive chef Ralf Schlegel has headed up the kitchen since 2011 following stints at Washington institutions Marcel’s and The Jefferson.
- Rose’s Luxury, the more casual sibling of Pineapple and Pearls
- Sushi Taro, chef Nobu Yamazaki’s restaurant widely praised both for its tasting menu as well as for its happy hour, weekdays from 5:30 to 7 p.m., when food and drinks at the bar are half off.
- Tail Up Goat, a relatively casual restaurant in the eclectic Adams Morgan neighborhood by local industry veterans Jon Sybert, Jill Tyler and Bill Jensen.
In addition to Washington, D.C., Michelin also publishes guides for New York City, San Francisco and Chicago. It once also rated restaurants in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, but has discontinued coverage of those cities.
Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected]
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