Restaurants

Finding the cuisine of your dreams is easy in Washington, whether you crave Japanese sushi or a luscious French boeuf bourguignon. Scoring a table can be the tricky part: Wheeler-dealers and socializing urbanistas fill restaurants throughout the city, but especially those in the Penn Quarter, near the White House, and along the 14th Street and U Street corridors.

Appealing dining trends include an uptick in delicious burger joints (Good Stuff Eatery), bistros serving "small plates" of fine tastes (Estadio), and walk-in friendly establishments (Palena Café), where patience and perhaps a distracting cocktail are all it takes to land a seat at the feast.

Practical Information

This guide presents you with choices from as many different tastes, budgets.

Read through the descriptions; if a place beckons, call ahead for reservations, especially for Saturday night. Most restaurants are affiliated with an online reservation service called www.opentable.com, so you can also reserve your table online.

If you wait until the last minute to make a reservation, expect to dine really early, say 5:30 or 6pm, or after 9:30pm. Or you can sit at the bar and eat, which can be more of a culinary treat than you might imagine; some of the best restaurants, including Ceiba, Marcel's, and Corduroy, offer a reasonably priced bar menu.

Better yet, consider a restaurant that doesn't take reservations. At places like Oyamel and Matchbox, where the atmosphere is casual, the wait can become part of the experience. The food is worth standing in line for.

Few places require men to wear a jacket and tie; I've made a special note in the listings for those places that do. If you're driving, call ahead to inquire about valet parking, complimentary or otherwise -- on Washington's crowded streets, this service can be a true bonus.

Price Categories -- The restaurants herein represent a range of cuisines and prices in D.C.'s major dining-out neighborhoods. Groupings are first by location, then alphabetically in each price category. Keep in mind that the price categories refer to dinner prices, but some very expensive restaurants offer affordable lunches, early-bird dinners, tapas, or bar meals. The prices within each review refer to the average cost of individual entrees, not the entire meal. The price categories for the average cost of a restaurant's dinner entrees are: Very Expensive ($30+), Expensive ($20-$30), Moderate ($10-$19), and Inexpensive ($10 and under).

Restaurants Outside the Center

Georgetown -- The closest Metro stop to Georgetown is the Blue Line's Foggy Bottom station; from there you can walk or catch the D.C. Circulator bus on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Glover Park -- The D.C. Circulator buses travel through Georgetown as far as Whitehaven Street, just a little bit short (south) of Glover Park; you can walk it easily, but it is all uphill. Regular Metro buses (the no. 30 series) travel to Glover Park. Perhaps the easiest thing to do is take a taxi.

Dining Green in D.C.

As the debut of the White House kitchen garden demonstrated in March 2009, the First Family is committed to the "green" movement's emphasis on organic gardening, ecofriendly farming, reliance on locally grown produce, and healthy eating. All the White House chef has to do is walk out to the garden to pluck fresh vegetables and herbs for immediate use in cooking for the Obamas. The White House kitchen is in good company throughout the city, where restaurants big and small, inexpensive and superpricey, are totally into earth-wholesome and healthy practices of energy and design, and the greenest of ways to grow, obtain, prepare, and replenish ingredients for their meals. Here are but a few examples:

• Bourbon Steak. Following in the White House's footsteps, the Four Seasons Hotel's popular restaurant introduced its on-site 500-square-foot herb and vegetable garden in June 2009. An Amish farm provided the 400 plants, which represent 62 varieties of produce, all of which are used in Bourbon Steak's dishes . . . and cocktails! Can't get more local than this. And it's all organically grown, no pesticides used.

• Equinox. Chef Todd Gray uses community-farmed organic ingredients that are grown within 100 miles of the restaurant whenever possible.

• Sweetgreen. This Green Restaurant Association-certified green eatery powers its restaurants entirely from wind energy obtained through carbon offsets. Nearly all packaging is biodegradable, including the menu, which has been implanted with seeds, so you can plant it in the ground and sprout a sweet green something or other yourself. Healthy salads and frozen yogurts are the deal here, and all are made fresh.

• Hook Restaurant. Its commitment to sustainability means that Hook's chef shops for locally farmed produce and that the menus are printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper, but most of all, that this seafood restaurant procures and serves only those varieties of fish that can reproduce at the rate at which they're caught. Right next door is Hook's inexpensive sibling, Tackle Box, which follows the same ecofriendly practices.

• Founding Farmers Restaurant. Owned by a collective of American farmers, the restaurant is LEED Gold-certified for its Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design, and Green Restaurant-certified, as well. Ingredients used are sustainably farmed, locally sourced, and organically grown.