Below is the text of my monthly “Editor’s Letter” in the new issue of Washingtonian.
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Tim Ma was an electrical engineer at Raytheon in Falls Church before he enrolled in New York’s French Culinary Institute. After graduating and working in David Chang’s Momofuku restaurant group (for more on Chang, see page 69), Ma took a job in the US Virgin Islands, where he and his fiancée schemed about opening their own place in Washington. Today his four-year-old Maple Ave Restaurant in Vienna—one of our 100 Very Best Restaurants in the February issue—features hints of his French training, but the highlights of the menu are its unexpected deviations into Thai, Korean, and—Ma’s own cultural heritage—Chinese. During a visit to his restaurant over the Fourth of July holiday, I circled the globe in a few bites, from the Deep South to Southeast Asia, eating small plates of Thai okra, chicken wings with Korean chili paste, and burrata cheese with pesto.
To me, one of the greatest advantages to living in Washington is the ability to explore cultures and cuisines so widely, to enjoy the overlapping of so many ethnicities and traditions.
After dinner at Maple Ave, I walked through the parking lot to Vienna’s historic Church Street for dessert at Nielsen’s Frozen Custard. Tucked a block away from busy Route 123, Church Street is where the town of Vienna began. The first European settlers from Scotland’s Ayr County originally named the area Ayr Hill, and it wasn’t until the mid-1800s that an influx of immigrants renamed it Vienna—in honor not of the Austrian capital but of a town in New York. Church Street was for many years effectively the Virginia burg’s only street. Today, historic-preservation efforts have helped it keep its small-town feel.
Those original settlers wouldn’t recognize the Church Street area of 2013—boasting, as it does, a Mexican restaurant, a sushi restaurant, a Greek restaurant (Plaka Grill; see page 88), and a shop selling traditional Cornish “pasties” inside and flying the Union Jack outside. But what caught my eye across from Nielsen’s was Yas Bakery, one of the area’s best Turkish and Persian bakeries and grocery stores. As soon as I finished my frozen custard, I loaded up with Turkish baklava, Iranian flatbread, Greek labneh, preserved lemons, and a host of other Persian specialties.
I love that a single evening in Washington can take you from Tim Ma’s fried green tomatoes to Persian pastries, that you can pass Peruvian chicken joints while driving through Wheaton en route to Nava Thai or Ruan Thai (see page 66), or that on Bethesda’s Cordell Avenue, within a few steps you can indulge in Passage to India, Mia’s Pizzas, Freddy’s Lobster & Clams, or Faryab for Afghan kebabs.
A recent weekend road trip began with lunch at R&R Taqueria, a remarkably authentic taco-stand in the corner of a gas station in Elkridge, Maryland (page 76), moved on to Italian pastries and coffee at Vaccaro’s in Baltimore’s Little Italy, then dinner at Pabu—the three-star Japanese restaurant in that city’s Harbor East neighborhood—and brunch the next day at Ouzo Bay, a trendy Greek restaurant in Baltimore started by the grandson of John Paterakis, whose family bakery empire bankrolled the early development in Harbor East a quarter century ago. Food from four countries in four different price ranges in four very different environments.
This month, our annual Cheap Eats issue celebrates that rich variety. It’s the most comprehensive Cheap Eats guide we’ve ever done, helping you get to know the wide range of cuisine that Washington offers. More than 30 cultures and countries are represented. Because exploring unfamiliar cuisines can be daunting, our reviewers have broken them down to the basics—offering tips on dishes to order, drinks to sample, and cultural etiquette you might not know about.
Keep this issue close at hand. It’s a perfect guide for when the kids are away at camp, the office closes early, or you’re just up for a little international adventure.
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