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Michelin launches first Washington, D.C. guide

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Bret Thorn, Senior Food Editor

October 14, 2016

2 Min Read
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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]
Follow him on Twitter: @foodwriterdiary

About the Author

Bret Thorn

Senior Food Editor, Nation's Restaurant News

Senior Food & Beverage Editor

Bret Thorn is senior food & beverage editor for Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality for Informa’s Restaurants and Food Group, with responsibility for spotting and reporting on food and beverage trends across the country for both publications as well as guiding overall F&B coverage. 

He is the host of a podcast, In the Kitchen with Bret Thorn, which features interviews with chefs, food & beverage authorities and other experts in foodservice operations.

From 2005 to 2008 he also wrote the Kitchen Dish column for The New York Sun, covering restaurant openings and chefs’ career moves in New York City.

He joined Nation’s Restaurant News in 1999 after spending about five years in Thailand, where he wrote articles about business, banking and finance as well as restaurant reviews and food columns for Manager magazine and Asia Times newspaper. He joined Restaurant Hospitality’s staff in 2016 while retaining his position at NRN. 

A magna cum laude graduate of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., with a bachelor’s degree in history, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Thorn also studied traditional French cooking at Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine in Paris. He spent his junior year of college in China, studying Chinese language, history and culture for a semester each at Nanjing University and Beijing University. While in Beijing, he also worked for ABC News during the protests and ultimate crackdown in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Thorn’s monthly column in Nation’s Restaurant News won the 2006 Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for best staff-written editorial or opinion column.

He served as president of the International Foodservice Editorial Council, or IFEC, in 2005.

Thorn wrote the entry on comfort food in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, 2nd edition, published in 2012. He also wrote a history of plated desserts for the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, published in 2015.

He was inducted into the Disciples d’Escoffier in 2014.

A Colorado native originally from Denver, Thorn lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Bret Thorn’s areas of expertise include food and beverage trends in restaurants, French cuisine, the cuisines of Asia in general and Thailand in particular, restaurant operations and service trends. 

Bret Thorn’s Experience: 

Nation’s Restaurant News, food & beverage editor, 1999-Present
New York Sun, columnist, 2005-2008 
Asia Times, sub editor, 1995-1997
Manager magazine, senior editor and restaurant critic, 1992-1997
ABC News, runner, May-July, 1989

Education:
Tufts University, BA in history, 1990
Peking University, studied Chinese language, spring, 1989
Nanjing University, studied Chinese language and culture, fall, 1988 
Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine, Cértificat Elémentaire, 1986

Email: [email protected]

Social Media:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bret-thorn-468b663/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bret.thorn.52
Twitter: @foodwriterdiary
Instagram: @foodwriterdiary

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