French Fries to Foie Gras

Join us at Restaurant Foraged. at Patowmack Farm for "what the land gives when it gives it".

Five Course Dinner $130
Wine Pairing $65

NOTE: The restaurant collects a $50 deposit per guest at the time of booking. In the event the restaurant is unable to split the tab, please come prepared to cover your portion with Paypal, Venmo or Zelle. Thank you in advance for your understanding.

The restaurant officially opened its doors in May 2026, taking over the idyllic, glass-enclosed property that formerly housed The Restaurant at Patowmack Farm. Diners can expect hyper-local, ingredient-driven cooking that makes full use of the surrounding 18-acre property and nearby farms. Because it is a brand-new concept, early expert critiques and diner consensus are still taking shape, though the location remains celebrated for its stunning panoramic views of the Potomac River

Northern Virginia Magazine:

Patowmack Farm has entered a new era. Restaurant Foraged at Patowmack Farm, led by chef Chris Amendola, has officially opened in Lovettsville.

This farm-to-table concept is taking over the space from the former Restaurant at Patowmack Farm, which closed at the end of August 2025. The shuttered restaurant was a mainstay on our annual 50 Best Restaurants list, landing the No. 1 spot in 2024.

Much like the original Restaurant at Patowmack Farm, this new restaurant will be a “hyper-seasonal restaurant concept known for its focus on local farms, foraging, and ingredient-driven cooking,” according to a news release.

Guests will experience a five-course tasting menu ($130) centered around locally sourced ingredients. Menus change frequently to include fresh, seasonal produce grown on the farm and nearby.

“We’ve always worked by the week, not the year,” said Amendola. “Being at Patowmack Farm allows us to get even closer to the ingredients and the land that inspires the food.”

This event is a special addition to our monthly line-up - I just couldn't pass it up!

Join us for live music, dance and Spanish flavors with Héctor, Miguelito, Kevan, and Mariana Gatto at El Mercat in Arlington!

From Arlington Magazine

I burned my upper lip. A rookie mistake, to be sure.

That’s what happens when you are so eager to annihilate an army of small plates that you impatiently thrust a hunk of crusty bread into a bubbling cast iron skillet of molten goat cheese and immediately chow down.

I suspect George Rodrigues, the chef and co-owner of El Mercat Bar de Tapas, understands my unbridled enthusiasm, as he, too, is obsessed with Spanish gastronomy.

That baked-in wiggle room gives him leeway to draw on childhood memories, play with global flavors and tweak the techniques he honed while working in D.C. kitchens such as the Latin-Asian mashup Tico (now closed) on 14th Street NW, and a Penn Quarter spin-off of Boqueria tapas bar. He likes to chase inspiration wherever it leads him.

I was tempted to cry foul when I spotted one such interpretation on El Mercat’s menu, billed as St. Louis pork ribs coated in cider glaze and mustard seeds. My first thought was, Why bring American barbecue into this?, presuming Rodrigues was trying to replicate a Carolina Gold-style mustard sauce or some other vinegary condiment.

Turns out, he was riffing on the tantalizing ribs he’d devoured while touring a cider distillery in Asturias, Spain, which he describes as “glazed in a sweet sauce and finished with sesame seeds.”

Putting his own stamp on the dish, he swapped the sesame seeds for a medley of yellow, brown and black mustard seeds (imparting notes ranging from “mild, mellow and slightly sweet-tangy” to “deeper spice, earthiness and pungency,” he says). So tender were these ribs that when the glaze adhered one of them to the serving plate, all it took was a tug and a twist to separate the bone from the succulent meat.

The chef’s take on ham croquettes is similarly engaging. The traditional Spanish version is filled with lusty Jamón Serrano and onion-laced bechamel sauce. Rodrigues takes it a step further by folding in fruity quince paste.

“It’s a flavor that immediately brings me back to my childhood,” he says, referencing the guava- and cheese-filled pastries so familiar to Caribbean and South American palates. The two-bite treats are terrific, their crispy shells giving way to a buttery, salty filling complemented by pops of sweetness.

I’d be remiss not to mention the aioli-topped paella, which elicited squeals of delight from my dinner companion one night. “Rather than using aioli as a garnish, I treat it as a thoughtful pairing,” Rodrigues says, adding: “Eating rice with mayonnaise is very common” in Brazil.

His saffron-scented seafood paella (my favorite), is studded with calamari, clams, mussels and shrimp, while another, stained black from squid ink, is crowned with a garlic-spiked emulsion. A meatier version layered with roasted chicken, chorizo sausage and herby salsa verde also gets a saffron aioli glow-up.

The six paellas on the menu feature varying combinations of proteins and add-ins (including duck, lamb and a vegetarian option) and can be ordered in two sizes (a small order is plenty for two people; medium can feed four or more). But all share one delectable thing in common: the crispy layer of toasted rice known as socarrat, which spreads across the bottom of the pan. Rodrigues achieves the crunchy, caramelized texture by cooking down the stock-absorbing bomba rice over a burner and then baking it in the oven, starting at a high temperature so the rice on the bottom forms that distinct crust.

Top sellers like gambas al ajillo (shrimp punctuated by smoky paprika and an abundance of fresh garlic) and spicy patatas bravas (spuds fried to a golden brown and smothered in zesty tomato sauce and garlic aioli) fly out of the kitchen at all hours, and with good reason. The patatas are perhaps the most addictive version of fries known to man. (At least this man.)

Join us for the Salo Salo menu which celebrates the heart of Filipino hospitality in the dining room at Kayu DC!!

NOTE from the restaurant: Our 3-Course Salo Salo Menu is priced at $65 per person and requires full table participation.
Inspired by the tradition of gathering around a table filled with food, drinks, and shared stories, this experience invites you to connect, share, and savor together.

Washington Post:

Each buoyant, oil-tanned doughnut at Kayu is piped full of black truffle cream, draped in prosciutto and capped with curls of smoked cheddar. Salty and sweet, peaty and intense, this is chef Paolo Dungca’s telling of an ensaymada, traditionally a small loaf of brioche baked until golden and topped with butter, sugar, and grated cheddar or mildly nutty queso de bola. Here, the baked pastry is replaced by a bombolone, a fried and filled doughnut nodding to executive chef Julie Cortes’s time spent cooking Italian food in Manila.

The dish traces back to Spanish colonizers, who arrived in the Philippines with ensaïmadas, light and flaky coils of lard-enriched pastry. In time, Filipino bakers swapped in butter for lard and revised fillings and garnishes to reflect local tastes and ingredients. The ensaymada became a culinary flag as emblematic of the Philippines as the ensaïmada is of Mallorca. At Kayu, the dish continues on its path of reinvention. It’s a fitting symbol for Dungca’s expansive vision for Filipino cuisine.

Until last June, Dungca operated Kayu as a tasting menu restaurant on Washington's H Street NE, a showier, tweezer-ier place built around an L-shaped open kitchen where Dungca, 35, might lean over the counter to explain kinilaw’s similarity to ceviche or tell the sentimental backstory of a gingery chicken broth sipped on stormy days in Manila, where he grew up. In 2004, 13-year-old Dungca moved to Los Angeles with his family, and in 2014, he relocated to D.C., where he served as the opening sous chef at the late 24-seat Filipino standard-bearer, Bad Saint.

Following a split with his business partners, he closed Kayu’s short-lived first location and reopened on 17th Street NW in August. The new Dupont Circle space, divided between a cozy upstairs dining room and a basement-level kitchen, requires a different form of storytelling from the intimate up-close approach Dungca is accustomed to. With the chef downstairs and servers flitting between tables, dishes must now speak for themselves.

This leads to some thrilling first encounters. Whether or not you were acquainted with bagoong before it hit your table, you’ll understand the essential Filipino condiment’s appeal when you taste a radicchio salad practically quivering with the goodness of so much naturally derived glutamate and interspersed with bits of smoked bacon. To make it, Dungca combines dried shrimp and scallops with fat from Maryland crabs and beet juice to stain the mixture its customary clayish brown. It appears again in fried rice, its piscine punch softened by heat to reveal a sweeter, more furtive side. A good rule of thumb: Order anything at Kayu graced with this bagoong.

Though many of Dungca’s dishes gesture only loosely toward ones you might find on a more traditional menu, he returns so often to the condiments, seasonings and building blocks of Filipino cooking that, when the meal is done, I feel closer to the heart of the cuisine. Dungca says that in the past, he would deflate when the occasional purist accused him of bastardizing Filipino food. Now, he says, “I embrace that*.*” You won’t find chicken adobo at Kayu, but on the weekends there’s a bang-up adobo chocolate chip cookie, flavored with bay leaf powder and rice wine vinegar and garnished with pink peppercorns.

Cocktails draw on a variety of island cultures, creating a roster of tropically inspired drinks that stand up nicely to the assertiveness of Dungca’s cooking. An otherwise standard Old Fashioned was bright and cheery with pandan. A slender chile floating in a mezcal-and-peach-schnapps number gave each sip a tickling heat.

Maybe Dungca just needed time to figure out how to distill the grand ambitions of a tasting menu into a decidedly more humble neighborhood spot. Whatever clicked into place before my two most recent visits, this is a good time to make your way to Kayu. The chef’s cooking now reflects the sharpness of his menu, which he arranges around a very reasonable format: For $65 and some optional supplements, each diner chooses three courses, most of which are dropped at the center of the table as a feast unfolds.

The restaurant serves one of my favorite steaks in town, a strip loin fanned over kare kare, a stew traditionally defined by its use of peanuts but interpreted here as a rich cashew curry even sweeter, creamier and smoother than its blueprint. It comes with piaya, a dimpled disk of flatbread you should mop across the plate until every last puddle of sauce is gone.

I’m fairly sure you haven’t had pancit like Dungca’s, which brings together fresh egg noodles and the first Maryland blue crab of the season in a delicate brown-butter dashi. “I think food evolves over time, and our experiences in America play a factor in that,” Dungca says when I ask about his spin on the classic noodle stir-fry. “Just being able to enjoy crabs in the DMV was the sole inspiration for that dish.”

The chef has a knack for fried chicken, which shows up masterfully juicy and glistening with chile oil between two shamrock-green halves of a faintly grassy pandan bun. Better still is a sandwich served on the weekends at Morena, a collaboration between Dungca, Cortes and manager Bless Barrios that transforms Kayu’s dining room into a counter-service Filipino cafe.

The fried chicken in the weekend-only sandwich is coated in pamapa itum, an ash-black condiment of burned coconut meat and warm spices that registers as sweet, smoky and invitingly bitter. Ever since Popeyes triggered a national frenzy of freid-chicken one-upmanship in 2019 with its mega-viral sandwich, it’s been hard to distinguish one golden mass of bread and batter from the next. Not Morena’s, which would have more than held its own in the chicken sandwich wars.

Occasionally, Dungca still seems to be testing his material. I liked a reimagining of tahô, typically a cup of silken tofu and tapioca pearls turned here into cheesecake parfait, but was less crazy about the sizable scoop of caviar on top, which felt like a salty, distracting bit of showing off. And at the end of an early May dinner, I was thrown when an ube custard and shredded-phyllo dessert was described as a take on the viral Dubai chocolate; likewise the following weekend at Morena, where I encountered a croissant inspired by the same dish.

Perhaps I would have been a little less confused had I known at the time that the candy, which originated in Dubai in 2021, was co-created by a Filipino pastry chef. Perhaps not: The confection has grown far beyond its maker into one of the most suffocating food trends in recent memory, its virality prompting a fire hose of indistinguishable pistachio-green milkshakes, cakes, parfaits and other marketing gimmicks to be sprayed across Instagram, TikTok and, worst of all, real-life restaurant menus.

As algorithms and artificial intelligence flatten our digital lives and increasingly dictate culture beyond our screens, restaurants serve as an antidote to so much sameness. I want to eat dishes that make my eyes and synapses light up and to experience flavors I couldn’t have imagined while mining the depths of TikTok. I want the impassioned cooking of one person with a unique point of view — something Dungca has in spades. Kayu doesn’t need to lean on the easy appeal of Dubai chocolate or whatever inch-deep trend comes next. Dungca’s own ideas are far more interesting.