French Fries to Foie Gras

Our NEIGHBORHOOD GEMS series features emblematic meals from around the world. This series shines a light on local restaurants and is designed to bring together inquisitive foodies and dishes that are unique and oh so worth a trip on roads less traveled!

Join us for authentic Hunan & Szechuan dishes at Chef Tan!

From Washington Post

Chef Tan invites diners to experience the tongue-tingling pleasures of one of China’s great cuisines in an understated Vienna strip mall.

When Chef Tan opened in Vienna last July, the restaurant had no website and initially offered neither takeout nor delivery. Albert Yang, the restaurant’s regional manager, believed that diners should experience Hunan cooking at its freshest and most vibrant. “If you pack it to deliver, the color, the oil, the meat will change,” he says. This was a sacrifice he wasn’t willing to make, even if it meant losing business.

Because of the low-key opening, I didn’t get wind of Chef Tan until February. Others had clearly beaten me to the punch. On my first visit, all but the large banquet tables in the handsome, wood-paneled dining room were occupied by chattering friends. Soon, my own table filled. Thinly sliced pork belly buried under waxy, modestly spicy green peppers. Morsels of chicken sweetly perfumed with ginger and surrounded by chopped red chiles packing merciless, browbeating heat. Tender slivers of lamb, ornamented with grassy cilantro and mild, neatly diced red peppers.

As I inhaled steam abundant with chopped chiles, pungent fermented peppers and dark, sharp vinegar, I understood Yang’s stubbornness. This was not food destined for a takeout container. I floated back to the parking lot, in awe of the mastery quietly playing out between a paint supply store and a beer and wine shop in this Northern Virginia strip mall.

When your server arrives with a mortar and pestle, it initiates a little table theater at Chef Tan. They slowly agitate the contents of the bowl, breaking through a layer of finely chopped green chiles and fermented bean curd to reveal strands of eggplants and wobbling, jet-black “century” eggs. If you’re unfamiliar, they’ll explain each ingredient, talking you through the curing process that gives these eggs their striking color and butter-rich texture.

“Instead of just providing the best taste, we also want to show some culture and immersive experience,” says Albert Yang. In a region where these chile-prickling, ferment-tingling dishes are nearly impossible to find, Chef Tan serves each one with a sense of great duty. If this is your first taste of Hunan cooking, you should love it. And Chef Tan is easy to love.

Owner Kevin Tan hails from the riverside city of Hengyang, as do many of the restaurant’s cooks, and dishes from their hometown shine. In lufen, springy rice noodles come in a concentrated stock warmed with anise and cinnamon, laid with thin strips of beef shank and a handful of crunchy peanuts. In another dish, the noodles float in a light seafood stock lit with green chile heat and packing seasonal vegetables and fillets of dense, flaky fish. Yang says his homesick friends once drove as far as New York for a taste of home. Chef Tan brought relief.

Though the menu includes a small section of Chinese American standbys, the best way to orient if you feel a little lost is to take stock of what neighboring tables are eating and follow their lead. This is how I first came to know the pleasure of little river snails stir-fried with pickled long beans and the grassy nuances of tender lamb cooked with cilantro. Best of all, after four visits to my new favorite Chinese restaurant, I’ve barely scratched the surface.

Join us for modern island-inspired dishes at Isla DC!

If it's good enough to attract the Obama's, I think we should give it a try too (they visited within weeks of its opening).

NOTE: This restaurant will NOT split the tab so please come prepared to cover your portion with Paypal, Venmo or Zelle. Thank you in advance for your understanding.

Washington Post:

Beyond the shimmer, Isla is an ambitious Caribbean destination with a lot to say.

Dinner at Isla does not end in the dining room. Chic customers filter back into the moodily lit entryway in twos and fours, where they put their to-go bags and fur coats to the side. They find their best light in a dramatic archway framed with mirrors. They strut a little strip of red carpet. As I duck inside, I always seem to land smack in the middle of Washington’s most fabulous photo shoot. Sorry!

Isla opened in the shimmering Midtown Center in late October, and it already feels like a destination. A place to celebrate birthdays, to get engaged, to spend an inordinate amount of money on a company credit card, to see and be seen (and, maybe, to see the Obamas on date night). Past the entryway is the even grander dining room roaring with life, illuminated by a chandelier shaped like a beehive and dripping light off hundreds of delicate glass petals. Through and through, this is a power restaurant, the kind of place people go as much for form — the glam of it all — as function. (You know, the food.)

A plate of lamb tartare was my first clue that Isla isn’t all window dressing. It arrives as a neat column, painted with a ticklingly spicy sweet potato and habanero cream and covered with a fine layer of chopped chives. Mixed almost imperceptibly in with the dark red cubes are bits of pickled shrimp, their slight chew giving way to waves of salinity. Instead of attempting to wrestle the gamy meat into submission, chef Lonie Murdock accentuates its undeniable intensity, breathing new life into a dish that tends to be more or less interchangeable from one glitzy restaurant to the next.

Murdock is new to D.C., but Canadian expats and visitors might know her from Miss Likklemore's, the restaurant she and husband Darren Hinds opened in Toronto in 2022. There, Murdock says, she felt more beholden to tradition, honoring the substantial Caribbean population that calls Toronto home by serving faithful renditions of classics such as slow-cooked oxtails and the handheld chickpea wrap called doubles. At Isla, she wanted to step “outside of that comfort zone.”

She brings her vision for a sprawling, globally inspired restaurant to Washington at an exciting moment for Caribbean cooking in the United States.

In New York, chef Paul Carmichael opened Kabawa in early 2025, a sleek tasting counter where he exalts plantains with shaved salt cod and caviar, treating the sticky sweet fruit as a luxury ingredient. At Kann in Portland, Oregon, chef Gregory Gourdet rubs whole cauliflowers in jerk seasoning and brings them to life in his restaurant’s open hearth, his cooking a glorious collision of Haitian technique and Pacific Northwest produce. D.C. has played its part, too. Chef Kwame Onwuachi's Dogon is a destination restaurant built around coco bread and brown stew snapper. At St. James on 14th Street NW, paratha is served as a centerpiece dish, surrounded by an ornate spread of meat and vegetable curries.

Where does Isla fit in?

The restaurant’s most interesting dishes emerge when Murdock treats “Caribbean” less as a prescription than a loose framework. “For me, it was more important just to kind of highlight the beauty and the bounty of Caribbean ingredients, and not necessarily focus on a traditional dish hitting the plate,” she says. Take flaky patties. There are familiar fillings, like supple oxtail that melts into each bite of buttery pastry, but more thrilling are ones densely packed with crab cooked in a fragrant panang curry. Murdock, whose mother is Jamaican, is a quick study in the American palate: A particularly decadent patty features processed cheese and ground beef.

Small plates and creative side dishes tend to outshine the bigger, spendier ones, but you can piece together a meat-and-starch dinner if that’s your thing. The showiest entrée on the menu (under a section called “feast & fire”) is a snapper whose meat has been separated from its bones and turned into fried nuggets. These morsels are then reunited with the fried skeleton, which wraps around the plate as if standing guard. For all the fun of the presentation, I found the fish disappointingly mild and craved a creamy sauce to dip into.

For something substantial, I prefer the pork chop, lovingly charred and served in a deep, dark, puckering reduction made with pork bones and the Trinidadian green mango condiment kuchella. A pat of crab butter slowly melts into the chop and amplifies its meaty richness, and a few spears of grilled mango radiate like glimmers of sunlight.

Whatever feast and fire you choose, pair it with a grilled plantain. “It is such a beautiful ingredient,” Murdock says. “I just didn’t want to see it hit the plate in any kind of way that I’d ever seen it before.” She roasts a sweet plantain until its skin is charred and the insides are beginning to soften, then slices it open and finishes it with butter infused with more bracing kuchella. The starchy fruit has all the heft of a baked potato, but so much more depth and curiosity. I like to double up with a side of mac pie. Murdock bridges the traditional Caribbean dish — a dense casserole — and ooey-gooey American mac and cheese. Her version is a brick of pasta almost caramelized around the edges, cheese lightly coating each noodle, all drenched in a devilishly rich Mornay.

I’ve yet to leave Isla short of stuffed, but someday I’ll build a light dinner around bara, the springy Trinidadian flatbread used to make doubles. Here, the dish is deconstructed, the bread served on a glass pedestal, the fillings served separately for swiping and layering. I like a version featuring tender oxtails blanketed dramatically in a creamy butter bean foam, but my favorite of these dishes nods to tradition. A bowl of well-spiced chickpeas, surrounded by labneh and dotted with a sweet-sour tamarind achar, is comfort food dressed up with a bow tie.

The leather booths are deep and cozy, and the cocktails, which favor rum and lean light and tropical, are lots of fun. A daiquiri stained blue with butterfly pea flowers is a refreshing start to the night, and Isla’s rendition of an espresso martini, coined the Style and Grace, balances jittery cold brew with sweet, milky peanut punch. Here, the classic cocktail becomes something rich and grown-up, almost devoid of its typical oversaturation.