Food in the DC Area - Part 1 of probably many

Those of you who know me are probably surprised I haven't written about the food here yet.  After all - I'm a super foodie.

On vacations growing up, museums were just places you went to between the significant restaurant stops.  And family get-togethers were always about who was cooking what and where it came from and what the story was behind it.  The best Christmas present my grandparents ever gave was the handwritten copy of my grandmother's favorite recipes.  We all have our own copies of "Nana's Cookbook" and when she died, I was fortunate to get her copy that had many annotations and additions.

And of course I ended up working in restaurants, starting a catering company, going to cooking school and eventually opening my own restaurant.

But eventually that all ended and now I'm in DC with my fabulous new job with the State Department.  Of course the big attraction of a job in the Foreign Service is that I get to taste food from all over the world!

So here we are in our first posting - training at FSI with us living in Northern Virginia.  I'd been very excited to check out the food scene in DC.  It's not really fair to draw comparisons between the restaurants of the DC area and those of the San Francisco Bay Area.  After all - DC is a town that's all about politics and power - that's the whole point and everything ultimately serves that.  San Francisco is a town that's about food.  When your chef's are celebrities and recognized wherever they go; when your newspaper's food section is larger than the entertainment section - and has a food scene gossip column - then you know you're in a food-centric town.

The DC area has some great places though - and does some things significantly better than SF - for example pizza.  I've had some really good pizza in Berkeley.  And everyone knows that the Cheeseboard pizza is a category unto itself.  Here there are a lot of really great pizza places.  We love Pizzeria Orso in Falls Church but our absolute favorite is Pupatella.  They've got the wood-fire oven from Naples and use San Marzano tomatoes.  Just wonderful!

They even have a wonderful Insalata Caprese for my daughter! Fresh Mozzarella - Yum!