A pair of local restaurants have attracted the attention of the New York Times.
Bostan Uyghur Cuisine, which opened in Cherrydale in 2021, and Ellie Bird, which opened last year in Falls Church, are on a NYT list of “The 25 Best Restaurants in Washington D.C. Right Now.”
The list, just published today, focuses mostly on restaurants in the District — from Thip Khao to Ethiopic to Reveler’s Hour — but includes a few in Maryland and Virginia. Mama Chang made the list in Fairfax, though Alexandria was shut out.
Bostan (3911 Langston Blvd), which also ranked last year on a Washington Post list of the area’s best fast-casual restaurants, was praised by Times for its tasty and traditional cuisine.
You can add Bostan’s chicken and lamb skewers to the list of great kebabs out there: juicy, hot-from-the-coals, heady with cumin. But what makes these kebabs truly special is everything you order to go along with them, dishes like saozi, supple flat noodles in a tart, red-tinted broth; rangpiza, a cold noodle dish sparked with chili oil; and the beef-and-onion stuffed flatbread called goshan. The owners, Mirzat Salam and Zulhayat Omer, started serving traditional Uyghur cuisine in this Arlington, Va., strip-mall after coming to the United States in 2019.
The Times also noted Bostan’s second location in Herndon, which opened about a year and a half ago.
The write-up for Ellie Bird (125 Founder’s Ave), meanwhile, called the Falls Church spot “well worth the short trip outside the District.”
Yuan and Carey Tang, the husband and wife team behind Ellie Bird, cut their teeth working in fine-dining restaurants in Washington, D.C., where they opened their critically acclaimed tasting-menu restaurant Rooster & Owl. Their second project, in the affluent bedroom community of Falls Church, where the couple grew up, is decidedly homier. There, they’re proving that suburbanites are as hungry for imaginative cooking as any city denizen. Think Vietnamese French onion soup with braised oxtail, cacio e pepe crossed with elotes, and fried oyster larb gai.
Hat tip to James B.