About Etto
Celery salad. It sounds like the opposite of fun, right? But leave it to Peter Pastan—a master of elevating even the simplest ingredients at 2Amys and Obelisk—to make it the thing we can’t stop coming back for at this pine-floored slip of a pizza place. The secrets? Three kinds of celery, which make for fantastic crunch, plus a hefty dose of pecorino and lemon. Your best move is to treat dinner as a snackfest of cured meats, cheeses, and small plates from the chalkboard menu (such as a fabulous eggplant Parm or a bowl of clams in sherry butter), then maybe finish with a pizza. The hearty crusts are made with house-milled flour, lightly charred, and sparingly topped.
Don’t miss: Burrata; roasted leeks; white pizza with cotechino and egg; chocolate “salami”; ice creams; San Gennaro cocktail, with lambrusco and grapefruit.
See what other restaurants made our 100 Very Best Restaurants list. This article appears in our February 2016 issue of Washingtonian.
Ann Limpert joined Washingtonian in late 2003. She was previously an editorial assistant at Entertainment Weekly and a cook in New York restaurant kitchens, and she is a graduate of the Institute of Culinary Education. She lives in Petworth.
Anna Spiegel covers the dining and drinking scene in her native DC. Prior to joining Washingtonian in 2010, she attended the French Culinary Institute and Columbia University’s MFA program in New York, and held various cooking and writing positions in NYC and in St. John, US Virgin Islands.
