In a first for a restaurant outside of New York City, Albi just earned a four-star review from the New York Times.
Chef Michael Rafidi’s detailed-oriented Palestinian fine-dining restaurant in Navy Yard has received plenty of flowers—including the No. 1 spot on Washingtonian’s 100 Very Best Restaurants list two years running—but this is a rare distinction. Ligaya Mishan’s review of Albi marks only the second time she has given out the Times’s highest honor since she became the newspaper’s food critic last year. It’s the first time the newspaper has ever given four stars to a restaurant outside of the Big Apple since it began running restaurant reviews in 1963. There’s never even been one in Brooklyn.
“It hasn’t really sunk in quite yet,” Rafidi tells Washingtonian.
At Albi, Mishan writes that Rafidi crafts “a wholly realized world” where “even the familiar is made new” without losing a sense of fun.
Mishan was impressed by the little things which Rafidi’s kitchen takes seriously: freshly baked sourdough khubz flatbread, kibbe naya with crushed rose petals, and roasted Dead Sea dates coated in ras el hanout-infused ghee. She opens her review with a rapturous description of a tray of warm rose-scented hand towels that servers present between courses.
Rafidi says the restaurant spotted Mishan when she dined there about a month ago, then heard from the Times for a fact check and a photo shoot. He says he appreciates being recognized for quiet attention to detail, something he describes as “our whole ethos.”
“I’m a pretty reserved and quiet person and I love to focus on what we do and the craft,” he says. “We spend more time on thinking through what we’re doing than promoting what we’re doing.”
With its four stars, Albi joins a rarefied group of Manhattan restaurants. Mishan gave four stars to Yamada for its kaiseki tasting menu in 2025. Besides that, only four other extant restaurants earned four stars from the Times when they were last reviewed, then by former critic Pete Wells: Le Bernardin in 2023, Yoshino in 2022, Eleven Madison Park in 2015, and Jean-Georges in 2014. The Albi review is part of the NYT’s efforts to expand its restaurant criticism coverage nationwide.
Since it opened in 2020, Albi has continued to impress Washingtonian’s food team. A renovation last year gave Rafidi the chance to refocus the menu and more explicitly delve into his Palestinian heritage. The Maryland-raised chef, who has family roots in Ramallah, also owns Union Market bistro and bar La’ Shukran and the all-day cafe Yellow.
Rafidi says the review won’t change anything for them. Albi can already one of DC’s more difficult tables to score, and it’s tough to see that changing any time soon.
“We plan far in advance at Albi,” he says. “There’s been so much great attention and press, which is incredible, and I really love that and appreciate it. But at the same time, it’s a busy restaurant, so we’ve been reducing our hours of operation a little bit lately and just focusing more on our own culture.”
Ike Allen covers politics, food, culture, and transportation in DC and writes the monthly Hidden Eats column for the magazine. He grew up in DC.
