We recommend: Tuna burger with grilled pineapple; Greek-style lamb burger; Wellington burger with blue cheese and roasted mushrooms.
Here you can get the sandwiches with cool lemony mayo or warm butter (not as good as the cold ones). Lobsters also show up in a tasty bisque-like stew and folded into mashed potatoes.
Kids can order spaghetti and meatballs while adults supplement the wood-fired pizzas with interesting salads such as one with arugula, pears, and Gorgonzola.
Look for a plate of lemon-kissed grilled lamb chops, a marvelous grilled whole black sea bass dressed with lemon and olive oil, and a gyro with made-from-scratch slices of pressed lamb and beef.
The ribs—the best in the area—aren’t too big or thick; the meat’s tender succulence compels you to gorge even if you’ve promised not to.
The best dishes, such as the ground-beef-and-potato-hash picadillo, the warm, crunchy ham croquetas, and the chicken soup with rough-cut veggies and hunks of meat, have a soulful simplicity.
Reliable starters include aushak, leek-filled ravioli smothered in meat sauce and yogurt, and bouranee baunjaun—eggplant stewed with leeks and garlic.
Batik doesn’t roll its own dumpling skins, but the fillings are fresh and imaginative—dive into them and it’s hard to resist over-ordering.
“Soup and salad” is often regarded as what you order if you’re counting calories. But here the combo amounts to a mini-feast. You could walk out the door happy if you order nothing else.
With buttery scrambled eggs in the all-day breakfast dishes, arepas make for a tasty South American–style twist on a morning sandwich.
The best of the tacos, the al pastor, features glistening, spice-rubbed pork sliced from a spit and piled into a nubby, two-ply corn tortilla.
A trip here is incomplete without a sampling of pupusas—crispy corn cakes oozing fillings such as bean-and-cheese or cheese-and-zucchini and served with a crunchy cabbage slaw.
The menu is inspired by the starchy carbs of northern China, and that should be your focus in ordering—sesame cakes, pork-filled wontons in a bowl of red-chili oil, and giant baton-shaped crullers.
The dumplings are the stars, but for variety and balance you might want to augment your meal with other dishes. Consider any of the noodle bowls from the voluminous main menu.
Ask for the “other” menu. From this traditional Cantonese and Szechuan menu try an appetizer of spicy dan-dan noodles or ginger-infused pork dumplings.
Even if you’re stuffed, you can’t leave without a bite of Perez’s homemade alfajores—anise shortbread cookies filled with caramel. Sublime.
The Shanghai noodles, which taste like a cousin of pork lo mein, are a good place to start. Soups—such as the delicate and restorative shredded-ginger-and-clam soup—also stand out.
Fish with spicy pickled cabbage is a foundational dish in the Szechuan cannon, but you won’t find a better version than the one at this gem.
There are five spice levels for the soondubu—medium is about right for the average diner.
Interesting small plates include kathi rolls, the cool potato salad called papri chaat, and tandoori chicken wings—sample them with abandon during the weeknight happy hour.
Consider the superlative lamb chops, marinated in a paste of ginger, chili flakes, and garlic, set over a charcoal flame until the surface darkens, then sprinkled with sumac.
Red curry is so precisely rendered that the lushness of its coconut milk dulls neither the heat nor the tang. Pad kaprow is a perfectly balanced combo of thin-sliced chicken and fried basil leaves.
Sidebar chef Aaron Covert curates the constantly changing menu—it might include Amish chicken rendered into KFC-style bites or a slider topped with a quail egg and hunk of pork belly.
New additions to the Wheaton menu are tamales and chicken empanadas, but they’re both forgettable.
The cooking is sure-handed and consistent, excelling in a variety of ways: roast fowl and game (duck and chicken boast burnished, crispy skins and tender meats) and tightly sauced stir-fries.
The menu contains a trove of seldom-seen treasures, from Floating Market Noodle Soup to crispy mussels in an egg-and-rice-flour batter to juicy grilled chicken with sticky rice.
Miso is the standout, a complex broth whose balance of saltiness, sweetness, and richness compels you to keep slurping. The noodles have the pleasantly chewy texture of all good pasta.
The kitchen is particularly skilled with the fry basket, which produces such standouts as angel wings, a light fritter of watercress and shrimp and crispy whole fish in red curry.
