Washingtonian
Downtown
1110 21st St., NW
Washington, DC
202-293-7191
Open Monday through Friday for lunch, daily for dinner.
Wheelchair accessible.
The best fixed-price, multiple-course dining experience in Washington is a dinner at Roberto Donna's Laboratorio, a 30-chair dining room served by its own kitchen in a glass-walled room in the back of Galileo. There Donna and three assistants cook to order and serve 11 to 13 small courses based on the finest available local and imported products, such as vegetables grown from Italian seeds, custom-raised piglets, and air-freighted game.
In this season, some of the courses include garnishes of traditional Italian relishes that the chef has canned during the summer. The tomato sauce used in any preparation is made in-house from locally grown San Marzano tomatoes and similarly preserved.
In one autumn dinner at the Laboratorio, the antipasto comprised house-cured prosciutti of wild boar and farm-raised pig with a garnish of pickled wild mushrooms and oil-cured baby artichokes. Then, in a progression of small courses designed to top one another, Donna and his assistants produced a beautifully paced meal that included pumpkin soup with a garnish of house-made cotechino sausage and black truffles; a couple of spoonfuls of ethereal fresh pasta in a sauce of monkfish and fresh porcini mushrooms; a perfectly cooked filet of red mullet, lent a sweet nuance by its breading of pandoro crumbs, served over a sweet-sour Sicilian vegetable stew; and a stunning course of roasted wood pigeon with a creamy purèe of potatoes and a sauce of emulsified black-trumpet mushrooms and anise.
Memorable as a meal in the Laboratorio is, the daily changing regular menu at Galileo does not suffer by comparison. Whatever the season, it offers temptingly novel dishes. On a given day's menu, one might find an antipasto of thinly sliced veal tongue with a celery-leaf salad and a classic salsa verde, a half order of fettuccine with a long-cooked Neapolitan tomato sauce, or an exquisite dish of baked piglet loin with sautèed mushrooms and potato purée—all dishes that reinforce Galileo's reputation as one of the country's best Italian restaurants.
— Robert Shoffner
January 2003
