Eating Across Vienna: Nominate A Dish Of The Week

It's no secret Vienna is home to 

We're out to find out where (and what exactly) it is. And we're turning to readers for help.

Here's how it will work:

• Each Monday we'll ask Vienna Patch readers to nominate their favorite dishes in Vienna.
• Each Wednesday, we'll open those nominations for voting.
• By Friday, the winning dish will be announced.
• Tune in the following Monday to read our review of the dish, and, nominate another.

We have just a few rules:

• The dish must be from a local restaurant (No chains).
• The dish must be under $20.
• You must name a specific dish, not just the name of a restaurant.
• A dish cannot "win" more than once.
• Don't worry: if your dish was selected one week but didn't win, you can nominate it again.

Nominate your favorite dish in the comments below.

Past Winners:

• Week of Jan.9: Pure Pasty Review Coming
• Week of Jan. 16: Wolftrap Cafe
  
  Review: I should preface this by saying I spent most of my childhood in New England, in an area where fish could be in the Atlantic in the morning and on your plate the same night. It's absolutely something I took for granted before moving to a college nowhere near an ocean, and later, to Washington, D.C., not quite the seafood capital of the East Coast. For that reason, I don't get seafood often these days — I save seafood meals for the times I visit friends and family up North.
  
  So when I found myself ordering the Pan Seared Trout after it won week two's poll, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I had anticipated a filet seared in some garlic and lemon juice. Instead, it was breaded, which was disappointing only to someone who likes the taste of fresh fish on its own (but likely not to the scores of other people who don't like things "too fishy").
  
  That said, the breading was light with just the right amounts of butter and parsley (unlike some restaurants who dredge fish so much that it's hard to tell whether you're eating fish or chicken) and the white flesh flaked away from the skin — crucial, in my humble opinion, to well cooked fish.
  
  What took the dish to the next level, though, was the Parmesan cream sauce, which fronted the palate with a hint of cheese and ended it with a zing of lemon.
  
  The thing that I suspect keeps so many people coming back to this dish, though, is the meal as a whole. The baked potato's skin peeled away from the edges, a sign of perfect roasting; the green beans were decorated with char marks (a good thing) and not swimming in a gallon of butter. The side salad was no leaf of iceberg and slice of tomato: it was packed with mushrooms, tomatoes and other vegetables, along with perfectly seasoned croutons. It reminded me of something you'd eat when you went to visit an aunt or grandmother — it's comfort foot, a meal Wolftrap seems to do often, and well.

• Week of Jan. 23: , Maplewood Grill (
• Week of Jan. 30: New York Style Pizza,
  
  I'm the daughter of two born and raised New Yorkers — being a pizza snob, connoisseur and critic is in my blood.
  
  And so is being suspicious of any place outside of the greater New York/New Jersey area that markets itself with the Holy Pizza Region's name.
  
  But Church Street Pizza has earned the right to use the style in its name; it's the closest thing I've found to the real deal in Virginia yet.
  
  The thinness of New York pizza is often the hardest part of the Empire State favorite to replicate, and Church Street got this spot on, along with the texture: perfectly crispy on the bottom before rising to a pillow of crust at the top of each slice. The tomato sauce wasn't overly sweet or spicy, and its ratio to the cheese — which bubbled as it was pulled from the oven — was near perfect. The cheese pizza wasn't quite as greasy as the real thing, but for the heart and waistline's sake, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
  
  What really made it feel like home was all the non-pizza things the restaurant does right: Taking my order five hours ahead of time, on Super Bowl Sunday, and having it hot to go at exactly the moment I got there; taking my name and also giving me a number; selling pizza by the slice and by the pie in one size only, offering toppings for either option; and most importantly, not laughing when I call it a "pie" instead of a pizza.
  
  There was something about it that made it fall just short of an exact New York pie — perhaps because I was eating it off a plate in Virginia instead of one-handed off a napkin while waiting for the subway — but it could just be because I was also raised with a single cardinal pizza rule: Never Admit Anything Outside New York Could Be As Good.

While we discourage manipulating a vote, our current voting system can't prevent the practice. So, until our engineers make tweaks, strategize as you see fit. Patch's "Restaurant Commissioner" holds the right to make changes and decisions as necessary.