About Top of DC.

The same handful of marquee rooms with publicists get covered to exhaustion, while the neighborhood spots locals drive across town for on a Tuesday night stay buried under sponsored listings on the platforms most people search.

Most Washington coverage stops at the same downtown blocks and the same tasting menus, then calls it a city. That's a small tier and it isn't where the region eats. The DMV has the largest Ethiopian community in the country, split between Ninth Street NW and Silver Spring. It has one of the largest Salvadoran populations anywhere, pupusas running through Columbia Heights, Mount Pleasant, and Langley Park. Eden Center in Falls Church is the biggest Vietnamese commercial center on the East Coast. Annandale is Koreatown. A guide that ends at the District line isn't a guide to this metro, so we don't stop there.

We track DC's own neighborhoods, U Street, Shaw, 14th Street NW, Petworth, Bloomingdale, H Street NE, the Wharf, alongside the Maryland and Virginia jurisdictions that share this food map: Bethesda, Silver Spring, Hyattsville and College Park, Arlington, Falls Church, Annandale, Alexandria. Ethiopian and Eritrean rooms, kept distinct. Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan, Peruvian, named by country. Bolivian salteñas, Chesapeake crab, half-smokes and mumbo sauce, the carryout tradition that's specifically DC's own. Strip malls and shopping plazas included by name, never apologized for. We track 0+ restaurants across the metro against the same methodology; the full method is laid out at How We Work.

Top of DC is published by Top Rated Network LLC, an independent, veteran-owned Las Vegas media company that runs city dining guides on the same methodology across the country. The rankings and the writing are produced by this site’s own desk.

The site is small by design. No investors, no growth pressure, no quarterly board meeting that needs engagement numbers to keep climbing. The rankings answer to the data; the data answers to the city.

The methodology (Bayesian-weighted ratings, weekly recalculation) is the same one Top Rated Network uses across its other city guides. The editorial voice is local to Washington. The sites themselves are built and maintained by WebIgniter, our in-house web studio.