Dining in North Potomac

[dmargolis]

I just got an email saying I have to post or re-register so as not to get "pruned" (ouch), so here goes.

Just going to list a few of my local neighborhood favorites:

1. Moby Dick's House of Kabobs. Love the chi\cken kabob dinner with basmati rice. The lamb, steak and chopped beef are excellent as well. Salad Shirazi, your basic Mediterannean tomato and cucumber salad, is always good.

Hummus is excellent, it's a thinner hummus than most, but very flavorful. The pita bread, freshly made in each store, backed in clay pots..is top notch.

2. Il Porto (Festival Center on Muddy Branch) is the best Italian restaurant in the area. Reasonably priced, and everything is excellent. Specials can be pricey, but specials are pricey at many places. Fish is good, they do a nice sea bass, salmon. Your standard Italian fare: Veal Marsala, Chicken Parmagiano, are excellent...that's the litmus test. If they can't do those well...you know the story.

The pizza is excellent. Nice thin crispy crust, with chunks of tomatoes in the sauce, quite nice. They do an excellent white pizza as well.

One dish to try is Chicken Ramano. It's boneless chicken in a cream sauce with a lillte sherry and marsala wine sauce mixed in. Not low calorie, but it's "like buttah", split it with someone or two if you're counting calories.

Il Porto rocks. Say hi to Alberto the owner when you're there, he's a great guy. They opened up a 2nd location in Frederick a few years ago. Alberto used to work at the Pines of Rome in Bethesda years ago.

[mnnchas]

Is "North Potomac" a euphemism for Gaithersburg? I've never really understood this (same goes for "North Bethesda" and Rockville). Probably off-topic, but the thread title threw me for a loop.

[DonRocks]

Is "North Potomac" a euphemism for Gaithersburg? I've never really understood this (same goes for "North Bethesda" and Rockville). Probably off-topic, but the thread title threw me for a loop.

Here's the answer.

[NB - I was the one who created the title; it originally said North Potomac and Gaithersburg, but we already have a separate thread for Gaithersburg.]

The following posts have been split into separate threads:

Il Porto (dcs)

[ol_ironstomach]

Is "North Potomac" a euphemism for Gaithersburg? I've never really understood this (same goes for "North Bethesda" and Rockville). Probably off-topic, but the thread title threw me for a loop.

Bottom line: yeah, that was the idea. Some time in the late 70s when Gaithersburg was still off the edge of the map and Potomac had cachet, several communities attached to Gaithersburg ZIP codes began petitioning to have "North Potomac" accepted as an official alternate place name, mainly because of real estate values which were predicted to rise 15-20% solely on the name change. And lo, once they got their way in the mid-80s, prices did exactly that within about a year, and suddenly the upper end of Travilah Road became development gold. A "Potomac Life" magazine sprang up, published in North Potomac. And so forth.

There was briefly a notion of West Bethesda, from the area around Montgomery Mall down to about where Democracy Blvd used to end (just past Seven Locks Rd) but everything to the west ended up in Potomac, and the rest...seems happy to just be called Bethesda.

FWIW, unless Moby Dick has opened another location south of Kentlands, neither of these restaurants is even in North Potomac, which extends only to Darnestown Rd. Il Porto is pretty solidly in G'burg.