Most Spanish restaurants outside Spain hedge their menus. Galician octopus sits next to Andalusian fried fish, which sits next to pa amb tomàquet, and nobody leaves unhappy. Xiquet by Danny Lledó in Washington does the opposite. It picks one region and stays there.
The name is Valencian, and it is worth getting right before you book: it sounds like chee-KETT, not "zee-kwet". The restaurant holds a Michelin star, and its wine programme won the Guide's Sommelier of the Year award in 2022.
What Valencia means on a menu
Valencia gets flattened abroad into one word: paella. The region is the birthplace of the dish, so that is not wrong, just thin. It sits on Spain's east coast with a warm climate, a lot of farmland and a lot of boats, and its cooking follows from that. Rice in many forms, vegetables that grow nearby, and seafood that came in that morning.
Chef Danny Lledó builds his tasting menu out of that, and the restaurant is open about where it goes further afield: the menu takes the best product it can find, local or imported. Red prawns from Dénia turn up when they are available, which is the kind of detail a Valencian recognises immediately. Dénia sits down the coast from Valencia city, and its prawns are among the most expensive seafood in Spain.
How dinner is laid out
It is a tasting menu of 22 compositions, and the building is used as part of the sequence rather than as a backdrop:
- You start at the Chef's Counter on the ground floor with canapés, aperitivos and a drink, reading the menu at your own pace.
- You then move upstairs, past a wood-fire kitchen enclosed in glass, to the top-floor dining room.
- Dinner finishes in the mezzanine lounge with after-dinner drinks and a few last things from the kitchen.
The menu changes with the season and with what arrives, so the list you eat will not be the list someone else describes in a review from six months ago. The wood fire is the constant. Dishes are cooked to order over it, which is closer to how rice is treated in Valencia than most fine-dining kitchens abroad get.
The wine
The Sommelier of the Year award tells you where the effort went. The list is described as extensive but focused, which in practice usually means depth in a few places rather than a phone book of labels. If you want to understand what Spanish wine can do beyond the two names everyone knows, a pairing here is a faster education than a shop shelf. We wrote more about the country's lesser-known regions in Spanish wine beyond Rioja.
Where it sits in Washington's Spanish scene
Washington has a deeper Spanish bench than most American cities its size. Jaleo opened downtown in 1993 and made regional Spanish cooking normal here long before it was normal anywhere else in the country. Taberna del Alabardero covers the formal end with a long wine list. Casa Teresa goes the other way, built by Rubén around his grandmother Teresa's home cooking.
Xiquet is the one that commits to a single region and then does 22 courses inside it. If you have eaten Spanish food in the city for years and feel like you have seen the map, this is the corner of it you probably have not. The rest of the city's listings are on our Washington page.
If you're going
Xiquet is at 2404 Wisconsin Ave NW, Suite B, in Glover Park, north of Georgetown and away from the downtown restaurant blocks. Book ahead; a 22-course menu is not a walk-in format, and the counter seats go first. Give the evening three hours or more, because the three-floor structure is the point and rushing it wastes it.
If paella is your only reference for Valencian food, read how to spot a bad paella first. It will make more sense of what the wood fire is doing.
