Café Tirolo: A Hidden Gem in Arlington, Virginia

Finding restaurants you enjoy enough to want to return to time and again can be a matter of trial and error. But, if you’re lucky, you’ll have friends who like the same types of food and restaurants that you do and are willing to share their discoveries. That’s how I found out about Café Tirolo, tucked away on Quincy Place, a diagonal side street behind 4001 North Fairfax Drive, in Arlington, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C.

“I wanted to share a little food find in Arlington called Café Tirolo,” my friend Gina e-mailed me. “The chef is an Austrian who cooks Austrian-North Italian specialties, and runs it with his wife and daughter. It’s on the ground floor of an office building on and, at first glance, looks like a nondescript pizzeria. But it's open at night, and has an impressive little dinner menu, as well as nightly specials. I'm hoping this place can survive, since it's practically invisible to passersby.”

Since Gina also writes about food—and has extensive experience in commercial kitchens, I knew — without even seeing the restaurant — that she knew what she was talking about. Gina went on to describe the homemade goulash soup “hearty and perfect for a winter night,” the trout with a lemony sauce that her partner enjoyed, as well as the veal scaloppini in red wine sauce with black mushrooms that she savored. When she said that the entire dinner for two, including appetizers was $38, I knew I had to check it out. It sounded as if Gina had found another candidate for my world-wide collection of what I call “real world,” gourmet restaurants.

At lunch, I found out that she had succeeded. “This is exactly the type of restaurant that I absolutely love to write about,” I e-mailed her later that day. So why did both of us like it? It certainly isn’t because of its stylish avant-garde décor. Actually, it’s the lack of an artificially contrived decorating scheme that gives the place charm—although some simple tablecloths, dimmed lighting and candles at dinner would be ideal. It’s a clean, pleasant lunchroom atmosphere—the type of honest, non-chain, down-to-earth mom and pop restaurant you might find as you climb your way through the Alps. And, as you look over the menu selections posted over your head and glance into the open kitchen, you can sense that owner-chef Vic Kreidl is Austrian.

He temporarily interrupts his cooking, and smiles a greeting as he hands us a paper menu “so you don’t have to strain your necks,” he tells us. Friendly and unpretentious. I like that in a chef—especially one who has had 35 years of international experience, including 14 years at Washington, D.C.’s noted Tiberio Restaurant.

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