“For whatever reason, we’re the restaurant you all love to hate,” remarks Chef Gillian Clark of her Brightwood restaurant, Colorado Kitchen. Some patrons have complained about slow service. Others are put off by the tone of the menu. “Are you starving?” it reads, “…you’d better have a salad and stop staring at the folks in the kitchen with that anxious look in your eye. You’re making them nervous.” PCists are skeptical of her more recent venture, DeSto — as opposed to The Store — and of a black chef’s choice to embrace Aunt Jemima (“Her smiling face, while it makes some of us black folks cringe, is part of Americana. How could I leave her out? I have come to terms with Aunt Jemima and I’ve acknowledged my secret admiration of her.”)

Don’t believe the hype that keeps you away Clark’s cooking. Even Ann Cashion, last year’s James Beard award winner for Best mid-Atlantic Chef, said in Oxford American’s “Southern Food” issue that Gillian Clark is one of her favorite chefs in D.C.

Colorado Kitchen isn’t merely the best restaurant in Ward 4, it’s among the best in the city. Haven’t been there? Zagat raters have, ranking the food 23 out of 30, on par with Jaleo, Georgia Brown’s, Café Atlantico and Johnny’s Half Shell. Clark characterizes her cooking as, “something simple…Betty Crocker gone to Cordon Bleu, I suppose.”