It’s been a delicious year in D.C. The city has seen a number of interesting new restaurants and eatieries, including spots like CommonWealth, Art and Soul, Cork Wine Bar, Adour, and Ray’s Hell-Burger. The DCist food staff got together to look back on their favorite dishes, desserts, and drinks of 2008.

Cork served up one of Eric Denman’s favorites — Pernod-braised lamb. The dish is a tender pile of shredded lamb shank atop small flagelots that have been cooked in chicken stock. If there’s one thing Chef Ron Tanaka knows is how to add flavor to his dishes with incredible stocks that run the gamut from conventional veal stock to the unexpected scallop stock made with connective tissue in the shell. Eggplant chips and small parallelograms of squash, zucchini, and tomato add color to the dish.

Tanaka’s old boss at CityZen, James Beard Award Winner Eric Ziebold, also adds to our list of most memorable dishes of 2008. Andrew Schneider was a fan of the braised shoat belly, which appeared in August. As he describes, “The small square of shoat was perfectly caramelized, giving it a powerful, rich flavor, even as the meat fell apart at the slightest touch of my fork. The shoat rested on a bed of homemade chorizo, beans, and a reduction sauce; it was reminiscent of a late summertime adaptation of cassoulet.”