Over the years, we’ve shared with you a lot of exciting news about the area. But this may be our most exciting news yet. 

Washingtonian magazine has highlighted Hyattsville, Riverdale Park and College Park in an eight-page guide as part of its neighborhood briefing in its latest and most popular issue of the year, “100 Very Best Restaurants.” It’s hot off the press and now hitting newsstands around the D.C. metro area. The briefing, as it’s called, is part of a more in-depth regular series on local hotspots which the magazine has published on areas like Arlington, Bethesda, Dupont Circle, Georgetown, Navy Yard, Silver Spring, and NoMa.   

When the magazine reached out to me a few months ago as editor of the Hyattsville Wire to put together a briefing on the best places to eat, shop and play in these three local communities, I was thrilled, not just to write it, but because of what it represented.

In 2012, the idea of the Hyattsville Wire was born over dinner one night with my husband at Tara Thai in Hyattsville. We felt big things were happening in the area, but at the time the communities along the Route 1 corridor were being underserved in the D.C. media, with most news about the area focusing largely on politics and crime. The day-to-day stories about life here just weren’t being told, especially online.

We decided to take news into our own hands and started the Hyattsville Wire with a mission of highlighting the local arts and music scene, the small-town culture and vibe of the area, the new businesses and restaurants and pop-ups, all the cool architecture and history and the ongoing development of communities up and down the corridor. There’s a lot we still haven’t covered, but we’ve worked tirelessly over the last nearly eight years to write the life on the corridor we were seeing firsthand. 

The Washingtonian guide is an extension of that effort. In it, I highlighted the craft alcohol boom in Hyattsville, the growth and expansion of the Rhode Island Avenue Trolley Trail connecting the three cities, the new hip restaurants popping up in Riverdale Park, the coming Purple Line and the half billion dollars’ worth of developments planned in College Park. The guide also includes my interview with one of the most notable people from area, professional tennis star Francis Tiafoe, who grew up in College Park.  

But writing the guide turned out to be much harder than I thought. With a limit of 2,500 words spanning three different cities, it wasn’t easy deciding which places to include and which to leave out — and yet, it turned out to be one of the longest neighborhood briefings the Washingtonian has published to date. To be honest, I could have written a whole magazine on all the cool places to go up and down the corridor, and I hope to be able to highlight in a similar fashion areas like Woodridge, Brentwood and Mount Rainier in the future. 

The Hyattsville Wire has succeeded far beyond what we initially thought possible, with our news now being regularly picked up by D.C. media, with the thousands of people who follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram; with our stories and events calendar now on Google News; and with capturing the attention of readers around the D.C. metro area with more than a million page views in total and 64,000 so far just this month; and now, this article in Washingtonian.

Be on the lookout for the February issue of the magazine this weekend at Whole Foods (we were told they usually stock the latest issue first) and be sure to grab a copy.  

From me to you, thanks for reading the Hyattsville Wire and I hope you enjoy the guide!

(6:20 p.m. update: Whole Foods at the Station at Riverdale Park now has the February issue of Washingtonian magazine on its shelves. Be sure to snag a copy before they sell out. )