Phillips Flagship

I just checked to see verify the address & found it closed. I want to cry! My mind takes me back to the smell, the smiles, the joy of great food, friends, family and history. I appreciate all the smiles, the bloated bellies (in a good way) and the memories. Thank you again and again… suppose I’ll look for another location. With tears in my eyes & memories in my heart! until we meet again!

Come to the restaurant since I was in high school. Wonderful seafood. Amazing sides. Great location and great service. Missed this place so much. I heard they will open one at L enfant place. News here:
If it’s real, I will be the first guest to there !

This is an obituary for a wonderful restaurant. We miss you. The salad bar was amazing. They even had soups without seafood. The pasta bar was awesome. We loved sitting in the outer area and watching the boats. Why did you leave us? Sigh…

My heart is heavy and stomach growling my annual soljourn to Phillips was met with the news that its been closed. A loss for my pallet. :-(

Are you kidding.
This is NOT the place to expect good food, just lots of food, then it won’t disappoint. Sorry it closed it was a fun experience with a large group.

Review is for drinks and service only~
Okay though, the only reason we came here was because we wanted a nice table outdoors, but under some shade after the 80 degree fish market. I’m only giving this 2 stars instead of 1 because we were able to sneak in and sit down at a table outside without them questioning us or making us pay for the ridiculously crowded buffet. The waiter was kind of confused, but brought us some drink menus upon our request. We decided on mango daiquiris and margaritas since the pictures looked outstanding (props to whatever photographer they use). The drinks did NOT look that way when we got them. Our waiter, after disappearing for endless amounts of time, asked if we wanted them virgin or not (wut the answer is obviously not), but they basically were virgin anyways or there was .1% alcohol.
Overall, I’m really glad I paid $ 11 for a mango smoothie and very subpar service (I hope you sensed the sarcasm in that one).

Decent food. Large buffet selection. Desserts weren’t that great. Clam chowder was great and crab cakes were good!

This place is terrible. I don’t think I liked a single thing about it. I came here because I had a strong desire for sea food and boy did this place kill that desire for a really long time (1 year ago is when I tried this spot and I haven’t had any since). Tiara was my waitress and her attitude was so poor that I felt like I was making her life bad by being a customer at this joint. We opted in for the buffet to get things rolling. While some of the food was okay, the seafood they offered was gross. They had baskets of crab legs out and waisting away. I was here maybe an hour before closing and I could tell they weren’t going to be eaten and they didn’t look very desirable to begin with but I had some anyway, because, «when in rome?» I forced myself to finish out of guilt to the lost crab lives. (I’m no vegetarian but I don’t like the idea of wasting the life of animals.)
Would I recommend anyone come here? Check the 1-​star rating! I’d come here if you like bad buffet’s like Golden Coral possibly but you’re better off eating somewhere else if you have taste buds that work.
Edit: Just for some extra clarity, I have 59 reviews and this is my only 1 star review thus far.

Two words: Tourist Trap
…Yes, we fell for it.
Went with my dad and boyfriend before Thanksgiving and the place was dead. The two of them had the buffet, while I ordered a cheeseburger. Our waiter came back and asked me three times to clarify my order. I had to be the only person in his whole section with an order from the kitchen.
The burger was fine. Not bad, but not really good either. The buffet seemed ok, but overpriced. The guys both spent for-​ev-​er trying to crack crab legs and said it wasn’t the greatest. Maybe summertime brings a different feel and quality to the place.
I left wondering what’s customary to tip a waiter on a buffet meal. I was overly generous, keeping the holiday in mind.
My two stars here are in the giving spirit as well. I’ve been to worse, but would not recommend this place unless you’re ok with paying for a below average experience.
Then ok, fall right in…

I am a land-​locked Midwest girl. Where I’m from, seafood is expensive and crab legs are a true delicacy. When they told me I could have ALL the crab legs I wanted… as in ALL YOU CAN EAT… as in FULL SIZED crab legs. WooWee!!!
Like the grinch, I think my belly just grew 10x in size.
Other than crab legs, their buffet is pretty extensive. Plenty of options for all pallets. I really like their dessert bar. You can always find some great goodies there.
I rate a 4 star because of the service. The staff is a wee bit Ghetto. You may find yourself waiting on menus, dying of thirst, or starvation if you order from the menu. The servers suck but they are friendly. The hostesses leave much to be desired.
Order the buffet, an extra 2 glasses of water, and pig out!

The food was badly overpriced, the quality fair to good. The waitstaff was surly and uncooperative.
My crew and I were housed in downtown DC and wandered around, looking for a seafood restaurant. The former Flagship restaurant, in the 1950s and 60s, was crowded every night to capacity during the evening, but the new version of this restaurant looked old and shabby, as if it had seen better days; the weekday evening we came in, there were many vacant tables in the restaurant but it was still early (5:30 PM).
We stood at the bar seemingly forever before we were even acknowledged and tried to find a spot in which to cool down (the restaurant was very warm). We sat quietly over the one round of drinks we were able to be served and finally decided to take a chance on the menu. One of my crew ordered a lobster dish and someone at another table caught his attention and shook their head ‘no.’ We settled on crab cakes and while the food was passable, it just wasn’t worth the expense.
The restaurant never did fill up or cool down.

AYCE Seafood, pasta, and chicken, desserts. I think I had a little of everything on my plate, started with a plate of crawfish, next a plate of crab legs, next a plate of crabs, next a plate of… some kind of pasta with seafood and let me tell you it was delicious! The Jambalaya was simply marvelous. Roast beef and ham I believe it was looked a little too dry. They also had a little taco/​burrito station. I didn’t try it out but they had all of the popular fixins. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed my experience and I want to go back! We sat out on the covered outdoor deck and enjoyed the night air, people watched and threw down on some good ol seafood! OOOOHHH let me not forget the plentiful selections for desserts from chocolate cake and mousse, cheesecake, cookies and the caramel, fudge and other little toppings you could add. The drinks were good too. I’ve yet to go here and get a bad drink. Our waiter was pretty decent. Kept the table clean, drinks coming and not overbearing.

I remeber when it was Flag Ship Washington, DC. When Phillip taken over it was very good. There sushi bar was out of this world. After the tour bus came in the place it was starting to go down hill. All you can each was getting chiper and chiper. Only on Sunday you may get raw oyster. Everything starting to be fried food. They start getting long lines. To many party taken over part of the restrant. Only thing I ask Mr. Phillip’s close this location.

It was SO hot outside in July and while we wanted to eat outside at Maine Avenue, the heat just was NOT happening. So we walked over to this restaurant to grab a drink at the bar, gather our bearings and cool off and decide what to do.
Standing at the mostly-​empty bar, we were still mostly ignored just to get a few beers and waters. As we sat at our table fanning ourselves and debating whether to eat here, we checked Unilocal.Truly, the comment «the crabs was nasty» made us all laugh pretty loudly but walking around the seafood buffet showed us a lot of heat lamps and dried-​out fried selections. Repeated poor bar service was the icing on the cake, so we decided not to spend our money on dining here.

First of all let me say that I did not get to choose the restaurants on this Vietnamese High School Tour. Second, when I saw this restaurant on the itinerary, I did get super excited. However, I shouldn’t have based on our other culinary «adventures». While I don’t usually judge restaurants by their façade… this should have been the first indication that this may not be the best seafood buffet in town. It looked rundown and inside the rundown continued.
The hosts/​hostesses couldn’t look more unenthusiastic. No one showed us to the room that was reserved for us. And later on, they were rude to a couple of people that were joining us that weren’t part of the original party. They offered to pay for themselves, but just wanted to sit with us. Why this was a problem was beyond me since there were three large empty tables in addition to our two large tables. As the Vietnamese students yelled throughout the trip: RUDE! However, I must say that our waitress was very lovely and kept up with all 15 of us. I give her five stars and my tip is to work at a restaurant with good food. Anyway, the room looked more rundown than the rest of the restaurant and I was worried that our chairs would give way. We went up to the buffet and in case you decide not to heed my warning to go somewhere else… survey the whole area before you begin piling food on your plate. I am not sure there is any rhyme or reason to how things are set up… What I thought was the bar had pizza, pasta, and roast beef.
If you love fried food, you will enjoy the first part of the buffet that everyone encounters. At first, I was actually worried that that was all there was to the buffet… french fries, hush puppies, «crab cakes», fried shrimp, and fried whatever clams. Then there was the seafood area… mussels, clams, crawfish, crab legs, and whole crabs. I decided to try the crab legs. I will say that the guy was really nice and gave me two sets instead of just one. But later you will find out that might not necessarily be a good thing.
They have a salad bar and a bar of… random foods. There was curry, mashed potatoes, plantains, cuban beef and potatoes, four kinds of soup, pasta, etc. Then in the middle is a dessert bar with ice cream, tarts, bread pudding, peach cobbler, «cheesecake», and fruit.
So the lowdown on the food:
«Crab cakes» looked like cake balls and tasted like… schweddy balls. In fact, as soon as I bit into one, I spit it back out.
Crab legs resembled the rubbery-​ness of Gumby. Of course because they were so rubbery, it was so hard to peel them and get the miniscule meat inside. One of the Vietnamese students said to me, «You know, in Vietnam, we have fresh crab.» ‘Nuff said.
Clam Chowder tasted like Bacon Chowder. I did not taste a single clam and the soup split shortly after I got it back to the table.
Cuban Beef and Potatoes and Plantains were the best of anything I tasted at the buffet. Maybe Phillips should consider a new type of cuisine.
Fried Clams tasted stale, like they had been there since the place opened.
Cheesecake tasted… actually it didn’t have any taste at all, but it was creamy.
Bread Pudding was actually pretty good, but skip the Peach Cobbler unless you like clumps of orange gel.
The students seemed to like the ice cream though…
Overall, it just wasn’t good and I honestly wouldn’t even bother to go back and try anything else if I am ever in the area again. I am so glad that I didn’t pay for this.

Plus: Lots of options for seafood, both steamed and fried, tons of sides, and many overall options on the buffet.
Minus: Super-​steamy if you’re sitting anywhere near the outdoor patio (interior doors are left open), and buffet food tends to get a little rubbery after sitting out for awhile, which was also true here.
Our waitress was very nice but we seemed to wait around a lot between drink refills and waiting for the check. She also overcharged us by adding a $ 10 item and a $ 5 item that we didn’t order to our bill. She did take it off for us, but we had to wait for awhile to get her attention.
Overall, it’s a good place to visit, lots of options, and it’s right next to the outdoor seafood market which is a must-​see in DC.

The food definitely won’t blow your mind. It’s a Phillips. That being a given, I’ve been here twice just to grab a quick bite after going to the fish market and the waiters have been outstanding both times. We had Sparkle today. So nice!
I see others are comparing this place to Morton’s and giving it 1 star. C’monnnnnn. You can’t rate McDonald’s on the quality of their fish-​filet. You know what you’re getting into.

I don’t get all the negative reviews. I would give this place 3.5 stars for the AYCE buffet.
There were many selections of seafood: steamed snow crab legs, clams, mussels, fishes, shrimps, crawlfishes and crabs. They were as over cooked as buffets do, but they were fresh. I particularly enjoyed the 4 types of fishes. There were many selections of carbs, vegetables and other proteins (meat). There were 4 types of soups and a reasonable dessert table. The service was great. Our waiter, Mark, was personable, helpful and polite. Other servers changed our plates quickly. The washroom was clean. All in all, we enjoyed the buffet and will return the next time we travel to Washington. I won’t mind recommending it to my friends, too.
I also find the $ 30 fee per person not low. However, after a few dinners around Penn Quarter and Galleria Place, I have come to an awareness that the average dinner cost in Washington DC is approximately $ 20 per entrée, before tax, for casual fine dining (e.g. The Old Ebbitt Grill, Rosa Mexicano, Clyde). Therefore, $ 30 for a full course dinner is not exceptionally expensive.
The only issue I had was the costs of beverages, so we only ordered 2 glasses of water and 1 coffee.

I went to Philips because my Israeli family members are enamored with buffets (which are rare in Israel) and could not stand the smell at the wharf. Philips is awful. I knew this and tried to warn my father, but my warnings were not heeded. Plus, it really wasn’t about me, it was about my family. Anyway, I feel bad my father had to pay for this meal. This is a case that calls for 0 star rating.
I am extremely thankful for the cold beers (Daddy & I downed two each). I barely ate anything. Whatever I chose was just awful — biscuit, fried chicken, roasted chicken, sweet potato fries, mussels. No flavor and poorly cooked. The only thing that was OK was the mahi-​mahi and fries. The one dessert I did try, pecan pie, had about two pecans on it.
I didn’t even feel bad not eating much, and when the server cleared two barely touched plates from me, he knew not to ask if anything was wrong. Well, he probably already knew that the food was awful. Anyway, a definite skip.

Was here this past weekend for the buffet on Saturday…
While I agree with the other reviewers that, yes, you can find better seafood elsewhere, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. The cutting reviews I read make the place seem worse than it is. I read many complaints about service… come on, it’s a buffet. Just get what you need…
The buffet selection is huge and i thought very decent for a buffet. I enjoyed the steamed crab legs and crawfish for quite awhile, sampled the salads, the fried clams, steamed clams, the mussels, and many other things including a pretty nice salad bar spread, then fell into and did the backstroke on the dessert table.
Sitting outside under the canopy on a great day in front of the wharf was a pleasure.
If you have kids, the buffet is only $ 12.95.
The place has a cool bar too. I would come here and just hang out at the bar… and if you drink to much, there are some cool couches there to chill out… I almost fell asleep on one and no one bothered me…
Good place to stuff yourself… not something you’d want to do all the time. Out-​of-​town guest would enjoy this place…