“I could kiss and hug it, but I’d rather chug it!” Catchy, funny, clever. What more could you want on the Friday of a holiday weekend?

We hope you will be safe over the Fourth, especially if your plans involve anywhere near the amount of celebrating that the Legos do in this stop-motion short. Even if your mindless web-surfing has led you to the Arrogant Worms version of George Bizet’s classic march from Carmen, we think you will enjoy this silly little video. Have a great Fourth of July weekend!

It’s a short work week, and we at Young & Hungry Central have just the thing you need: beer and dining recommendations for the Fourth. We also have something for your reading pleasure:

The top blog posts of the week.

1. Obama Ate Here: The Working Map (with apologies and gratitude to BrightestYoungThings)
2. What Did Your $10 Ticket Get You at the Safeway Barbecue Battle?
3. On July 4th Weekend, Buy American Beer
4. Breadline Busted on 19 Health Code Violations, Ten of Them Critical
5. Dairy Godmother’s Owner Doesn’t Want the Obama Bump That Ray’s Hell Burger Got

Photo by cristinabe via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution License

Let’s assume for a moment that you don’t want to grill and that you don’t have any friends kind enough to invite you to their barbecue drunk-a-thon on the Fourth. Where do you turn? Well, Y&H has some options, including a couple with smoked meats for those who just can’t celebrated America’s birthday without an animal sacrifice.

Mmmm, animal sacrifice.

• Jamie Stachowski will be grilling his artisan sausages at Red, White & Bleu in Falls Church from 1 to 5 p.m. on Saturday. The charcuterie master will be tending the charcoal grill at the wine and gourmet food shop, cooking up veal bratwurst, kielbasa, merguez, and linguiça for customers to sample. Stachowski will also have some rabbit terrine, country pate, and other “meat surprises” to try. All samples will be free, but the shop is hoping, of course, that you’ll be enticed into buying some of Stachowski’s meats to take home — and maybe a bottle or two of wine to go with it.
• Mr. P, one of the top 50 performers on Y&H’s 2009 Dining Guide, will be working the Fourth at his usual spot: the Safeway parking lot at Rhode Island Ave. NE. Aside from his amazing spare ribs, which are smoked to a charred, crispy, and succulent state, Mr. P will also trot out a new item: barbecued short ribs. He tells me they will be a permanent part of his menu.

Read More “Some July 4th Eats Good Enough to Keep Your Grill in Storage” »

If you live in the District and suddenly get a case of the Pho-king Shakes — that weak-in-the-knees condition that will be cured only with a bowl of rice noodles, fatty brisket, raw round steak, and veggies drowning in beef broth — your remedy requires a long Metro ride to some gray strip-mall outpost in the ‘burbs. It’s like the coke addict who has to brave the projects for a fix.

Fortunately, some noodles houses have now popped up in the District to satisfy our cravings for pho, including Saigon Bistro off Dupont Circle, which features not one but two chefs who recently emigrated from Vietnam. Huong T. Van handles soup duties here, and her offerings include not only pho but also hu tieu (a rice noodle soup with seafood or pork stock) and mi (an egg noodle soup with seafood or pork stock).

Read More “Is It Now Possible to Get Good Pho in the District? Well, Sometimes.” »

The brilliant parody aims for and hits a number of targets: corporations jumping onto the green bandwagon, vacuous TV morning programs, even the dining public’s naivete over what foods are really good for the environment.

Taco Bell’s New Green Menu Takes No Ingredients From Nature

A meaty homage to Michel Richard?

One by one, we’re running through the 50 restaurants that made the cut on this year’s Young & Hungry Dining Guide. If you have visited the day’s featured restaurant, let us know what you think. If you’re planning to visit for the first time, tell us about your meal when you return.

Unlike some fine-dining restaurants that aim for the conspicuous-consumption set, Eventide has carved out a different niche for itself: It’s Arlington’s eccentric foodie destination. Eventide combines Komi’s OCD-like attention to detail with the chic intensity of the Source’s downstairs lounge. What’s more, chef Miles Vaden strikes me as a toque who will never be satisfied with his work. His menu reads (and tastes) like a man who pushes things about as far as you can in the typically conservative Clarendon dining scene. His bison carpaccio already assumes an air of Michel Richard; like a red-meat version of Richard’s famous “Mosaic,� Vaden plates thin circles of crimson-bright bison meat on a square of white china so that the dish looks like some monochromatic Pop-Art piece. The appetizer’s flavors and textures, however, are altogether original—the crunch of citrus-marinated jicama, the bite of ancho-chocolate mole, the salty umami of Parmesan, the plodding meatiness of the bison. While not as jaw-dropping as the carpaccio, other dishes on Vaden’s menu display enough invention and technique to justify any wild-eyed optimism you may have about this restaurant. Hell, even the upstairs dining room at Eventide, a former meeting hall for the Odd Fellows fraternal organization, strikes an odd, engaging tone. The ceiling is high, and the walls have an exposed, terra-cotta austerity about them. The long elegant drapes and the intimidating emptiness all around you—above your head and between the widely spaced tables—complete the image: You feel like you’re dining in some cool medieval castle.

Eventide, 3165 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, (703) 276-3165

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

As a follow up to our very own Beerspotter’s conversation about top five desert island beers, we offer this account of what some craft-beer stars consider to be the finest beers on the planet. During this year’s Lupulin Reunulin at RFD, a glorious night of drinking and mayhem where a handful of the most innovative American brewers bring out their best, the panelists were asked what they would choose as their last beer on Earth. Here’s what they said.

Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River in California was the first to respond. Emphatically, he said his last beer would be an Orval, on draft at the brewery in Belgium.

Tomme Arthur of Port / Lost Abbey in California, after confirming that he would have a whole ten minutes left to live to enjoy the beer, said that he would choose one from Alpine Beer Company. He settled on Alpine’s Pure Hoppiness.

Read More “Your Last Beer on Earth: What Do the Pros Say?” »

Honest Abe was attacked again.

If you’ll recall, back in May when H Street Country Club first opened, I tried to warn owner Joe Englert that several holes were vulnerable to attack from drunk duffers. He brushed it off like so much pet hair, saying the statuary on his putt-putt course, particularly the gruesome dead presidents on Hole No. 5, could withstand the punishment of Satan’s army.

Well, apparently not.

Just weeks after opening, some asshole broke the hands off the rotting skeleton of President Lincoln — and that’s not even the worst of it. “Someone tried to skull fuck Abraham Lincoln,” Englert notes. I’d prefer not to explain how this could be done to artist Lee T. Wheeler’s statue, but let’s just say there’s a wide-diameter bullet hole in Honest Abe’s skull.

Englert’s shocked, too, which is saying something for him.

Read More “H Street Country Club Changing Course” »

Washington Post Food Editor Joe Yonan sent an e-mail to Northern Virginia magazine’s Warren Rojas yesterday with an emergency request: Would Rojas mind if Ezra Klein’s new column on food politics runs under the same name as the magazine’s Gut Check blog?

It was an honorable move on Yonan’s part. It just came late in the game. By the time the two scribes connected yesterday, the Post’s Food section had already gone to print with Klein’s Gut Check column in it. Yonan proceeded to do the right thing and offered to change the title after the fact.

Rojas didn’t think that was unnecessary.

“I didn’t make a stink because I didn’t make up the phrase,” Rojas told Y&H this afternoon. “I’m fairly confident that no one will confuse [Klein's] academic style with our free-form blog.”

So how did the near-snafu occur?

Read More “Post’s New ‘Gut Check’ Column Almost Lost Its Name Before It Even Hit the Streets” »

The best line from this WHO-TV item: “Jackson will sit alongside the iconic butter cow in the Agriculture Building in a 40-degree cooler.”