I was trying to get to the restroom during my most recent visit to Graffiato, Mike Isabella’s new neo-Italian starfucker clubhouse, when a photo-op blocked my way. Isabella and fellow Top Chef alums Carla Hall and Antonia Lofaso were huddled for a snapshot.

As it happens, you see a lot of these snapshot sessions at Graffiato. Give it five minutes, and Spike Mendelsohn will probably show up. Oh, wait: Here he is, trademark fedora, facial scruff and everything. Spike, over here!

No wonder Graffiato has gotten so much attention during the brief period since its June 23 grand opening.

By earlier this week, there were 100 reviews of the place on Yelp (“I’ll start by saying that the staff here is hot!” one excited reviewer exclaims). Local food blogs were all over the place: “After just one dinner, I can confidently say that Graffiato has not only lived up to all the hype, but has exceeded my expectations,” declared Dining in DC. “I haven’t spoken to a single person who wasn’t wowed by the food, and my two experiences have proven that this place is here to stay,” added Eat More, Drink More.

But here’s one person who hadn’t reviewed it: Me.

I’m not alone. The place went unreviewed by fellow Washington professional food critics like Tom Sietsema of The Washington Post and Todd Kliman of Washingtonian.

This isn’t to say I haven’t sampled Isabella’s signature chicken thighs with pepperoni sauce (delicious) or his “Jersey Shore” pizza (a decent use for soggy fried calamari) or found myself underwhelmed by the hugely hyped house prosecco on tap (it literally falls flat, and even a bartender told me that “you can do better”).

So why not write at length about it? Convention. In fact, I shouldn’t even have been there on the night of Isabella’s restroom-blocking photo-op, which took place less than a month after the celebrated grand opening, which was actually my third visit in three weeks.

Under the traditional standards of restaurant criticism, I should have waited another week or so before even darkening Isabella’s doorway for the first time.

According to the official critics’ guidelines espoused by the esteemed Association of Food Journalists, “reviewers should wait at least one month after the restaurant starts serving before visiting. These few weeks give the fledgling enterprise some time to get organized.”

In the abstract, the rule seems fair. Restaurants are not films, after all; there is no post-production period to iron out the kinks before unveiling the finished product to the public. With food service, adjustments generally take place on the fly in real time. Critics ought to wait long enough to let the joint get settled before telling the world whether it’s worth the trip.

And, back when big-city restaurant critics strode the earth with a bag of lightning bolts—in that long lost era when print publications ruled and ordinary schnooks had no way of sharing their enthusiasm for sweet corn agnolotti (“best thing I ever ate,” declares one of Graffiato’s Yelp admirers)—wait they did.

After twirling their forks elsewhere for the first month and then finally dropping in for a bite after the 30-day grace period is up, proper critics would then need to come back at least two or three more times, spaced out over several weeks, to round out the observations. After a couple of months, they’d get around to rendering a verdict.

According to executive director Carol DeMasters, the AFJ’s guidelines haven’t changed since they were first written about 10 years ago, before the rise of TV chefs, social media, or food blogs.

The guidelines, it seems, are about the only aspect of food media that hasn’t changed. These days, a new restaurant is able to access vast new media resources in order to pump up its reputation from day one—or even before it. The Web lets foodies learn about new restaurants before a lease is even signed. Blogs offer sneak-peak photos of the décor as soon as the dust settles, posting the full menu the moment it becomes available. Many places are packed on opening night; long gone are the days when a restaurant didn’t see a packed house until a newspaper chimed in.

The restaurant industry’s PR people have taken advantage of the change. Which makes me wonder whether the pros ought to change their rules, too. Given that many professional food critics used to see themselves as the paid protectors of said diners—zealously guarding their culinary dollar against mediocre food and subpar service—are those who still follow the traditional timetable essentially fighting with one fork tied behind their backs?

DeMasters says her organization is pondering that same question. “This will be a topic at the Association of Food Journalists annual conference in Charleston in October,” she says.

In the meantime, D.C.’s highest-profile critic says he values the old standards. For the past 11 years, Sietsema says, he’s largely stuck to the rules, at least when writing the coveted starred reviews for the Post magazine: One month before visiting, then return three or four times. “None of those ‘rules’ has changed and I hope they never do,” he says via email.

Sietsema’s paper has, however, created a loophole: “First Bite,” published separately in the Food section. Not a review in the traditional sense, the preview-ish column provides the critic’s early take on a place and its food—while feeding the public’s vastly increased appetite for scoops on the new spots in town.

“First Bite is our way of saying, ‘Here’s something new, something you might be interested in, something to tide you over until a formal critique comes out,’” Sietsema says. “Our snapshot is typically based on one but sometimes more visits. I feel free to visit new establishments as soon as their doors open to paying guests, although I’m not big on going the first night, when the paint is still drying. Generally, I wait one or two weeks to drop by a maiden restaurant, in part because a lot of tweaking goes on in a restaurant’s first few days and I’d rather report on details that have survived that tinkering.”

The conflict arises if and when the critic comes back to write a more formal review. It’s not easy to just erase the memory of that early visit in the name of ethics.

“For the most part, I try to start fresh with a restaurant that I’ve previewed, although there are exceptions,” Sietsema says. “For instance, I might include a dish in a magazine review that I ate during a First Bite visit but didn’t highlight in the column.”

Kliman, a Young & Hungry alum, is more agnostic. For most of his career, the Washingtonian critic has clung to an initial three-week waiting period. But in some recent high-profile cases he’s made an exception. On at least one of the times when he’s gone in early, he’s caught flak—including from restaurants, the same businesses that stoke early hype from informal critics.

Back in May, Kliman wrote a takedown of D.C. chef R.J. Cooper’s 24-course preview of the forthcoming restaurant Rogue 24. The concept was not your standard subject: this was essentially a temporary pop-up restaurant, with a lifespan less than three weeks, albeit one with a more permanent setting several months down the road. Still, the critic was himself the subject of some criticism, much of it from the chef, for not adhering to the conventional rules of wait before you write. On another occasion, Kliman reviewed opening night at Alain Ducasse’s Adour via a series of posts on Twitter.

Kliman says the timing was fair in both cases. The big-name hugely hyped venues these days simply open themselves up to early criticism by ginning up so much online hype. Kliman also sometimes comments at length on first-meal experiences as part of his weekly Web chat, including an initial positive take on Graffiato, which was not meant to be taken as a definitive or comprehensive review. In that particular case, he probably wishes he’d waited. A subsequent meal at Isabella’s place was not as good, Kliman later revealed on Twitter.

Kliman endorses no set rule, per se, other than the usual journalistic tenets of “being fair, doing a thorough job of reporting, trying to do the right thing by your reader and trying to produce a good piece of writing,” he says.

For rookies to the restaurant-reviewing game, the rules are even less apparent. “I think a hard-fast rule is dumb,” says Scott Reitz, a former Young & Hungry contributor recently hired as the critic at the Dallas Observer. Reitz took the job with the notion of sticking with a more traditional six-week gap between a restaurant’s opening and publishing a review. Then he asked his superiors. “It’s totally my call,” he reports.

Reitz, like Kliman, says he’ll evaluate on a case-by-case basis.

“I think you can ‘feel’ when a place has settled in. Sometimes it’s a few weeks, sometimes it’s a few months,” he says. “Hammering a place that still in that early phase, with a full-on formal review, is kind of a dick move.”

Which is why I’m reserving judgment on Graffiato’s tiny-sized full-priced cocktails. For now.

Photos by Darrow Montgomery

Eatery tips? Food pursuits? Send suggestions to hungry@washingtoncitypaper.com.

Well, Smith Commons, slated to open next week Tuesday, doesn't seem it will be that common.

Executive chef Frederik De Pue, according to a press release, has put together an "internationally-inspired menu with comforting dishes like free-range roasted chicken and penne carbonara, as well as gourmet treats like confit of duck leg and Maine lobster."

De Pue's background suggests he's not all that ordinary either:

Born and raised in Belgium, Chef Frederik trained at the Hotel School Ter Duinen and worked at several top European restaurants. He worked under Chef Alain Ducasse at Louis XV and later became Sous Chef at Alain Chapel. In 1998, at age 21, he joined Yves Mattagne’s Sea Grill in Brussels and worked there for three years. In 2001, he traveled to Washington, DC to become the Executive Chef of the European Commission Delegation Ambassador. Chef Frederik was highly praised in the diplomatic circles where he would spend the next five years creating one of the most exceptional dining tables in the Embassy world.

Smith Commons' general manager is Sheldon Robinson and the sommelier is Andrew Stover.

The beer program, overseen by managing partner Miles Gray, will have, according to the release, "[n]early 40 permanent and seasonal selections are served on tap and in bottles from breweries across the United States, Canada, Belgium, Germany, Scotland and Italy."

Young & Hungry hopes to soon check out the renovated three-story space, which once housed a carpet warehouse.

Smith Commons, 1245 H St. NE, (202) 396-0038; Hours: Tues-Thurs, 5 p.m.– 2 a.m. (kitchen closes at 11:00 pm); Fri-Sat: 5 p.m.–3 a.m. (kitchen closes at midnight); Sunday: 5 p.m.-10 p.m.

The editors promptly tore it apart, word by word. I’m not sure how many editors had a say on my first draft, but it felt like management was treating my Y&H debut as the journalistic equivalent of a tackling dummy. I figured it was a test of my mettle, particularly when an editor told me I wasn’t brilliant enough to use metaphors. I couldn’t tell if he was bullshitting, but I knew for certain that if I were to survive as the City Paper food columnist, I was going to need to develop thicker skin. This was no place for wallflowers who want to craft their prose in monk-like solitude, guided only by their “muse” and some arch, overly precious sense of the food world. The editors stood steadfastly against preciousness on all fronts.

Half a decade later, I look back on the edit of that first column (sample comments: “Fuck this; I hate this equivocation. Forget what I said up top about you keeping a strong POV throughout this piece” and “I don’t give a flying fuck what your entrée was!”) with a mix of nostalgia and bile-churning, spit-hurling anger, which was probably the whole point. Editors had time back then to find your pressure points and see if, by pressing them, they could make you a better writer and reporter.

Don’t worry. I’m not going to turn my farewell column into some sentimental, revisionist claptrap about how journalism needs more editors who treat their reporters like Bo Pelini treats his star quarterback. No, I’m just reflecting back on how much things have changed in five years, starting with the very job I’m leaving. Back in February 2006, when I officially became the paper’s next Young & Hungry, I wrote exactly one column a week. I went through at least three drafts on each column. I answered further questions from the copy desk. I didn’t blog at all. We didn’t even have a blog at City Paper. And today? Well, let’s just say I miss the old work load.

The food and dining scene has experienced its own growing pains. Consider that in late 2005:

• Washingtonians had a president who never visited restaurants. George W. Bush was content to sit in the White House, choking down pretzels while watching football. By contrast, Washington now has a president who has stopped at some of the area’s most recognizable restaurants, both high and low end, from Komi to Five Guys Burgers & Fries. In one instance, the president’s visit propelled a popular eatery, Ray’s Hell Burger, into the stratosphere. Owner Michael Landrum was forced to put his planned seafood restaurant on hold and expand the Hell Burger empire. That’s a good problem for a local restaurateur to have.

• The District boasted restaurants by Todd English and Charlie Palmer, but our biggest celebrity chef was a Frenchman, Michel Richard, who dared to base his operations in D.C. In the intervening years, chefs of varying celeb status have decided to throw up a restaurant and drill down into our wallets. On one end you have a TV-generated, semi-celebrity like Spike Mendelsohn who has also made D.C. his home, while on the other, you have a Michelin-star hoarder like Alain Ducasse who thought he’d send some emissaries down to D.C. and start cashing in on his considerable reputation. There are benefits on both sides of this star spectrum, but there are also sinkholes. Some of these culinary carpetbaggers take dining dollars (and sometimes kitchen talent) away from the home team.

Michel Richard

• Roberto Donna still had his Galileo empire. He not only had the flagship restaurant, but also the Osteria and the Laboratorio. He was also hawking grilled sandwiches on the sidewalk outside of Galileo. Five years and one failed restaurant later, the chef returned to D.C. with a storm cloud over his head. He owes taxes to Arlington County, owes money to former employees, and owes the people a better accounting of his abuse of public money.

• H Street NE was a great spot for fried whiting and a tall boy. No strip has changed as much as this patch of Northeast. The Ohio Restaurant was one of the early pioneers on H Street, hawking chef-driven soul food from a ragged outpost at H and 14th streets. But other dining destinations soon popped up. Granville Moore’s, Taylor Gourmet, Sticky Rice, Liberty Tree, Biergarten Haus, H Street Country Club, The Atlas Room. These (and others yet to come) are turning the street into a dining destination. Imagine what the area will be like once the city completes that goddamn streetcar project.

• Unless you count those motorized hot dog wagons down by the National Mall, the District didn’t have a single food truck. D.C.’s streets have made a remarkable turnaround in the past two years, breaking the death grip of the depot owners who have controlled the city’s curbside eats for decades. If and when the D.C. Council ever passes new vendor regulations, you can expect to see even more variety on our streets. I know for certain that Kushi, my current favorite for Japanese cooking, plans to launch a yakitori truck in D.C. But what the District really needs, as a colleague recently pointed out, is a gourmet coffee truck. Nick Cho, are you listening? Have you paid off your tax bill yet?

• The craft beer craze was just in its embryonic phase in the District. We had brewpubs, of course, but if you wanted to sample the best of the world’s craft beer, you pretty much had to give your money to Dave and Diane Alexander, whether at the Brickskeller in Dupont or Regional Food and Drink in Chinatown. These days? You can’t wander the streets without running face-first into a Dogfish Head tap. Craft beers are everywhere. Rustico (two locations now, with perhaps more to come), CommonWealth Gastropub, Pizzeria Paradiso (three locations), Meridian Pint, Brasserie Beck, Granville Moore’s, Black Squirrel, Restaurant 3, and the mother of all beer emporiums, ChurchKey, have transformed D.C. into suds city.

• Peter Chang and Fabio Trabocchi were still cooking in area kitchens. At the time, Chang was mesmerizing diners at TemptAsian Cafe in Alexandria, while Trabocchi was blowing away patrons with his gourmet takes on Italian cooking at Maestro in Tysons Corner. Within two years, both Chang and Trabocchi were gone. But after a rollercoaster ride in New York City, Trabocchi is returning next year to open Fiola in the former Le Paradou space in Penn Quarter. And Chang? Well, after forcing his fans to follow him around the country like jilted lovers, the chef has apparently settled down in Charlottesville, where he’s scheduled to open Peter Chang China Grill in January. Has anyone started a pool yet to see how long it lasts?

• The Washington area had only three four-star restaurants, according to Tom Sietsema’s 2005 Dining Guide. They were Maestro, Citronelle, and the Inn at Little Washington. Sietsema’s latest Dining Guide listed five four-star performers. Citronelle and the Inn made repeat appearances on the list, joined by Komi, Rasika, and Restaurant Eve. A previous four-star restaurant, CityZen in the Mandarin Oriental, was nowhere to be found on Sietsema’s 2010 survey. No one can accuse the critic of ratings creep at the top end.

• The boutique pizza market had two main players: Pizzeria Paradiso and 2Amys (OK, and maybe Ella’s). The pie options today are stupefying, a reminder that the recession continues to force many restaurateurs into safe, cheap, and consumer-friendly choices. The new pizzerias are too numerous to mention, but here’s one indication of how ridiculous our pie market is today: Not one but two Frenchmen have opened pizza joints (Pizze in Woodley Park, and Seventh Hill in Capitol Hill), no doubt generating a small forest of raised eyebrows among the Gallic community, which tends to view Italian cuisine as something to feed the family pet.

• There was no Urban Daddy, no Thrillist, no Tasting Table, no TBD, no NBC Feast, and damn few bloggers ambitious enough to fight for every scoop that used to land like a butterfly onto the lap of print journalists. The competition for information today is fiercer than ever.

With this week’s column, I’m ending a City Paper tenure that has had its own mood swings. My beat and responsibilities have had to evolve and expand to reflect a changing media environment as well as a changing culinary one. This is the truth of modern journalism. We must find new ways to look at old subjects. We must venture beyond our usual circles to find the next person who wants to revolutionize what we eat. Anyone in my line of work knows that food can never, ever be treated like something too precious to withstand tough scrutiny. But my time at the paper, from that brutal first edit back in the one-column-a-week days to the radical shifts in job responsibilities that accompanied the old news media’s discovery of the Internet proves that we dead-tree types are more adaptable than you think.

Eatery tips? Food pursuits? Send suggestions to hungry@washingtoncitypaper.com.

Photos by Darrow Montgomery

NBCWashington broke the news yesterday with prose that bordered on the orgasmic: Pinkberry is coming to D.C.! (I'm not sure how many exclamation points to include here, but the general tone of the item merits at least four, I think.) Now understand, the item names no location, not even a neighborhood. Just the promise of a Pinkberry, the chain that launched a thousand fro-yo imitators after just five short years in business.

You'll have to excuse me if I yawn as this dustbunny of a breaking news item drifts by.  Allow me to provide you with five reasons I couldn't care less about Pinkberry's arrival in the District:

1. The Chain That Yanked Our Chain. Two years ago, Pinkberry's real estate coordinator, Lucas Junkin, yanked our chain about the possibility of the fro-yo chain entering the D.C. market. "D.C.'s a priority, compared with our other upcoming locations," Junkin bullshitted Express Night Out. "It's not going to be long before it opens." Months later, the Washington Business Journal revealed what kind of wusses these Pinkberry executives are.

2. The Yogurt That Wasn't. For years, it wasn't even clear if Pinkberry's product could technically be called frozen yogurt. People sued over whether this "Swirly Goodness" was actually yogurt or even all natural and non-fat.  The state of California apparently deemed it something other than yogurt, which caused the Pinkberry folks to go all Swirly Crazy and perhaps even to scuttle plans to open a store in D.C. because they needed to learn how to, you know, make real yogurt.

3. The Name that Shall Not Be Spoken. Pinkberry calls its product "Swirly Goodness" and "Chilly Bliss." If I already refuse to call a "medium" coffee at Starbucks a "grande," I'm definitely not using these terms.

4. The Fro-yo Ov-yo-load. Mr. Yogato. TangySweet. Sweetgreen. FroZenYo. Yogen Fruz. Yogiberry. Caliyogurt. Serve-yourself yogurt shops. Environmental yogurt shops. Sustainable yogurt shops. Locally sourced yogurt shops. Yogurt shops on wheels. Like liquor licenses in Dupont Circle, I think it's time the city put a moratorium on yogurt shops.

5. We Don't Need Your Stinking West Coast Validation. There may have been a day when your laid-back, daze-on-the-beach El Lay vibe would have appealed to us overworked wonks with our never-ending search for power, but these days, you're more Lindsay Lohan than Lady Gaga. Your time is so over. Besides, look around us. We've got Eric Ripert here. BLT Steak. Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Alain Ducasse. And Danny Meyer is headed our way. We're obviously New York's bitch. Not yours.

You want another perspective on this? I asked online producer Emily Kaiser for one. She's actually tasted your product. Her take:

Pinkberry is often referenced as the store to launch the upscale frozen yogurt trend into the American mainstream, with people waiting in lines 20-30 deep just for a taste of what soon became known as "crackberry". Once celebs like Paris Hilton started flocking to the stores for their tart fro-yo topped with fruit, candy and nuts, the stores became a must-visit in LA and NYC. Just like the D.C. cupcake mania, it wins fans by taking a previously boring and simple dessert, turning it fancy, and charging a lot of money for it.

There is something crack-like about Pinkberry, but it's not worth standing in long lines for. The original flavor is still a must-try for fro-yo fans and the consistency is spot on. During a visit to one of their LA locations last year, their brand still stood up as one of the better fro-yo options around. Pinkberry may have started the craze, but it's not hard to replicate. Unfortunately Pinkberry is hitting D.C. three years too late. Give it a try, but we wouldn't plan to ditch the local brands just yet.

Photo by VirtualErn via Flickr Creative Commons, Attribution License

I'm sorry to pick on Rachael Ray. It's beyond shooting fish in a barrel. It's carpet-bombing fish in a home aquarium (though I have to admit that I admired Ray's self-awareness and unwillingness to take the bait after Martha Stewart bashed the TV cook last year).

Nonetheless, would I be surprised one day to find Rachael Ray working at a dry cleaners, as is the premise of this shamefully addictive CBS fluffball titled I Get That A Lot? Well, yes, I would be surprised, if only because she's such a rich, well-branded institution now.

But in the secret recesses of the blackest part of my heart, I'd also think: Why shouldn't she be working at a dry cleaners? Does someone with her skill set really deserve to make more money cooking than Mario Batali and Tom Colicchio and Alain Ducasse?

Andrew Stover

Illinois, Stover says, has a history of winemaking that predates America’s more recognizable grape-growing states. “California was not even heard of back” when Illinois starting making wine in the 18th century, Stover says. The problem is that Illinois winemakers “don’t grow a lot of the grapes that we’re familiar with. Sure, they have chardonnay, but they have a lot of strange grapes,” too, like seyval and Marechal Foch, which actually do better in the harsh Midwestern climate.

 Getting your hands on these Corn Belt bottles, however, takes some work. Just ask Ramon Narvaez, the wine director for Alain Ducasse'snew D.C. playground, Adour, inside the St. Regis Washington Hotel at 16th and K Streets NW. Narvaez learned the hard way that his liquor license is shared with the St. Regis, a chain that must adhere to a higher standard than private businesses when bringing new wines into the District. He’s hoping like hell to have his two unusual Illinois wines, an Owl Creek chardonel and an Alto Vineyard chambourcin, at the bar before the inauguration. “I’ll be really bummed if I don’t,” he says.

But at least he’s not trying to bring in wines from Hawaii. “Getting Hawaiian wines into Virginia is like trying to get heroin into the state,” says one anonymous source, citing Virginia’s rigid distribution system.