It seemed a bit silly to order the so-called American breakfast platter of eggs and grits at a venue promising more authentic Mexican fare, albeit stuff derived from local gringo and James Beard Award-winning chef Ann Cashion. So I went with the breakfast tacos: a double layer of white corn tortillas, spread with a thin goo of melted cheese, topped with softly scrambled egg and, at my request (and additional charge), piled high with crumbled chorizo. The bits of spicy sausage are so abundant that they’re prone to tumble all over your table and lap, if you don’t cradle your taco with enough care.

For an added kick, sauce it up with one of three available salsas available at the pumps, ranging from medium to medium-hot. (It seems Cashion’s peeps aren’t much on extremes, at least when it comes to the condiments.) The traditional huevos rancheros are also a viable option, though, in my experience, the ample supply of refried beans and cheesy eggs provided on the platter far outweighed the modest tortilla allowance. Sólo dos?

Ay dios mio! A small selection of Mexican-style pastries is also available. My repeated requests for a little horchata were disappointingly declined. “Not ready yet,” the cashier kept saying. Even an hour later my thirst for milky cinnamon refreshment went unquenched. Thankfully, the fresh pineapple juice, served slightly sweet but not too sugary, proved a suitable alternative. ¡Salud!

Taqueria Nacional, 400 North Capitol St. NW, (202) 737-7070

Allow me to offer a disclaimer before I start: You can trust my picks for the District's best shopping districts as much as you can trust Bernie Madoff's financial advice. Through years of selective focus, I can walk through any neighborhood and ignore all manner of shoe shops, clothing stores, and perfumeries, my mind singularly focused on the latest eatery to open its doors.

As such, you'll have to cut me some friggin' slack if I missed one of your favorite shopping meccas. This ain't my area of expertise. So, with that in mind, here are the best neighborhoods to mix shopping and eating on Black Friday, the day that I personally plan to stay at home, far from the marauding hordes armed with their razor-sharp plastic cards.

• Dupont Circle: I've heard you can buy good shit around here. I know you can eat well, although that hasn't always been the case. I think some recent additions have significantly improved the dining in Dupont, particularly in the fast-casual area, which will probably capture most of the shoppers on Black Friday. You can't go wrong (well, you can, but not usually) at BGR: The Burger Joint, Panas Gourmet, Sweetgreen, Nando's Peri-Peri, and even Pizzeria Paradiso (if the place is on its game that day.) For more upscale options, you have the exquisite Obelisk and the newcomer Eola.
• Georgetown: With a few exceptions — Citronelle, La Chaumiere, and Leopold's Kafe + Konditorei — I've long considered Georgetown a wasteland of food options, a tourist destination where many eateries are content to slide by on mediocre fare. The neighborhood has improved of late. I like the big juicy patties at Thunder Burger & Bar (and the craft beer selection). I admire the Neapolitan pies at Il Canale, and I know I can always get some decent sweets at Georgetown Cupcake and Baked & Wired. And if all else fails, I can just slip into my favorite little bistro in the area.
• U Street Corridor/14th Street Strip/Logan Circle: OK, granted, this is really several neighborhoods clumped together, but what the hell. It's the holidays. I'm feeling generous. The dining options in this area have exploded. The hard part is not finding a decent place to eat, but deciding which one to pick. There's Masa 14, Teak Wood, Bar Pilar, Oohhs & Aahhs, Cork Wine Bar, Great Wall-Szechuan House, Little Ethiopia, JJ's Cheesesteaks, and, of course, the mother of all beer emporiums, Birch & Barley/ChurchKey. I know where I'll be shopping this holiday season.
• Capitol Hill/Barracks Row: I've heard this is a good shopping area, but I have my doubts. I do know that you can get quality bites in the neighborhood. You, of course, have Spike Mendelsohn's fast-food two-fer, Good Stuff Eatery and We, the Pizza. Come to think of it, casual dining (some more refined than others, obviously) rules in this neighborhood. You have Matchbox, Ted's Bulletin, DC-3, Zest Bistro, Montmartre, Ba Bay, Market Lunch, Taqueria Nacional, and Tunnicliff's Tavern. If you want to take a few steps up the gastronomic ladder, you can always hit a pair of restaurants run by two of the District's most notable chefs: Johnny's Half Shell under Ann Cashion and Bistro Bis under Jeffrey Buben.

Good luck with your shopping on Friday, and please, someone, let me know when it's over.

As I was walking back to the office after my first Red Hook Lobster Pound truck experience in Adams Morgan — more on that later — I noticed that Cashion's Eat Place was closed for the evening. More than closed, in fact. Chairs were upturned and resting on tables, while workers were doing something inside.

I poked my head in the door and asked the woman on the far side of the dining room if I could take a picture. She asked who I was. I stupidly uttered, "a blog," as if my entire existence had been boiled down to this microscopic bit of real estate on the 'net. (Hmm, come to think of it...)

Anyway, she said Cashion's was closed essentially for cosmetic renovations. The owners are redoing the floors, repainting the walls, that sort of stuff. The neighborhood operation, founded in 1995 by Beard winner Ann Cashion before she sold it 12 years later to her sous chef John Manolatos, will reopen for business on Tuesday, August 31.

So says the window sign, a picture of which is below the jump.

400 North Capitol St. NW (202) 737-0400

If your Independence Day weekend was anything like mine, you ate a lot of smoke: smoked brisket, smoked ribs, smoked sausages, smoked corn. By the time our Fourth of July feast was ready on Sunday afternoon, I smelled like a crank shaft in an overheated Ford on a lonely stretch of Interstate 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

I took two showers in less than 24 hours, the water moratorium be damned.

All that time standing next to a barrel smoker got me thinking about barbecue in D.C. Unlike some urban markets, D.C. still struggles to produce high-quality 'cue. Urban Bar-B-Que continues to produce my favorite brisket in the area, a slice of low-and-slow Texas-style goodness right in Rockville, while Mr. P's continues to smoke my favorite ribs. The rest of our smoked-meats market is a crap shoot at best, turning out sub-par barbecue far more often than anything worth recommending.

As we head into the teeth of summer, though, I wanted to point you in the direction of some reliable barbecue outlets as well as point out a newcomer perhaps worth a visit.

Aside from Urban and Mr. P's, I think you'll find plenty to satisfy your smoking needs at, of all places, the WFM Smokehouse inside the Fair Lakes Whole Foods. Aside from the holy trinity of beef, ribs, and sausage, the grocery store also offers whole chickens and these delectable smoked wings, almost as good as the ones Ann Cashion turns out at Johnny's Half Shell.

Then there's Branded '72, which is an outgrowth of O'Brien's Pit Barbecue in Rockville; the son-in-law of founder Ken O'Brien Sr. has given the old smokehouse a new name and a renewed sense of purpose. I can't vouch for the ribs here, but I think the brisket shows considerable promise. I have hopes that, under new management, Branded '72 will only get better with time.

The newbie is a place called Blue Ribbon BBQ and, interestingly enough, it's also located in Rockville. (So when did this town become the metro area's 'cue capital?) Blue Ribbon is the product of three college friends who bought the old smokehouse and injected it with new blood. The owners boast a 600-pound capacity Southern Pride unit in which they toss seasoned hickory logs to smoke their Texas-style brisket, Memphis-style dry ribs, and Carolina-style pork. But the most unusual item at Blue Ribbon has to be the hot dog.

That's right, I said hot dog.

Blue Ribbon takes an all-beef, natural casing link and smokes it for a few minutes, just long enough to perfume it with hickory. The dog is then deep-fried, placed in a toasted bun, and smothered in chopped smoked brisket. It's like a chili dog, only better because it's covered in smoky meat.

"We invented it," says co-owner Nick Rossi. "We tried as many things as we could to see what was delicious. And this came out the best."

Blue Ribbon, like most barbecue outlets in the area, is no pure breed but more of a mutt, combining the influences from a number of different regional forebears.  But we do have a pure breed coming our way, or at least as close to one as we get around these parts. It's called Hill Country, a D.C. offshoot of the NYC original. Its influence is, as the name implies, pure central Texas. It's supposed to open this month at 410 Seventh St. NW.

What about you, Y&H Nation? Where are you eating barbecue this summer?

José Andrés

The money won't amount to much more than "a few hundred to a few thousand" dollars, depending on the restaurant, the celebrity chef tells Y&H. "The way we do it is we go and we write a check that sometimes is more than the money you raised," Andrés adds.

But the three-day event from June 10-12 is more than just a fundraiser, Andrés says. As conceived by Jimmy Galle, owner of the respected Gulfish that supplies celebrity chefs with seafood, Dine Out for the Gulf Coast is also a chance to talk about the importance of protecting our food supplies.

"I think he's (creating) a moment to engage in conversation with our waiters, with our cooks, with the guests who come to the restaurants," Andres says about Galle. "At the end of the day, it's food, and hopefully restaurants and chefs and food writers and all of us, we are the people who have to be the high priests of protecting all that food and keeping everyone aware that, if we don't have this food, we are nothing."

As he often does, Andrés is looking at the broader picture. The environmental crisis in the Gulf didn't just materialize in April when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, unleashing untold thousands of barrels of oil into the water.

"Obviously, with something like this, now we can blame one person that handles this in a bad way, one company, but in the end, the problem is not one company. The problem is humanity itself," says Andrés who occasionally buys products from the Gulf, whether oysters or shrimp or even stone crabs from Florida.

"This is a terrible accident that only brings a lot of awareness," the chef adds. "But I think the big thing here — the big thing here — is only to [remind] ourselves, 'Let's be careful in the way we are living, because if we keep living like this, nothing is going to be sustainable.' Maybe we will not see the end, but if we are not careful, in one, two, three, four, five generations, the food chain may be very different than the food chain we are used to today."

Andrés' restaurants are not the only local ones participating in Dine Out for the Gulf Coast. Over at Johnny's Half Shell on Capitol Hill, Ann Cashion and John Fulchino, two long-time proponents of Gulf Coast cooking and culture, are also taking part in the event.

If you can't eat out during the three-day period, you can also make a donation, either on the Dine Out site or via other agencies and groups helping out victims of the spill.

"I think that I've always had a...gastronomic mind," says Cashion, a former doctoral student at Stanford in English literature. Food "was always something that was easy for me to understand...I really think about it like a language."

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

"My first reaction was," the subject tells the camera crew, "'How are we letting the other 5 percent get away?'"

Well, they certainly aren't sneaking their way to D.C., at least not in the droves that I'd like to see. I mean, it's Lent, for chrissakes (sorry). We're supposed to be tearing apart mud bugs right now and devouring their seasoned sweet meat along with links of smoked sausages and fresh corn on the cob.

But where are the crawfish boils around here? Where are the full head-on Louisiana crawfish? Here are the results of my quick survey of the local landscape:

• Acadiana will start up its crawfish boils in April, weather permitting. They run from 4 to 6:30 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays on the patio.
• Johnny's Half Shell has no crawfish on the menu, although chef Ann Cashion occasionally runs it on special.
• Bardia's New Orleans Cafe gets crawfish meat from Argentina and serves it in jambalaya and etouffee. The owner swears you won't be able to tell the difference from the Louisiana crawfish.
• Louisiana Kitchen buys frozen tail meat and uses it in bisque and etouffee and the like.
• Sea Side Crab House buys whole crawfish from Louisiana, but they're frozen. Still, this is my favorite place to eat crawfish, although you have to drive all the way to the Eden Center to do it.
• Social in Columbia Heights has shown considerable improvement with its "mud bug" beignets (which now taste like crawfish although the croquette's interior too closely resembles uncooked batter for my palate). The place also serves up a fine "crawfish Monica," a big bowl of rotini pasta studded with mud bugs and veggies and heavily sauced in a creamy, spicy Creole concoction. Both dishes feature small, presumably frozen pieces of tail meat.

Help me out, Y&H Nation. Where can you get some real Louisiana crawfish during the time of year when you're supposed to eat them? We gotta hurry. There are only a few weeks left of Lent.

It's been more than two years since Ann Cashion and John Fulchino sold Cashion's Eat Place to long-time sous chef John Manolatos, who promised to uphold the standards of the beloved Adams Morgan eatery. Manolatos and his partners even said as much on their Web site.

Restaurant Rater dcdiner, however, isn't buying it. Take a look at this brutal assessment:

The reviews here are very old, when Cashion's was in fact a wonderful restaurant that I visited frequently. Things have gone downhill dramatically.

In fact, the departure of Ann Cashion has had disasterous consequences. I had a Sunday brunch there on 01/10/2010. The food was pedestrian at best – tasteless scrambled eggs and boring potatoes. We could have eaten at any number of nearby (cheaper) diners and had much better food at less cost. On top of that the waitress, without the slightest hint of concern, announced there was no bread because of "delivery problems". Sorry, at a place like that you expect some wonderful muffins or rolls at brunch, not a surly waitress announcing "tough luck".

DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY – my once favorite restaurant is long gone, and the current management, made aware of these issues, made it clear they're not interested. ANN CASHION – WHY ARE YOU ALLOWING YOUR NAME TO STILL BE USED BY THIS POOR EXCUSE FOR "FINE DINING"?

Do you have a different take on Cashion's? Then what are you waiting for? Sign in (or sign up) and give us your review!

Photo courtesy of Cashion's

Tonight officially kicks off winter D.C. Restaurant Week, which means that if you haven't already secured your reservations to the city's finest, priciest dining rooms, you're pretty much screwed.  Because, let's be honest, if you're not hitting the most expensive restaurants, you're not getting much bang for your buck during RW.

Once you start figuring in drinks, upcharges, gratuities, and that dessert course that you'd never order under normal circumstances, you don't always walk away from Restaurant Week, thinking, "My God! What a deal!" You think: "My God, what just hit me? Didn't I come in here looking to spend $35?"

With the idea that many of the best reservations have been snagged already, Y&H offers you the Ten Best Deals still out there for Restaurant Week. (Incidentally, I have focused on dinners only, since lunch tends to be a better deal all around; each of these ten recommendations had seats available by Monday afternoon.)

This list is after the jump.

• 701: This year's RW menu is a little more streamlined than last winter's version, but chef Adam Longworth has put together a quality list of appetizers and entrees, including plates of pork loin and salmon. Only Thursday evening is booked, a hostess tells me.
• Dino: Dean Gold does one of the best Restaurant Week programs in town. His whole menu is available, including the terrific duck beggar's purse, with only two upcharges on the entire thing. Even better: Wines over $50 a bottle are 33 percent off the entire month of January, which is how long Gold's RW runs as well. Reservations are still available, but you may have to accept a late seating on Thursday. Friday, or Saturday.
• Ristorante Tosca: You may have to elbow your way through a roomful of lobbyists (and who wouldn't like to elbow a lobbyist?), but chef Massimo Fabbri is putting his best food forward for RW, with only two upcharges. Reservations are available, though only late and early seatings on Friday and Saturday. Tosca is closed on Sunday.
  
• Johnny's Half Shell: Beard Award-winning chef Ann Cashion has fashioned a solid RW menu that features a few of the Shell's classic dishes, including the Maryland crabcake (only one per order) and New Orleans file gumbo.  Reservations are available all week.
• PS 7's: Some of Peter Smith's best plates are specials that seemingly appear out of nowhere — I'm thinking of his recent merguez sausage with buttery sourdough croutons — but this RW menu offers a chance to taste the chef's winter experiments with gastriques. Most of the prime seatings, between 7 and 8 p.m., are taken, but early and late tables are available.
• Kaz Sushi Bistro: It's unusual for a sushi house to stand out during RW, but I think chef Kaz Okochi has put together a winning four-course menu comprised of appetizers, sushi (upcharges for the pricey fish, of course), hand rolls, and desserts. Lots of good seats are still available.
• Firefly: Even though the braised delights of the "mini" pot roast come with a $6 upcharge, many of chef Danny Bortnick's other RW offerings carry no supplemental fees. Don't miss his salt-roasted baby beets, which put a new twist on the traditional winter dish. You may have to accept late or early seatings on Friday or Saturday, but the rest of the week is wide open.
• New Heights: You could argue that this isn't much of a deal, given that you can already get three courses for $38 any ol' day, but chef Logan Cox has expanded the options for RW, with only one upcharge. I think it's time I gave Cox another chance, don't you?  Seating is wide open here, even for the weekend.
• Farmers & Fishers (aka Agraria): Last year's face-lift at this Washington Harbor restaurant ushered in a more casual concept. So it only makes sense that for RW, Farmers & Fishers would expand the promotion to four courses for $35, which actually makes it a deal. Saturday looks like a tough get, but the rest of the dates are open.
• Vidalia: Jeffrey Buben's place generated some controversy last year during RW, but this year, the downtown institution is coming out strong, with one of the most well-composed menus for the week. There's a reason this place is almost booked. Only late seatings left on most days. Get 'em while you can!

Here's hoping your Restaurant Week experience is better than you (and definitely I) expect it to be. Please send me your RW experiences via e-mail when you're finished. I'll collect the best of them and put them on the Young & Hungry blog.