Y&H isn't sure why it took Ben's Chili Bowl more than a year to capitalize on Barack Obama's visit to the landmark eatery. Maybe brothers Kamal and Nizam Ali wanted to wait long enough so people forgot that, technically, Obama was only the president-elect when he dropped by in early January '09. Obama wouldn't be sworn in for another 10 days.

Or maybe Ben Ali didn't like the idea.

Whatever the reason, Ben's started hawking these bumper stickers yesterday. You can pick them up at the lunch counter for a buck apiece.

You can also take satisfaction in knowing you're like the president in another way: You have to pay, too. Bill Cosby says so. (Check out the sign next to the griddle; it will explain everything.)

At 72, Bill Cosby might be at an age when his doctor looks the comedian dead in the eye and says, "Bill, I'm telling you, if you want to see 73, lay off the half-smokes." Well, if Cos has ever heard those words, he's not heeding them.

Nizam Ali, youngest son of founders Virginia and the late Ben Ali, says Cosby still grabs half-smokes at Ben's Chili Bowl every time he's in town. (I mean, why not? He's still only one of two folks who eats free at Ben's, the recent winner of our D.C. Dish Hall of Fame contest.)

"If he doesn't physically come in the door," Ali tells Y&H, "he'll send a car by or the hotel will send a car by or his venue will just happen to come by and get them or he'll call in and have us deliver them. So he always seems to get them when he's in town some kind of way, whether or not he actually walks in the door."

Cos did walk in the door in October when the Kennedy Center awarded him the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

"He walked in and said hello to everybody," Ali remembers. But Cos did one thing more: He ordered up half-smokes for a reception at the big Twain event.

That's right, the half-smoke made its debut at the Kennedy Center.

Photo by devriesm via Flickr Creative Commons, Attribution License

All three of Ben Ali's sons plan to speak at the memorial service set for Friday at the Lincoln Theatre, right next door to the greasy spoon he made famous.  Mayor Adrian Fenty may speak, too, but as of this afternoon, no other people, famous or otherwise, are scheduled to honor the founder of Ben's Chili Bowl, who died last week at age 82.

And that's just fine with Nizam Ali, the youngest of Ben Ali's sons, who says his father wouldn't have wanted any fuss. The "Celebration of Life," scheduled for noon Friday at the theater, "is going to be like a family thing that we're going to open to the public," Nizam Ali tells Y&H this afternoon.

The memorial is free and open to the public. All you have to do is show up at the theater and grab one of the 1,225 seats available — well, minus however many seats the Ali clan needs, which, Nizam Ali thinks, might run as high as 200.

The family is going to show a short video that it put together for Ben Ali's 80th birthday as well as some other clips about the founder's life and the restaurant he created. The speakers for the afternoon will include Ben Ali's sons — Nizam, Kamal, and Sage — and possibly Fenty, although the mayor hasn't confirmed yet.

So will Bill Cosby or President Obama or any celebrities who have made the pilgrimage to Ben's speak at the service?

"I don't think so," Nizam Ali says. "We didn't ask or seek anyone."

The family, however, is seeking your thoughts. They will have microphones around the theater for you to share your memories about Ben's and its founder.

As for after-service snacks, Nizam Ali says no final plans are set. The family is considering having chili dogs at the theater. But if not, people can always walk next door to Ben's and enjoy chili dogs in the very place that made Ben Ali a local legend.  Well, some people can at least.

"With 1,200 [potential people in the theater], it's not going to be possible" to serve everyone, Nizam Ali says.

No one but the employees knew about Ben Ali's death.

The managers of Ben's Chili Bowl had told their employees this morning that Ben Ali died in his bed last night, but they didn't want their customers in the restaurant to know yet. So there was nary a clue at the landmark U Street eatery. No signs. No weeping employees. Only a Web notice for those who had somehow checked it before arriving.

The only thing at Ben's that might have tipped off an attentive diner was the music. It was soul music, the mournful variety. "Never Can Say Goodbye," by the Jackson 5 was playing softly in the background, the band's lead singer just a memory now, too.

"The mood is very somber," said Sonya Ali, wife of Kamal Ali, one of the two surviving brothers who now run Ben's. "The music is even somber."

Sonya Ali said the entire family was gathering at Ben and Virginia Ali's home in North Portal, including Sage, an artist and musician who lives in California.  Sage's wife, Sonya Ali noted, is a publicist and will help the family plan a public announcement and figure out how to honor the man who founded what has become, courtesy of Bill Cosby and President Barack Obama, D.C.'s most famous restaurant.

The family is "as well as can be expected," Sonya Ali said, including wife, Virginia, who married Ben in October 1958, just two months after opening Ben's Chili Bowl. The couple would have celebrated their 51st anniversary on Saturday.

"She believed in him then and to the very end," Sonya Ali said.

Employees were shocked but supportive when managers broke the news this morning. The family, Sonya Ali said, had no immediate plans to close today or through whatever private and public funeral arrangements are eventually announced. "I don't think so," Sonya Ali said. "That's not what he'd want...He doesn't want a lot of fanfare."

Manager Maurice Harcum had known Ben Ali for 10 years, ever since the founder hired him for the night shift at Ben's. Ben Ali, despite his failing health, showed up at his namesake restaurant at least once a week, Harcum said, but he couldn't eat the half-smokes and chili that had made him famous.

"Mrs. Ali wouldn't let him," Harcum said. "He still loved his milkshakes, though."

Vanilla was Ben Ali's flavor, the manager said, and he had to settle on the small size, for his health's sake.

Employees, managers, and family all said Ben Ali was a great businessman. "He knew how to get things done," said Sonya Ali, who performs a variety of tasks for the family businesses, including Ben's Next Door, the full-service restaurant right next to Ben's.

"I'm not saying that I agreed with him all time," Sonya Ali added after a beat. "He was a man determined to have his way."

Nizam Ali agreed. He said his father was "persistent," "strong willed," and had a "great business mind."

"He took control of each moment," Nizam Ali added. "He lived life the way that he wanted to. No regrets."

Asked to try to put his father's legacy in perspective, Nizam Ali understandably struggled for words. Then he said his father's "story, as an immigrant from Trinidad, is probably the ultimate American dream."

If the family was holding it together well, at least publicly, one loyal customer was shocked. As he waited in line for his usual hot dog, Keith Turner first heard the news from a reporter.

"Wow," he said, "I hadn't heard that...I'm kind of stunned. You kind of caught me off guard."

Turner, 42, has been frequenting Ben's since 1985, he said. The window tinter said he was doing a job at nearby Cardozo High School and decided to grab his usual lunch at Ben's: a simple griddled hot dog. He likes the char on it.

And with that, he turned to the counter and ordered his hot dog.

More photos from the first day at Ben's Chili Bowl without Ben Ali:

As New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller reportedly quipped while on the hustings in 1969, “No man can hope to get elected in New York state without being photographed eating hot dogs at Nathan’s Famous.” The same can be said for Washington, D.C.’s Ben’s Chili Bowl.

No politician has used chili dogs and half-smokes as shortcuts to D.C. accreditation quite like former Mayor Anthony A. Williams. Long accused of being aloof, overly academic, and insufficiently black, Williams compensated for his lack of common touch by associating himself with Ben’s Chili Bowl at every possible turn. He mentioned the place in his inaugural address, and he made it his first stop after he won office in 1998, according to the Washington Post. In a January 2005 Q-and-A with the Post, Williams cited Ben’s as the “restaurant where my constituents would most likely run into me.” And when he was spotted eating a turkey chili dog there in the summer of the same year, some observers took it as a sign that he might actually seek a third term.

How did Ben’s and the half-smoke become such icons of Washington culture? “As I think about it, I often wonder if Bill Cosby didn’t play a major role,” says Virginia Ali, who co-owns the Chili Bowl with her husband Ben. The story goes that Cosby first came across the half-smoke when he was in the Navy and stationed at Quantico in the 1960s.

When he came to town in 1985 to promote the premiere episode of his soon-to-be-watershed sitcom The Cosby Show, he spent some time at the Chili Bowl being mobbed by fans and telling a reporter how he used to take a young Camille Hanks there on dates. Subsequent press reports about Ben’s often noted how Cosby could devour three of the sausages in a single session. And when Cosby went on The Oprah Winfrey Show, the talk-show host surprised him with a batch of Ben’s half-smokes she’d had brought in for the taping, allowing Cosby to bring a small piece of Washingtoniana into the homes of millions of Americans.

Photograph by Darrow Montgomery

Feeling guilty about the mass quantities of beer we consumed over the past week, we decided to check out some of the rumors we recently heard about beer being ... well, good for you.

Turns out that having one to three glasses of beer a day has been proven to have benefits for your health–as much and even more than red wine.

The facts are simple. As an alcoholic beverage, beer has the same ability to prevent blood clotting and lower cholesterol, thereby preventing stroke and heart disease, as Merlot and martinis do. Unlike wine, however, the unfiltered yeast in many beers (look for the hazy ones, not the clear ones) contains a crapload of B vitamins–far more than wines, which are almost always filtered. Also, beer has more vitamins and minerals in general because it is made from barely and wheat, and these grains retain nutrients much better than grapes do by the end of the wine-making process.

You might be remembering Bill Cosby's legendary decision (skip to 4:25) to give his children chocolate cake for breakfast, based on his faulty logic: since eggs, milk and wheat are ingredients in cake, it must be a nutritious breakfast. It was easy for Mr. Jello Pudding Pops to ignore the sugar and fat for comedic purposes, but how can we ignore beer bellies, liver damage, and the big A (think "anonymous") when promoting daily beer consumption?

Well, we can't. It's obvious that people should not start drinking beer just to have a 10% to 40% less likely chance of developing heart disease, which they can more easily avoid through a healthy diet and regular exercise. It's even more obvious that people should not drink a LOT of beer EVERYDAY. But it's also become obvious that drinking beer in moderation, which is defined fairly liberally in our opinion, is not as bad as most people think it is. In fact, it's actually a pretty good idea and perhaps an even better idea than having a glass of red wine a day.

We were so encouraged by this argument that despite swearing to give beer a break this week, we bought some Ayinger Hefeweizen at our neighborhood corner store and helped our hearts out a little last night. Prost, little guys. Keep on tickin'.

Seriously, the Cos needs to get a grip. This is not a faux pas along the lines of John Kerry asking for Swiss cheese on a steak sandwich in Philly. A half-smoke is one of the least known, most-misunderstood signature dishes in the country. I suspect most Washingtonians don't know what a half-smoke is, particularly because street vendors all over the city constantly pass off Polish sausages as half-smokes.

If you need a refresher, read Dave Jamieson's authoritative piece on the half-smoke. You'll be in good company. More than 800 folks have already clicked on the story since Obama's visit to the Bowl.