OK,I know I said on Friday that Y&H was finished with our short hymn to a mother's influence on chefs, but late yesterday, Mark Furstenberg, a man of some renown, wrote a moving tribute to his mum and her kitchen skills. You need to read it, and not just because it's a 71-year-old chef praising his mother, who's nearing her 100th birthday. This is a missive from another era:

My mother will reach her 100th birthday on May 20th and she is in very good shape. That fact alone would seem to vindicate her cooking (as well as her genes and her will and her energy).

I was one of six children. We were an eating family. We ate dinner together; we even ate breakfast together. And although our food was influenced by my father's having been born in Sweden (herring and knaeckebrot for breakfast), my mother made the food decisions.

She came from a somewhat aristocratic German-Jewish family and her mother didn't cook. Her family's meals were prepared by Miss Hen (one generation out of Slavery) followed by Bobbelee who started working for my grandparents when she was 15 years old. (She lied about her age.) My mother may never have turned on a stove until the War.

But in 1942 my father was assigned to Florida and my mother had to learn to cook. Happily she had an aptitude.

Our family dinners were simple — it was a time of simple food. I have memories from the War when rationing demanded from even experienced cooks a level of ingenuity that our affluence today has made entirely unnecessary. We didn't have meat very much; we certainly didn't have butter. But even without ingredients easily obtainable now we ate very well.

It was in the Fifties that my mother's cooking flourished. She used to describe meals as "the flower of my art." Scallops, pot roast, Swedish meatballs, Beef Stroganoff, always vegetables simply cooked, nearly always potatoes that my father loved, salads, and desserts. We ate well. The dinner table was chaotic. Six children, all eaters, my father trying to tell stories from his workday, my mother trying to gather our attention for my father. She was the cook; she was the mistress of ceremonies.

"Mom," someone (usually me) would say, "We just had lamb." And my mother would bolt from her chair and bring back from the kitchen her notebook, look through it to say, "We haven't had lamb since March 10th."

It's sad that what we have exists so little now. Dinner wasn't always joyful. My sister (Carla Cohen, owner of Politics and Prose) regularly knocked over her water glass and, in anticipation of my father's disapproval, would begin to cry.

But whether joyful or not, stormy or not, our dinner was a family time, the most important family time. And always my mother was in charge.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Samuel Fromartz, if you'll recall, was the surprise winner of Y&H's debut baguette competition last year, beating out breads from local icons like Marvelous Market and Breadline, even national big boys like Le Pain Quotidien and La Brea Bakery.

Well, good news travels fast, or semi-fast. Last week, Fromartz got a call from the office of a celebrity chef. Not just any celebrity chef, but one of the biggest in the history of celebrity chefs. She wanted him to bake bread for her charity dinner on Sunday.

Fromartz picks up the story here on his blog, ChewsWise:

I was leaving the gym when I checked my messages. Alice Waters' office at Chez Panisse was calling — yeah, right. Who was this really?

When I called back, it turned out Waters was calling and looking for a baker for her charity dinner in Washington, to replace one who had dropped out. Barton Seaver, a friend and chef at Blue Ridge, suggested me. "We hear you make the best baguette in DC," said Sarah Weiner, Waters' assistant. "Well, yeah, I won a contest," I stammered, "but I just bake at home. The most I've baked was for Thanksgiving dinner."

They needed to feed 40 — at a $500 a plate dinner at Bob Woodward's house. Could it be done in my home ovens? I said I'd call back. I went home to figure out how much bread I needed to bake and realized I could probably do it — 5 big loaves and several baguettes. I then called Peter Reinhart — the renowned baker and author I've known for a couple of years — to see what he thought. "That's not a lot of bread," he said, and he encouraged me to give it a whirl.

So began my first gig as a professional baker — at an Alice Waters' dinner.

You can read the rest of the story over on Fromartz's blog, including how his breads turned out.

Photo courtesy of Samuel Fromartz

Today and throughout the week, Y&H will be giving you a glimpse back at 2009, via the blog posts that most captured your attention. First up: the granddaddy of all aggregations, the 10 most-read items of  the year.

The list is after the jump.

1. Budweiser Launches Select 55, Light Beer Arms Race Gets Absurd. This page, posted by the Beerspotter in August, is the Michael Jordan of Young & Hungry. It performs at peak levels week after week. The page is also the holy temple of search engine optimization; future Web gurus will study its signs and contours to learn out how it has performed so well on Google.
2. Vintage TV Beer Commercials. I compiled this page as daily blog filler, no more important to me than some random fat dude screaming for his McDonald's chicken sandwich. But the internets has its own way of rewarding inanity.
3. Spike Mendelsohn Evicted from His Capitol Hill Rental House. The item that forever put Y&H on the burger man's shit list.
4. Ritz Pastry Chef Jérôme Girardot Found Dead in Cameron Station Park. A terrible, terrible incident that I still think about with equal parts wonder and sadness.
5. Another D.C. Beer Week? Yes, Please. Because it's always better the second-time around.
6. Birch & Barley Opens Today. What's Inside? The Logan Circle beer emporium has been a consistently strong performer on Y&H. It is, in fact, the only establishment with two nods on this list.
7. Nori Amaya's Friends and Fans Express Their Grief on Her Facebook Page. People were so desperate for information on this tragic killing that they turned to my shallow little effort — and sometimes expressed their anger at its lack of real info.
8. Birch & Barley Slated for Summer Opening. Maybe. More false optimism spooned out by Y&H.
9. Breadline Busted on 19 Health Code Violations, Ten of Them Critical. Excessive fruit flies! Dirty meat slicers! Operating without a license! Readers wanted to know all the icky details of Breadline's spectacular health inspection failure.
10. Michel Richard Plans to Move His Home Base to Tysons Corner. The maestro of D.C. chefs hunted for investors last year for a planned move to the former Maestro space in McLean.

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

Just a week after it was closed for 19 violations of the D.C. food code, Breadline was back in business today. To the naked eye, the sandwich shop didn't look so different from its "excessive live fruit fly" phase. I did notice meticulous, hand-written expiration dates on the lemonade drinks and that the bread rack behind the cash register was gone, an apparent victim of a D.C. Health Department inspector who thought consumers might contaminate the loaves. But almost everything else looked the same.

I don't mean to imply that Breadline remains as dirty as when the inspector tagged it as a menace to society. What I do mean to say is that I (and probably you) wouldn't know a health hazard if it bit me (or you) on the ass — at least not from the serving line at this downtown sandwich shop. Could I have known that food was stored at the wrong temperature? Or that there was excessive grease under the hood? Or that dough was rising on the walk-in floor? Or that Breadline was operating without a restaurant license?

Nope, I couldn't.

What I do know is that Breadline has aggressively tackled the problems in the days since the Health Department pointed them out. The restaurant managers have scrubbed the place clean, to the point that it not only passed re-inspection but it also impressed Breadline founder Mark Furstenberg, a man not known for an easy compliment.

Where am I going with this? I'm saying that if you liked Breadline in the past, when it was apparently a haven for the city's fruit fly population, then you should like it now, when it's as clean as an operating room. Health inspections are designed to protect you from harm, not harm a business — though that's sometimes the unfortunate consequence.

When I stopped by for lunch, I noticed that the patio was packed with patrons, but inside, a good number of tables were empty. As I paid for my salami and cheese sandwich, lemonade, and chips, I asked the cashier how Breadline was faring on its first day back. She said it was "better than expected."

I was going to leave it at that but just couldn't. So I asked her if that meant business was down from pre-inspection times. The cashier smiled and nodded.

As I was about to leave, I stopped and looked at the pastry display case and noticed it was virtually empty. A manager-looking guy asked if he could help me and then promptly directed me to a housemade whoopie pie, which I purchased. I asked him how business was, and he, as you might expect, was more optimistic. He said it was "good."

But as he handed me my whoopie pie, he said something that said everything: "Thanks for coming in."

He said in a way that made me feel as if I were a brave pilgrim venturing into untamed lands.

Yours truly is thrilled to report that, for the first time in weeks, the vintage TV beer commercials did not crack the Top 5 posts. I'll drink to that news.

Instead, readers this week were fascinated by a D.C. Department of Health inspector's report on Breadline, which found 19 separate violations of the food code. Thousands of you wanted to read all the ugly details that caused the department to temporarily shut down Breadline. Fewer of you wanted to read the good news: the re-inspection report, which found not a single violation at Breadline. Ah, human nature.

And with that, we turn to the most-read items this week:

1. Breadline Busted on 19 Health Code Violations, Ten of Them Critical
2. My Top 5 Desert Island Beers. What Are Yours?
3. BGR: The Burger Joint Set to Open Third Store in Dupont Circle
4. Dining Guide Rejects: Corduroy, Comet, Urban, Tallula
5. Dairy Godmother's Owner Doesn't Want the Obama Bump That Ray's Hell Burger Got
   

In the name of fairness, Y&H is posting the D.C. Department of Health's re-inspection report on Breadline, which had earlier been cited for 19 health code violations. In her return trip, inspector Dawn McFadden found a totally different Breadline. She reported no violations.

The bottom line from McFadden: "Permission granted for the issuance of the restaurant and Bakery Basic Business license."

You can read the rest of the report after that jump.

Less than a week after it was cited for 19 violations of D.C. Department of Health codes — ten of them critical violations — Breadline has passed its re-inspection, says Dena Iverson, director of communications for the department. Before it can officially reopen for business, though, the sandwich shop still has to secure a new restaurant license from the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs.

Morell Marean, representative for the private-investor owners who bought Breadline from founder Mark Furstenberg in 2005, hopes to have the license in hand by tomorrow, which would allow Breadline to reopen for business on the same day.

"The Breadline has passed its health department inspection, and we're looking forward to opening soon," Marean says.

Marean wouldn't comment on the amount of money invested — or the time spent — to get Breadline back up to code. But Furstenberg, who was at his former restaurant when the inspector was there today, told Y&H this afternoon that the shop looks born anew.

"It was beautiful. Seriously," Furstenberg says about the repair work. "They replaced ceiling tiles, cleaned the oven, cleaned all the machinery...Everything was spotless."

"They must have spent a fortune," he adds.

The public will now be the final arbiter on Breadline's future. Given the large number of violations — including that customer-killer known as vermin in the kitchen — Breadline will likely need to conduct more than a clean-up campaign to get patrons back in the door. The group will likely need to go on a PR offensive.

But for now, Marean prefers a cautious approach. As for a public statement, the representative wants to be brief and on point.

"Food safety and sanitation are of paramount importance to our company," Marean says, "and we have worked diligently to remediate all of the items cited by the health department."

The opening page of the Health inspector's report on Breadline.

The big news today has been the temporary closure of Breadline, the once esteemed bread and sandwich shop founded by Mark Furstenberg in 1997 but sold to the international company, Groupe Le Duff,  in 2005.

The Washingtonian was first out of the gate with its late-morning Tweet, which reported that Breadline was closed. "For good," it noted. The Washington Business Journal quickly followed with a report that said Breadline was merely closed for repairs, and then Washington Post published a more substantial report, saying that Breadline was "temporarily closed for health code violations," but was working with the District to resolve them.

This afternoon, however, Y&H got a hold of a copy of the Food Establishment Inspection Report, filed on June 18, which lists 19 separate violations at Breadline. Ten of them, according to inspector Dawn McFadden, are critical. McFadden determined the risk at Breadline was "high" based on her inspections.

Among the violations that McFadden recorded:

• License requirement: Breadline was operating with a suspended restaurant license, which is issued by the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs after an establishment passes a health inspection. McFadden noted that Breadline's license expired on Dec. 31, 2008.

• Preventing contamination from premises — food storage: The inspector "observed containers...containing rising dough stored on the walk-in cooler floor." Health codes mandate that food must be stored at least six inches above the floor, she noted.
• Preventing contamination by consumers — food display: McFadden observed bread stored on racks behind the service line, toasted bread slices stored on a tray at the deli station, salads not stored behind the sneeze guard, among other things. "Above items are exposed to contamination by consumers," she wrote.
• Cleaning — food/non-food contact surfaces: The inspector found a dirty meat slicer ("old food particles present") and a dirty potato chopper (ditto) as well as "debris throughout prep tables and prep table shelving."
• Controlling pests — McFadden observed "excessive live fruit fly activity throughout the establishment." Aside from recommending an exterminator, McFadden advised that Breadline "eliminate harborage conditions such as dirty mops stored in stagnate [sic] water, cleaning floor drains of slime and build-up present throughout and by routinely inspecting food shipments."
• Cooling — On at least three separate checks, McFadden found that the following foods were improperly cooled. Chicken, chick pea spread, tuna salad, curry chicken salad, sliced turkey, ground beef, and cole slaw were all above the required 41° Fahrenheit threshold.
• Refrigeration — McFadden observed a "display deli case maintaining a temperature of 82° F." She recommended removing sandwiches from the unit until it is repaired.
• Physical facilities — The inspector noted that Breadline needs to clean "the wall in the warewash area, above the mop sink and where...mold [is] present." She also recommended that Breadline provide "a drop ceiling in the food pantry area and repair the ceiling throughout and provide ceiling tiles." Finally, she said the shop needs to clean the "stove, oven, entire hood system, excessive grease build-up present. Remove the ice build up present on the door of the walk-in freezer in order to properly close the door. Clean the walls throughout of excessive dirt present."
• Handsink accessibility — McFadden observed that a bread rack or other equipment blocked access to hand sinks. "Handsinks," she noted, "must be accessible at all times for proper handwashing."

The full inspection report is listed below.

Silent Treatment: Loic Feillet knows how to take criticism

Loic Feillet is, without question, one of the area's most skilled bakers. The owner of Panorama Baking Co. in Alexandria has, over the years, sold bread to some of the finest restaurants in the District, including both CityZen and Citronelle. But when Feillet took part in the Washington City Paper's debut baguette competition, his entry finished far down the list.

Feillet's loaf scored only 24 out of a possible 80 points, placing it eighth among the 12 competing breads. The baker, whom I asked to join our contest as a non-voting judge, remained mum as his fellow critics sliced and diced their way through the various baguettes. Some of the judges were not kind to Feillet's bread.

"It looks really good," said CityZen chef Eric Ziebold. "I was surprised. It did not taste good." On his scorecard, Ziebold awarded the baguette only 10 out of a possible 20 points. Mark Furstenberg, founder of both Marvelous Market and Breadline, scored the bread slightly higher, giving Feillet 11.5 points, but his comments were coarser than Ziebold's.

The crust, Furstenberg noted, was "old — should be better." As for the crumb, or the interior of the bread, the baker wrote on his scorecard that it was "dense" and "badly done."

It was only after all the breads were sampled and all the scores tallied that Feillet finally spoke in defense of his baguette.

"I made this baguette not to my personal tastes," Feillet told the crew gathered around the conference room table. "It's made according to the will of my customers."

In fact, Feillet told us, he used to make a baguette based on master baker Eric Kayser's recipe, but when Feillet moved from Florida to Alexandria about four years ago, he learned that his clientele wasn't interested in a classic French baguette. "It was a nightmare," Feillet added. "All the customers wailed, 'What is this baguette?'"

Feillet calls what he makes now "commercial bread," meant for many of the restaurants he serves, not for retail sales. (I should note that the high-end restaurants mentioned above don't or didn't buy Feillet's baguettes, but some of the other breads he produces.)

His customers, Feillet added, "want something very soft. I can't go against my customers."

Upon hearing this tale of woe, Furstenberg offered some advice to Feillet: "Never lower yourself to your customers' tastes."

Perhaps realizing the harshness of his words, Furstenberg immediately changed his tone. "You don't want to fight with your customers, I understand that," Furstenberg said. "I want to fight with my customers."

Photo by Darrow Montgomery