But, you probably could've guessed all of those.  As the Baltimore Sun duly points out, "Think of this an update of the previous edition, with 119 new listings. But established restaurants have not been re-rated and re-ranked—that happens every other year."

Read Y&H alum Tim Carman's definitive piece on the survey, "Dear Zagat," here.

Catching lobster in the dead of winter isn’t for the faint of heart. As the temperature dips and lobsters grow hard shells, they migrate to warmer waters in deeper seas, far from shore. Only the most determined fishermen will face open seas and hazardous conditions to bring in a winter catch.

Demand for the crustaceans at local restaurants doesn’t decline, though; at Occidental Grill & Seafood, chef Rodney Scruggs says he still sells 75 to 100 orders each week, no matter how cold it gets outside. Red Hook Lobster Pound’s D.C. food truck will keep rolling, too, returning from a holiday break this past week.

Which just means more steady work for a couple of local folks who’ve made a name for themselves ferrying fresh lobster from Maine to D.C.

Every Tuesday and Friday—even during the winter—207 Lobster, a one-year-old distribution company with ties to Maine lobstermen and D.C. restaurants, delivers a fresh catch to a large, and growing, list of clients.

The company is a partnership between Alex Harris, 25, a host at Occidental Grill who got hooked on lobster as an undergraduate at the University of Maine, and Nick Olson, 23, a Mainer who’s on track to join his family’s long line of lobstermen. (So long, in fact, that the Olsons have a grandfathered permit that allows them to trap near Cushing Island, where no new permits are issued.)

207 Lobster is a by-demand outfit without a brick-and-mortar location. Restaurants place orders, Olson and his family pull lobsters from traps in Maine, pack them in seaweed and ice in a wax-coated cardboard box, and send them off to a shipping company. They’re transported south in a refrigerated truck. Here in the District, Harris picks them up and delivers to clients. Besides Occidental Grill, 207 Lobster serves CityZen, Vidalia, Brabo, Marcel’s, Brasserie Beck, DC Coast, and Tackle Box.

“In winter, there’s not much of a difference in catches or sales on the whole except the price,” says Harris.

Restaurants pay 207 Lobster $7 per pound during winter, rather than $4 or $5 per pound they pay during the summer; most pass the higher prices on. At The Occidental, a summer lobster is $16 or $17 for a pound-and-a -halfer, whole. For the same price, the winter lobster makes for a beautiful plate: a butterflied tail on a bed of braised fennel, layered with one claw and a douse of micro-greens, dressed with a ruby-colored Sauterne pomegranate sauce.

* * *

Over the last few years, the lobster business has boomed for both suppliers, like 207 Lobster, and the restaurants (or trucks) that sell to consumers. What used to be a luxury beyond the reach of most diners is getting closer to becoming a commodity, says Trevor Corson, author of The Secret Life of Lobsters.

Until the fall of 2008, says Corson, half of the Maine lobster catch was going to Canadian processing plants that supplied parts like frozen tails to grocery stores, or sent frozen lobster to mid-level restaurant chains. Prices stayed high because middlemen and processing costs kept it that way.

Then globalization stepped in. The collapse of Iceland’s economy in 2008 pulled lobster prices down, not because Icelanders like Maine lobster, but because Icelandic banks had been the primary lenders to Canadian processors. Since banks elsewhere perceived fishing as a risky investment, the businesses haven’t been able to secure funding since. The result, says Corson, is more lobsters on the market, driving down the price.

On top of that, cod, lobster’s natural predator, has been overfished. As a result, Maine lobsters are more plentiful than ever. Tack on weight and size restrictions, and the numbers off the coast of Maine have proliferated beyond what anyone had expected.

Though other New England states also have successful lobster fisheries, Maine’s catch is prized. They’re not imported, like Canadian competitors, but they taste sweeter than those from waters farther south.

That sense of place—in wine, it’d be called terroir—is part of the appeal of the lobster businesses that have thrived in the District. 207 Lobster ships directly from Maine, and the restaurants that sell their product get a specific local supplier to tell diners about.

Red Hook Lobster Pound sources its own lobsters from Maine, as well. Until recently, co-owner Susan Povich and her husband drove north from Brooklyn (where the business began) every week. They met fishermen. They sampled lobster from hundreds of processors. Recently, she hired off-duty firemen to shoulder the drives. Povich has relationships with fishermen and processors, but won’t reveal who supplies her. She says her processors get lobster for $2 to $5 a pound, but she was mum about how much she herself pays.

At Red Hook Lobster Pound in Brooklyn, Povich keeps whole lobsters in storage tanks for up to 24 hours until they’re sold, whole. The Lobster Pound doesn’t warehouse its product; they tend to order only as much as they’ll need to serve lobster rolls or retail lobsters for home cooking.

Povich can spend upwards of $30,000 a week on her business, which includes maintaining tanks for the sales of whole lobsters in their Brooklyn storefront. “There’s an art to keeping lobsters in tanks,” says Povich. “They need them to revive. It’s hard to keep them healthy and not to lose them.”

At 207 Lobster, Harris and Olson agree; they don’t use tanks at all. It’s in part out of concern that prolonged storage hampers freshness by stressing the lobsters, which tend to be territorial. The stress releases an enzyme that could degrade the flavor of the meat. Worse for business, tanks can cost anywhere from $20,000 and up. Journeys and maintenance of the Gale Ray, Olson’s boat, are expensive enough as it is.

The real difference between winter lobster and summer lobster has nothing to do with logistics or cost, though. Like anything else involving a fresh seasonal product, it’s a matter of taste.

“Ask a Mainer on the street and he’ll tell you hands down, he likes a summer lobster way better than a winter one,” says Harris. The shells are softer. The meat is less dense and more succulent. There’s more “juice,” or water weight in the shell.

But Harris prefers winter lobster to summer meat. “I like that you get more for your money,” he says. “I like the dense meaty stuff.”

I was skeptical: Isn’t this like comparing a rib-eye to flank steak? But the other night during a lobster taste test at The Occidental, my dining companion suggested I think of it the way northerners and southerners view Gulf oysters. New Englanders dismiss them as fryin’ oysters—i.e., not as flavorful as those from colder waters—while a Louisianan views a fat meaty raw bivalve from local waters as the be-all. When it comes to lobster, winter versus summer is a matter of preference.

“Winter lobster is amazing,” says Povich. “It’s less sweet and more briny, but still delicious.” She cites lobster bisque and the Connecticut style lobster roll as seasonal favorites, since the sandwich is served warm.

Perhaps winter meat is a little less sweet, but I hardly noticed, since at The Occidental, it’s doctored with the fruit in the sauce. It is certainly denser than during the summer. I could have used a steak knife on the butterflied tail; it was tough enough. The claw was more the delight. But that’s the way they usually are: tougher tails, more supple knuckle and claw meat. It’s why Povich and company don’t use tails in their sandwiches, ever. She thinks they’re too tough.

Tough also describes the shells in winter, so hard you might poke someone’s eye out as you’re cracking a claw, or so I learned at Tackle Box, when I order a whole grilled one for $29 (with two sides) the other night. As was the case at The Occidental, the lobster meat was slightly bitter, almost herbal. The meat was dense. But it was, nevertheless, delicious. That said, I had to apologize to people surrounding me eating fried clams and crab cakes as I impaled them with shell shrapnel. It makes sense that 207’s lobsters are selling for “beauty plates” in winter, with fine dining as the majority of their clientele; eating a whole one in public is a delicious debacle.

While 207 Lobster sees steady sales year round, the nature of the lobster truck and its outdoor clientele means that Povich and company will take a hit. But “we’re definitely staying open,” she says. “It’s worth it for marketing. And, I have to keep my people employed.”

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

Photos by Darrow Montgomery

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

By his own estimate, Don Rockwell eats approximately 700 restaurant meals a year, spending nearly $30,000 of his modest computer consultant’s salary at high and low-end establishments alike. Rockwell reviews many of those meals in minute detail on his eponymous food board, which he founded in 2005 and which has become a prime local destination for chefs, sommeliers, restaurateurs, and diners, many of whom engage with DonRockwell.com on a weekly or daily basis.

Between his prodigious eating habits and his online gastronomic gathering place, Rockwell has accumulated a lot of knowledge about the local dining scene—and the people and organizations that comprise it. He knows, for example, that many of the folks who have waited on him and cooked for him lack health insurance. He knows the frustrations of restaurant owners who must battle the District’s bureaucracy to even open for business. And he especially knows about their frustrations with the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington, the trade group established to promote and protect the hospitality industry’s interests.

One of those exasperated restaurateurs is Michael Landrum, the man behind Ray’s the Steaks, Ray’s the Classics, and Ray’s Hell Burger. His regular comments on Rockwell’s boards include this Oct. 28 salvo, fired the day after RAMW split with its parent organization, the National Restaurant Association: “They are a self-serving, parasitical organization where often-times the parasite has grown larger than its hosts. They are openly hostile to employee’s rights,” Landrum wrote. “One thing to be clear, they do not, do not, represent or work on behalf of independent restaurants, restaurant workers, farmers or chefs.”

In an interview, Landrum levels a few other charges. “RAMW is an organization that uses its substantial financial clout to enrich itself,” he tells me. What’s more, he adds, the organization’s “political agenda is hostile to what most people would consider the interests of the restaurant community as a whole.”

By that, Landrum means that RAMW’s lobbying hasn’t always represented the best interests of either restaurant workers or restaurant eaters. Fighting against a higher minimum wage, for instance, may please owners, but it undercuts the line cooks, bussers, and others employees who rely on those meager salaries. Likewise, RAMW’s efforts to exempt bartenders and wait staff from the District’s Accrued Sick and Safe Leave Act of 2008 took away basic rights from hundreds of workers. And RAMW efforts directed at battling food trucks, smoking bans, and menu labels have also tended to favor traditional brick-and-mortar owners over everyone from street vendors to diners who’d prefer clean restaurant air.

Rockwell doesn’t have answers for all of these issues, or even most of them, but does have a vision for the future of the local hospitality industry. He has tentatively started an organization, the Association of Independent Restaurants, which will attempt to harness the collective power of the area’s independent restaurants to assist both management and workers. Rockwell wants to offer discount group health insurance for line cooks, wait staff, bar backs, and everyone else who needs it. He wants to put quality ingredients in the hands of smaller restaurants by pooling their purchases and negotiating lower prices. He wants to help employees get work visas, and he wants to help restaurateurs negotiate the cumbersome process of establishing an eatery in the District and elsewhere.

Rockwell is still a long way from accomplishing these goals. At present, he doesn’t have an office, employees, a budget, or even a solid business plan. He just has a domain name (air-dc.com) and a desire. “I see a need that needs to be filled, and I want to fill it,” Rockwell says over lunch at Circle Bistro last week. “I view [AIR] as more a complementary thing than a takeover attempt” of RAMW.

What Rockwell does have, however, is the support from some influential people in the industry, like Landrum, chef Eric Ziebold of CityZen, and Cathal Armstrong at Restaurant Eve.

He also has his own frustrations with the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington to motivate him. Like the annual RAMMY awards, where it remains a mystery as to how or why a restaurant earns a win or gets nominated. Or the association’s bi-annual Restaurant Week, in which participating RAMW members offer three-course lunch and dinner menus for around $20 and $35 respectively. Rockwell, for one, thinks this is not a deal for anyone, unless they’re dining at one of the area’s few fine-dining palaces.

“I think the dining public is being absolutely duped by this,” he says. He’d like his organization to work with restaurants to offer discount menus year-around, perhaps at off hours or on slow week days.

Restaurant Week is sore spot for some restaurateurs, too. Not only do owners have to pay a fee to participate in Restaurant Week (typically $500) and offer meal discounts, but ever since RAMW started steering people to OpenTable to book reservations, restaurateurs must pay a $1 fee for each person who goes through the online service. The money adds up quickly, biting into whatever profit may be available during the week. Bob Kinkead, the Beard Award-winning chef and owner of Kinkead’s in Foggy Bottom, says his payments to OpenTable will usually double or triple to nearly $3,000 a month during the promotion, which often runs longer than a week.

Kinkead, like other restaurateurs I spoke with, has mixed feelings about RAMW. He’s a past board member who understands what RAMW does well and what it doesn’t. He believes the association does a good job of preventing governments from raiding the pocketbooks of local restaurateurs when budgets fall short. At the same time, Kinkead thinks RAMW didn’t fight hard enough to stop the city from raising parking meter fees and extending their hours into the evening, thereby hammering downtown eateries.

The interesting thing about Kinkead is that he’s no sideline critic. In the late 1990s, he and some fellow restaurateurs created the Council of Independent Restaurants of America, a nationwide organization designed to battle the major chains. At one point, CIRA had chapters in 17 cities, including the District, where its membership peaked at about 50 establishments.

CIRA’s ambitions were similar to those of Don Rockwell and his budding association. CIRA tried to establish health care coverage for the employees of its 100-plus restaurant members (it proved almost impossible to find a policy to cover workers in the various states, Kinkead says); it tried to create a central ordering system for restaurants so members could take advantage of group purchasing rates (some cities already had companies performing this function, Kinkead says; chefs in other cities sometimes couldn’t agree on what ingredients to purchase); and it even tried its hand at expediting to help owners negotiate the Byzantine bureaucracy necessary to get restaurants open (lawyers already have this market well covered).

In the end, Kinkead says, the local chapter of CIRA was undone by the kind of things that bring down most such organizations: a lack of funds and a chronic inability to reach consensus. CIRA remains alive in other areas, Kinkead says, mostly smaller towns where members are willing to put aside their own needs for the greater good of the chapter. The veteran restaurateur believes one factor will determine whether Rockwell succeeds with AIR: “If he’s extremely well funded, there’s not a reason why it shouldn’t work,” Kinkead says. “If not, don’t bother, buddy.”

But another industry insider expresses a separate worry about Rockwell’s budding venture: Should AIR get traction, assemble a healthy number of dues-paying members, and start offering insurance and group purchasing, it could step on the toes of some powerful interests. The hotel and restaurant workers union, not to mention the companies that already offer group buying, would not sit idly and watch AIR take over their markets. “In the beginning,” says the source, “I don’t think anybody’s going to pay very much attention because [AIR] is so small.” But should AIR grow, Rockwell needs to be prepared for battle.

At the same time, the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington will not be standing still, either. The group no doubt has heard about the situation in New York City, where a number of high-profile restaurateurs including Stephen Hanson and Keith McNally recently started the NYC Hospitality Coalition to serve as a complement to the local chapter of the New York State Restaurant Association. The question here, of course, is this: How long will it take before this “complementary” organization becomes an actual competitor, fighting for the limited number of dues-paying members and donors.

Lynne Breaux, a former restaurateur herself, is the president of the non-profit RAMW. As the leader of the association with more than 650 members in the District and Northern Virginia, Breaux oversees an organization that took in $1.26 million during fiscal 2009. Far from being a group that cares only for owners and management, Breaux says, RAMW also looks out for workers. The association has a lawyer available for members to help them secure work visas for employees. Earlier in its history, Breaux notes, RAMW also offered group health insurance for restaurant workers and is looking into the proposition again. “It’s down the road,” she says. (A RAMW board member who spoke on the condition of anonymity confirmed that the association had a “substantial conversation” last week about a group health plan for workers.)

But Breaux is clearly aware that RAMW has its detractors, whether Landrum and his belief that RAMW lives to enrich itself (Breaux, incidentally, earned about $161,000 last year as president) or restaurateurs who are frustrated by the economics of Restaurant Week (Breaux says the group is talking to OpenTable about lowering its rates). “Maybe you can’t please everybody all the time,” she says.

That may be a lesson Don Rockwell will learn when the Association of Independent Restaurants finally gets off the ground. Or will it get off the ground? Or will local restaurateurs and their employees be forced to live with the imperfect work of the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington? Michael Landrum has an opinion on this.

“I think there’s nothing that Don can’t accomplish once he sets his mind to it,” Landrum says.

Eatery tips? Food pursuits? Send suggestions to hungry@washingtoncitypaper.com. Or call (202) 650-6925.

Photos by Darrow Montgomery

For the first time in three weeks, the Rogue States trial didn't dominate blog traffic. Instead, y'all favored a mix of subjects, from Starbucks' plan to start selling alcohol to a four-star restaurant that lost its cache to the ongoing fascination with the sale of the Brickskeller.

Hmm, I'm thinking the ultimate traffic-generating blog item would look something like this: Starbucks buys the Brickskeller and transforms it into a four-star gastropub, complete with Chicago hot dogs and strippers. Lindsay Lohan is a regular — and drunk all the time.

I'll get to work on that. In the meantime...

1. Starbucks Goes for Bar Bucks by Selling Beer
2. Tap Lessons: Advice for the Brickskeller's New Owners
3. The Family Guise: Two New Italian Eateries Take Radically Different Approaches
4. Changing Tables: Chicago Dogs Headed to D.C.
5. How Did CityZen Go from Four Stars to No Show in WaPo's Dining Guide? Sietsema Explains.

Photo by Bill Roehl via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

WaPo

I've been trying to reach CityZen chef Eric Ziebold for comment, but we haven't connected yet. Perhaps he doesn't want to talk about it, which I'd understand. I also asked Sietsema if he wouldn't mind explaining the restaurant's fall from grace.

Here's his e-mail response:

As I mentioned in the introduction, not all the usual "best" restaurants would be (or could be) included this insider-themed issue.

In the case of CityZen, I visited twice just before my deadline, once at the bar and again in the dining room. While the service there has never been better, and I love the dining room, I thought the cooking this fall was more subdued, less soulful — indeed, less interesting — than I've come to expect from Eric Ziebold. In fairness, the chef was away from the kitchen when I ate in the formal dining room (he was sick, actually). Even so, I think a restaurant at that level should act and taste as if the boss were present even if he's not.

In the end, I think two factors played into CityZen's dismissal. One was Sietsema's narrow focus on trendy restaurants, which, as he noted in his introduction, "means you won’t be reading about all of the area’s better-known addresses or popular standbys for sushi, steak or pizza. Chances are, you already know about them."

But CityZen's kitchen apparently sliced its own finger off, too, by taking the boss' absence as a chance to let its guard down. Either one of these factors — the theme or the off-day — probably wouldn't have been enough to sink CityZen. But together, they felled a giant.

Red Hook Lobster Pound truck: street food makes the Dining Guide

WaPo's Tom Sietsema released his 2010 Dining Guide online yesterday, and in between other tasks, I've been combing through it to understand how the critic views the current restaurant scene. Before I get to the nuggets that I've mined, though, I should note what Sietsema's MO was for this year's guide:

To make the cut this year, a restaurant didn't just have to be performing well; it had to be a place folks are talking about. That means you won't be reading about all of the area's better-known addresses or popular standbys for sushi, steak or pizza. Chances are, you already know about them. Chef changes excluded a handful of contenders from consideration, as did a noticeable dip in quality at some of the region's most popular (but no longer most praiseworthy) restaurants.

Using this as his guiding criteria, Sietsema shook up his guide from a year ago, sometimes radically so. Among the notable picks, omissions, and star movements:

• CityZen, chef Eric Ziebold's taste laboratory in the Mandarin Oriental, went from four stars in the 2009 guide to completely off the list this year. This is the biggest fall from grace I can ever recall.
• Other notables from the 2009 guide that didn't make the cut this year: Marcel's, the restaurant that topped the Zagat food ratings this year, was dropped from Sietsema's guide after earning three stars last year.  Other three-star performers from last year that lost their spots: Present, Corduroy, The Source by Wolfgang Puck, Proof, and Zaytinya. (The Zaytinya snub is understandable.)
• Other sacred cows that got tipped this year: 2Amys, Four Sisters, and even 2941, which earned three-and-a-half stars from Sietsema last year.
• Citronelle regained its fourth star after losing it two years ago. Michel Richard's flagship moved up to three-and-a-half stars last year, but made a full recovery this year.
• Michael Landrum, despite opening the high-profile Ray's the Steaks at East River, has no restaurants on the list. Not even Ray's Hell Burger.
• Birch & Barley, Estadio, Kushi, Pizzeria Orso, and Masala Art all made impressive debuts, scoring either three or two-and-a-half stars.
• The Red Hook Lobster Pound truck made an appearance on Sietsema's list, the first time street food has made the cut. It's a very forward-thinking move if you ask me.
• Similarly, Sietsema gave a huge boost to the craft cocktail movement by awarding three stars to the Columbia Room, mixologist Derek Brown's boozy hideaway, which doesn't even serve formal meals. (Which, frankly, makes me scratch my head why the equally inventive ChurchKey didn't make it.)
• Sietsema ventured into Baltimore Sun territory by including Cindy Wolf's tasting-menu operation, Charleston, from Charm City.
• And, in what must be a very satisfying moment for Little Mexico, Taqueria La Placita also made its debut on the Post list. I'd like to think Y&H helped influence that decision.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Well, the new 2011 Washington D.C./Baltimore survey just hit the streets today, and guess what? Makoto is nowhere to be found among the Top 5 restaurants in terms of food quality. Take a peek at the top finishers in the food category:

1. Marcel's

2. Inn at Little Washington

3. Komi

4. CityZen

5. Rasika

The victory is a first for Marcel's, Robert Wiedmaier's French-Belgian restaurant in the West End, and he deserves the recognition. But I wonder what happened to Makoto since the last survey? Did Zagat unearth a ballot-stuffing operation on the part of Makoto? Did diners suddenly turn against their perennial favorite? Have the media influenced diner voting?

So many questions. I'll try to answer some in the coming days. Or at least gather more opinions on the matter.

If you want to understand the difference between Meaza and every other Ethiopian joint in the area, just look down at your table. That spongy pancake dimpled with about a zillion little moonlike craters? You know the name: injera. Owner Meaza Zemedu makes her own in house, which, in a certain sense, makes Meaza the Ethiopian equivalent of Restaurant Eve, CityZen, Palena, and other high-end temples of gastronomy that bake their own loaves. These restaurants all understand you don’t put your bread service in the hands of inferiors. Zemedu, like any quality kneader, doesn’t mix just a single dough. One of her flatbreads is prepared with wheat flour, another other with traditional teff. The latter starts sour on the palate and resolves into an exotic nuttiness, so complex and so unlike every other injera that graces tables around Little Ethiopia. It’s worth the extra $2. The bread, like a generous squeeze of lemon, adds an acid note to almost everything you eat at Meaza. Try it with Zemedu’s generous mound of raw kitfo, as hot as its smoky firebrick color suggests but tempered with loads of soft Ethiopian butter. Or try it with her doro wat, as dark as mole, which is just about the only local version of the so-called Ethiopian national dish that deserves the honorific. Or try it with one of the dishes that hasn’t yet entered the regular rotation along 9th Street NW, such as Zemedu’s slabs of raw cow round served with awaze sauce, which is evidence enough that dining at Meaza may be the closest thing Washington residents have to tearing flatbread together at a small, ceremonial dinner in Addis Ababa.

5700 Columbia Pike, Falls Church (703) 820-2870

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

I mean, Andrés had all the momentum. He just was the subject of a glowing 60 Minutes profile and he had just told WaPo's Tom Sietsema he was opening two restaurants in Las Vegas. C'mon, if that isn't Outstanding Chef material, what is?

Apparently, Tom Colicchio is. The Top Chef host took home the top honors last night at the Lincoln Center ceremonies. Colicchio was about the closest thing to a D.C. winner, given his constant presence in our restaurants as he films the next season of Top Chef in the District.

The real D.C. area contingent didn't fare so well. Not only did Cook and Monis lose in their respective categories, but all three area toques nominated for the Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic medal lost out to Jeff Michaud of Osteria in Philadelphia. I'm sorry, I've eaten at Osteria, and it's not in the same class as Restaurant Eve (whose chef Cathal Armstrong was up for the medal), nor even as consistently good as another local nominee, Peter Pastan, at the likewise Italian-leaning Obelisk.

What gives? I think the New York Times hit upon a legitimate point when it noted that Beard Foundation voters appear to be heavily influenced by celebrity chef restaurants (and their PR machines that constantly generate more favorable press). Marc Vetri, the co-owner of Osteria, is arguably Philly's biggest celebrity chef. Armstrong certainly rates on the celebrity chef meter too, but in ways I can't clearly define in this post-Beard Award haze, I don't think his star is in the same orbit as Vetri's. At least not on a national scale. Maybe I'm wrong. I'd love to hear your take, Y&H Nation.

One of the Beard Award highlights for Washingtonians had to be Carol Blymire's work on the foundation's live-blog page. You can review her posts from the event here.

As noted yesterday, the D.C. area fared far better in Sunday night's journalism awards, which might seem a little strange given we're often surveying the food and restaurant scene around us.

Regardless if the locals won or lost, Y&H passes along his congratulations to all the nominees. You can read the full list of winners here.

Photo courtesy of the Beard Foundation