If every restaurant in town lost business due to Saturday's historic  snow storm, then Equinox suffered a double whammy over the weekend: Todd and Ellen Gray's regional American gem on Connecticut Avenue took it on the chin from two elements, fire and water. A fire hit the place early Friday morning, followed shortly thereafter by [...]

The ceiling to the private dining and wine room was destroyed. Ellen Kassoff Gray believes three things prevented the early morning fire at Equinox from destroying the well-regarded restaurant: an in-house fire alarm system, the weekly degreasing of the kitchen's hood, and an alert security guard who smelled smoke around 3 a.m. Just the weekly [...]

This is sort of like reporting that, new flash, no one was killed today in Congress, but I figured my wife, Carrie, can't be the only person who heard this item on WAMU this morning. She called to tell me there was a fire at the Mandarin Oriental, which houses one of the city's finest [...]