For nearly a month, the General Store, chef Gillian Clark's home-spun Silver Spring restaurant with the killer fried chicken, has been operating as a take-out joint only. Montgomery County apparently wanted Clark and her partner, Robin Smith, to have more dedicated parking spaces before issuing them a certificate of occupancy.

This is depressing. The No. 1 item for the week was last week's celebrity-sighting post from the inauguration, which I'll dismiss faster than Lindsay Lohan from her latest rehab session. So starting with the No. 2 most popular post, here's this week's Top 5: The Obamas Hire Their Own Personal Chef, After All Urban Bar-B-Que [...]

Back in late 2007, I wrote about a column about all the fussy signs at Gillian Clark's former restaurant, Colorado Kitchen, and how they sometimes caused diners to rebel, kid-like, against the rules. Well, yesterday when I stopped by Clark's new joint, the General Store in Silver Spring, the chef and her partner, Robin Smith, [...]

The wife and I stopped by the General Store late on Sunday night, around 9, hoping against hope that chef/owner Gillian Clark might still have some fried chicken and collards available for take out. She didn't. She had sold the last of her birds about three hours earlier, so we had to satisfy our General [...]