• Chocolate City Beer Launch Party at RFD (from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m.) – We have another new production brewery in the District! Chocolate City Beer founders Jay Irizarry, Ben Matz, Brian Flanagan and Don Parker, are hosting a launch party in the back room at RFD. D.C.'s newest local brews will be $4 a pint and DJ O'Scool will be spinning tunes until close. Best part? No cover
• Local Cask Night at District ChopHouse & Brewery (from 6 to 9 p.m.) – Slurp some fresh cask ale from the following local breweries: Rock Bottom Bethesda, Gordon Biersch D.C., DuClaw, Franklin's Restaurant & Brewery of Hyattsville, Oliver Breweries and Heavy Seas of Baltimore, Capitol City Brewing Company, Mad Fox of Falls Church, Great American Restaurants / Sweetwater Tavern of Sterling, and of course, the District ChopHouse. A $40 ticket gets you hors d'oeuvres, a take-home tasting glass, and unlimited beer. Reservations are required.
• Oskar Blues Founder Meet & Greet and Blues Band Night at Bier Baron (from 5 to 8 p.m.) - The Bier Baron will feature a variety of styles from Colorado's Oskar Blues Brewery and a live blues band. Founder Dale Katechis, a musician himself, might even get on stage. If not, you can still count on him for free Oskar Blues merch.
• Elysian Brewing Welcome Party at ChurchKey (from 6 to 10 p.m.) - This launch party for Elysian Brewing Company from Seattle, Washington, welcomes the highly decorated brewery and its beers to D.C. With names like Sextacula, Rosemary's Baby, and Asphalt Dunkel, how can you not be curious about the beer?
• Bell's Beer & Cheese Pairing at Little Miss Whiskey's (from 7 to 9 p.m.) - Join regional Bell's Brewery representative Derek Zombrowski for a paired tasting menu featuring six cheeses matched with a selection of Bell's fine brews. The price is $30 per person for all six pairings and you can show up and order anytime between 7 and 9 p.m.
• Starr Hill Beer 101 Class at Radius (from 5 to 7 p.m.) and Iron Horse Taproom (from 8 to 10 p.m.) - Take a introductory course in beer with Starr Hill Brewing Company owner and brewmaster Mark Thompson. Featured beers include Northern Lights IPA, Boxcar Pumpkin Porter, Love Hefe Weizen, Jomo Lager, Double Platinum IPA, Festie, Starr Hill Amber. Thompson will be giving away knowledge as well as brewery schwag.
• Allagash, DC Brau & Schlafly Draft Night and Patio Party at Meridian Pint (from 5 to 11:30 p.m.) – Meridian Pint is devoting an evening, and 24 draft lines, to three of its favorite breweries, Allagash, DC Brau, and Schlafly. In all the way from St. Louis, Schlafly Tap Room chef Andy White will be on the patio grilling up treats for the festivities.
• Lagunitas Tap Takeover at The Black Squirrel (from 5 to 11 p.m.) – Five drafts and several bottles from California's Lagunitas Brewing Company will be poured along side special food pairings, including half-price burgers. The line-up includes bitter beauties like Hop Stoopid Ale, IPA Maximus, The Kronic Rich Copper Ale, and Classic IPA.
  
• Flying Dog Night & Hole-in-One Contest at H Street Country Club (from 6 to 10 p.m.) – Flying Dog Brewery of Frederick, Maryland, invites you to don your popped collars and goofy plaid pants for a night of games and pints. Win some beery prizes for your golf skills. Fore!

For more information on D.C. Beer Week events, check out my D.C. Beer Events Calendar below, as well as the Washington City Paper event page and the official DC Beer Week site hosted by DCBeer.com.

Send submissions for the D.C. Beer Events calendar to thelagerheads@gmail.com.

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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

Your trusted Y&H beer bloggers will be posting daily picks starting next week, but below is a complete list of known events. We expect to get wind of several more before festivities officially begin this weekend. For the most up-to-date info on D.C. Beer Week, visit DCBeerWeek.com or if you're Googley enough follow our D.C. Beer Events Calendar where you can click on any event for location, time, price and menu details.

FRIDAY, August 20

• Nerd Nite DC and Rock & Barley Concert at Rock & Roll Hotel (Lectures 6:30pm, Concert 10:00pm, $10 for one event or $16 for both)

SUNDAY, August 22

• Rare Beer Brunch at Pizzeria Paradiso (12:00-2:00pm, $60)
• Craft Beer Cruise on the Cherry Blossom (6:00-9:00pm, $70)
• Great Lakes & German Style Tasting at Little Miss Whiskey's Golden Dollar (8:00-10:00pm, $20)

MONDAY, August 23

• Victory Brewing Company Rarities at Room 11 (5:00-10:00pm)
• Great Lakes Take-Over at Meridian Pint (5:00pm-Close, $5 Pints)
• Opposite Night & Homebrew Swap at Breadsoda (6:00-10:00pm, Free 8oz. beer with each pint purchased)
• Oliver Ales Cask Night with Brewmaster Stephen Jones at The Big Hunt (6:00pm)
• Belgian vs. American Beer Dinner at Granville Moore's (7:00-9:30pm, $70)
• Three Course Beer & Food Pairing at Dino's (7:00-10:00pm, $39)
• Burgers & Beer in the Bus at Trusty's

TUESDAY, August 24

• Adam Stein Beer Dinner at Little Miss Whiskey's Golden Dollar (6:00-8:00pm, $20)
• Brisket & Brews with He'Brew Ales at Star and Shamrock (6:00-9:00pm)
• Brooklyn Brawl Beer & Cheese Tasting at Kramerbooks/Afterwords Cafe (6:00-10:00pm)
• "Local" Beer Night at The Big Hunt (6:00pm-Close)
• Harpoon Pints for Putts at H Street Country Club (6:30-9:30pm)
• Racer 5 IPA & Dangerously Delicious Pies at Justin's Cafe (6:30-11:30pm, $10 for pie-beer combo)
• Vintage Chimay Tasting at Belga Café (6:30-8:30pm, $59)
• Dogfish Ancient Ales Tasting at The Brickskeller (7:00-9:00pm, $35)
• Pizza Night with 21st Amendment Brewing at 18th Amendment (7:00-9:00pm)
• Smuttynose Beer Dinner at Liberty Tree (7:00-9:00pm, $40)
• Oliver's "Brewmaster Presents" with Stephen Jones at Meridian Pint

WEDNESDAY, August 25

• Heavy Seas Cask Night at ChurchKey (6:00-9:00pm)
• Troegs Night at The Red and the Black (6:00-9:00pm)
• Sierra Nevada Dinner at Thunder Burger (6:00-9:00pm, $40)
• Great Lakes Beer and BBQ at Capitol Lounge (6:00-10:00pm, $45)
• An Evening with Troegs at Commonwealth (6:00-10:00pm)
• Speakeasy DC at The Big Hunt (6:30-10:00pm, Performance $15)
• Meet the Brewer Night at District Chophouse (7:00-9:00pm)
• Lagunitas Dinner at DC Bread & Brew (7:00-9:30pm, $50)
• D.C. Beer Week Night at Nationals Park (7:00-9:30pm)
• (Flying Dog) Bitch vs. (Stone Arrogant) Bastard at The Big Hunt (8:00-10:00pm, $35)
• Ommegang's Belgian Bonanza at Meridian Pint

THURSDAY, August 26

• Rogue Ales Oyster Fest at The Reef (5:00-10:00pm)
• DC Brau Owners Meet & Greet at The Big Hunt (5:30-7:30pm)
• Heavy Seas Cask Night at Thunder Burger (6:00-9:00pm)
• Schmaltz Brewing at Distrtict Pour House (6:00-8:00pm)
• Schlafly Dinner with Founder Dan Kopman at Meridian Pint (7:00-10:00pm, $65)
• Reissdorf Kolsch Firkin at Biergarten Haus (7:00-9:00pm)
• Beer vs Beer Braugust Celebration at Breadsoda

FRIDAY, August 27

• Duvel Happy Hour at Belga Café (4:00-6:00pm)
• Beer Week Wrap-Up Specials at Meridian Pint (5:00-8:00pm)
• Michigan Beer Bash at The Big Hunt (7:30pm-Close)

SATURDAY, August 28

• Firkin Spectacular at RFD (7:00-9:30pm, $40)

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In addition to the usual happy hours, brewer meet and greets, and pairing dinners, this year's line-up includes a beer cruise on the Potomac, a craft beer night at Nationals Park, and events that pair beer with everything from pies to brisket to indie rock. The schedule is heavy on mid-week events and H Street corridor venues, likely because those bar owners are within arm's reach of the week's main organizers, but it is not likely to stay that way as other craft beer championing bars and restaurants across the city firm up their plans.

For those of you dying for a sneak preview, below is a tentative list of events so far. The line-up is nowhere near complete, but this little tease should be enough to get your saliva going and your glass-grasping hand ready. For updates and further details, you can keep checking back here on Y&H, add our D.C. Beer Events Calendar to your arsenal of Google gadgets, or visit D.C. Beer Week's Facebook page. (Just don't mind the messed up dates. No one said the organizers were math geniuses...)

Friday, Aug 20

• D.C. Beer Week Kickoff: DC Nerd Nite and Rock & Barley Concert at Rock & Roll Hotel

Sunday, Aug 22

• Craft Beer Cruise on the Cherry Blossom

Monday, Aug 23

• Oliver Ales Cask Night at The Big Hunt
• Belgian vs. American Beer Dinner at Granville Moore's

Tuesday, Aug 24

• Brisket & Brews with He'Brew Ales at Star and Shamrock
• Butternut Pints for Putts at H Street Country Club
• Racer 5 IPA & Dangerously Delicious Pies at Justin's Cafe
• Vintage Chimay Tasting at Belga Café
• 21st Amendment Brewing at 18th Amendment

Wednesday, Aug 25

• D.C. Beer Week Night at Nationals Park
• Heavy Seas Cask Night at ChurchKey
• Troegs Night at the Red and the Black
• Speakeasy DC/(Flying Dog) Bitch vs. (Stone Arrogant) Bastard at The Big Hunt
• Great Lakes Beer and BBQ at Capitol Lounge
• Meet the Brewer Night at District Chophouse
• Sierra Nevada Dinner at Thunder Burger

Thursday, Aug 26

• Heavy Seas Cask Night at Thunder Burger
• Schmaltz Brewing at the Pour House
• Beer vs Beer Braugust Celebration at Breadsoda

Friday, Aug 27 & Saturday, Aug 28

• Michigan Beer Bash at The Big Hunt

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Click on charts to enlarge.

The Shitheads convened Saturday night for the first of what we hope will be numerous Tasting Clubs in which we compare and rate (mostly) local products in the same category. Since lead Shithead Jim conceived the club, he deemed that we'd launch our endeavor by passing judgment on salsas.

It was a good and easy choice, and I say that despite the fact that Jim, Shithead Carrie, and I have, in the past, served as guinea pigs judges at the annual Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival — and have suffered the gastrointestinal effects of the same. But there we were, six Shitheads stuffing our faces with chips slathered in hot sauce until our taste buds were reduced to ashes. We had a ball.

We also had a lot of pumpkin ice cream to cool our tongues.

I'm not sure how much we ultimately accomplished with our debut Tasting Club. Opinions were all over the place on our highly random collection of salsas, and Shithead Lou refrained from sampling any salsa with cilantro, since he has an aversion to the soapy-tasting herb. Plus, we were drinking beer, tequila, and pumpkin martinis, which couldn't have helped our concentration.

Jim brought salsas from Canales Deli at Eastern Market, H Street Country Club, Super Tacos, Rosa Mexicano, and Mixtec. Shithead Lou brought salsa from Cactus Cantina as well as commercial sauces from Pepper Dog and Pain Is Good (the Jamaican-style, which is listed on the chart above as "ringer.") I visited the 14th Street corridor and bought salsas from Taqueria Distrito Federal and La Molienda as well as a commercial Goya sauce from the Panam supermarket.

Notes Shithead Jim via e-mail, after the fact:

I included salsas that are not commercially available because I wanted to answer the question, Who in this city makes a decent salsa? Because I have found so many salsas here so disappointing, I generally just make my own. By disappointing, I mean either bland or heatless, but many heatless. (Flavor is the low bar; matching it with some heat — as they do in salsa capitals like New Mexico and Texas — is the thing.)

"Decent," by the way, was the operative word. None of the salsas received from me (or anyone else, I think) the top grade of 5. I feel bad that some important salsas were not included, most notably those from Cantina Mexicana, which I think makes a commendable (which is to say, both flavorful and, dammit, at least hot-ish) table salsa and Taqueria Nacional. But the point wasn't to include every salsa in town. Neither I nor anyone else can round up everything. Nor is that the point. There is nothing definitive per se about The Tasting Club. It is just a chance for like-minded friends to get together, have a good time, and begin — not end — the search for good locally made products.

With that said, the winner in the red sauce category was the one from Canales Deli, a fresh salsa with lots of chopped up tomatoes and onions. It earned top honors despite the fact that my first two bites tasted as if I had eaten rotten vegetables. To paraphrase the Witch Scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: It got better. But I still had to downgrade for those initial bites. (Incidentally, the blue bar on the charts represents the mathematical average, based on a 1 to 5 rating system, while the black line represents the variance between highest and lowest scores.)

Distrito Federal's flavorful cooked-tomatillo sauce won the green category, which required me to call owner Luis Marroquin, who promised to share the recipe if he won. He didn't know that he was dealing with a food writer when he sold me the salsas, so when I phoned him today, Marroquin was slightly taken aback. But he still agreed to share the recipe, which is as follows (for approximately one cup of green salsa):

5 tomatillos

1/2 medium-sized onion, thickly sliced

4 jalapeños, chopped (and seeded if you want less heat)

3/4 bunch of cilantro, cut off about 2 and 1/2 inches of the stalks, then chop the rest

1 clove garlic, coarsely chopped

1 tsp salt

Place all the above ingredients in a sauce pan filled with 1 cup water. Cook the ingredients for about 15 minutes over medium heat or until the tomatillos turn a dull green. Remove from the heat and let cool for about 15 minutes.

Take all the solids from the sauce pan and put them in a blender. Then pour about 1/2 cup of the cooked liquid into the blender and puree. Add more liquid until you achieve the consistency you desire.

Garnish the finished sauce with fresh Mexican cheese and serve with tortilla chips, homemade if possible.

Thanks to Shithead Lou for compiling the Excel charts.

The dining space, located on the ground floor near the kitchen, will accommodate small parties for a multi-course tasting menu not available anywhere else at H Street Country Club, says owner Joe Englert. Cardoso, who has worked previously at Cashion's Eat Place and Jackie's, will offer an ever-changing menu of Mexican and Latin American small plates, which the diners can pair with either wine or tequila.

And in keeping with H Street's concept, these private diners will also have access to their own Wii games of golf and tennis.

So when will the Maxi Bar open?

"June 2013," jokes Englert, a reference to H Street's endless delays.

Englert actually hopes to have the Maxi Bar open by September.

Honest Abe was attacked again.

If you'll recall, back in May when H Street Country Club first opened, I tried to warn owner Joe Englert that several holes were vulnerable to attack from drunk duffers. He brushed it off like so much pet hair, saying the statuary on his putt-putt course, particularly the gruesome dead presidents on Hole No. 5, could withstand the punishment of Satan's army.

Well, apparently not.

Just weeks after opening, some asshole broke the hands off the rotting skeleton of President Lincoln — and that's not even the worst of it. "Someone tried to skull fuck Abraham Lincoln," Englert notes. I'd prefer not to explain how this could be done to artist Lee T. Wheeler's statue, but let's just say there's a wide-diameter bullet hole in Honest Abe's skull.

Englert's shocked, too, which is saying something for him.

Whether due to unwanted advances toward dead presidents or just poor design, H Street Country Club's owners have been forced to alter several holes since opening day, Englert says. All but one of the dead presidents, for instance, have now been moved outside the coffin that outlines Hole No. 5.

Hole No. 4, in which you putt across a glassy Reflecting Pool and up the stairs of the Lincoln Memorial, has been altered to include AstroTurf on the previously wooden entrance to the monument. And with a simple rerouting of a drain pipe, Hole No. 3 no longer sends your ball bouncing across the golf course when you putt up the ramp of the National Cathedral.

Other changes are coming, too, Englert says, including adding gray AstroTurf to Hole. No. 7 in which you now have to put across concrete and between the legs of a D.C. meter reader.

It's just Englert's style to adapt, he says. "I will change at the drop of a hat," Englert crows.

So Englert? Can I say it now? I told you so.

"You didn't say that. You said Michael Jackson was going to live to be 100," Englert responds.

As you can imagine, the news of Spike Mendelsohn's eviction took center stage this week on the Y&H blog. No other item drew even a quarter of the readers. But now, there's good news on the Spike front: The chef and his erstwhile roomie have started to pay back their landlord, with the promise of a full accounting soon. While we wait for that, check out the most-read posts of the week:

1. Spike Mendelsohn Evicted from His Capitol Hill Rental House
2. H Street Country Club Swings Open Tomorrow
3. D.C.'s Unofficial Beer Week (Thank You, Savor)
4. Atlantic Food Declares D.C. a Great Food City
5. Spike's New Pizzeria Is Coming to Cap Hill. But First: Souvlaki!
   

Because Y&H has developed a warm, personal relationship with Joe Englert, Mr. Fatlas, I mean Mr. Atlas, District invited me to a sneak-preview of the long, long, long-awaited H Street Country Club on Sunday night, and I have just one thing to say: You'll never get a tee time.

This place is going to have longer lines than Ben's Chili Bowl during the inauguration. Everyone will want to putt-putt their ball between the bloated legs of a D.C. parking meter-reader who's exposing just a little too much butt crack. Or across the Reflecting Pool and up the stairs of the Lincoln Memorial. Or between the decomposing bodies of several dead presidents. Or around a multi-car pileup on the Beltway. Or....oh, hell, you get the point. This is miniature golf as imagined by the Coen Brothers.

Come to think of it, some people might even visit H Street just to sample the Tex-Mex menu designed by Ann Cashion, founder of Taqueria Nacional. Well, maybe.

Despite my utter delight at the playfulness of H Street Country Club — and its willingness to tweak D.C. and its institutions, including the never-say-die Marion Barry — I still think the place is going to have issues. Congestion being one of them. I can foresee several spots on the upstairs playground where customers will be bumping into each other with regularity — or even poking plate runners in the face with their putters. I also think Englert better have a budget to fix those K Street lawyers on Hole No. 3 and those dead presidents on Hole No. 5 who are bound to take a severe beating from indoor duffers.

I relayed some of my thoughts to Englert during a phone call today. He was touched by my concern. He also dismissed them all out of hand, including the notion that anyone could destroy the statuary designed by artist Lee T. Wheeler, who apparently built his sculptures out of the same substance that the auto industry uses to make cars.

That subject put to rest — at least for Englert — I raised the issue of a certain gargoyle hovering over Wheeler's links-oriented version of the Washington National Cathedral. It resembles a certain nightlife mogul, but with devil horns protruding from his noggin.

"It's a recurring joke," Englert tells Y&H. Wheeler "puts some [demonic] caricature of me in all the bars I own."

So there you have it. It seems that you can now play the Joe Englert version of Where's Waldo? in every watering hole that the mogul owns. Let's begin compiling the list of demonic Englerts now, starting with this one:

More pics from H Street Country Club: