I'm not sure how I've become the City Paper's gossip columnist, but given that I've already waded into the shallow end of the reporting pool with this post and that post, I should learn to accept it. If you're not bored with it yet—and given what Google Analytics shows me, you're not—here's the latest sampling of celebrity dining:

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dined at Michel Richard Citronelle on Saturday night.
• Violinist Itzhak Perlman and actor Christopher Lloyd chowed down at Central Michel Richard on Monday night.
• Tonight Show bandleader Kevin Eubanks supped at Central on Tuesday.
• Bruce Springsteen (you know him, right?) put aside his working-man persona long enough to pull up a seat at the Blue Duck Tavern on Sunday. NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams chose the Duck on Sunday, too.
• Denzel Washington and Joey Simmons from Run-D.M.C. were spotted at the lounge at the Park Hyatt Washington on Monday.
• Dustin Hoffman wolfed down a three-egg omelet and some cheeseburger sliders at Clyde's of Georgetown on Monday.
• Not to start any rumors, but both actor Ray Romano and R&B diva Alicia Keys were seen at Sonoma on Monday—although, alas, separately.
• And finally, Tyra Banks slinked into Zola for a bite on Inauguration Day.

Image by Flickr user Andrea Sartorati

The Wall Street Journal's Eric Felten, a jazz trombonist who happens to write the killer "How's Your Drink?" column, combed through some 19th century cookbooks to find a decent recipe for Orange Punch, the libation that nearly toppled Andrew Jackson's presidency even before it was a day old. OK, maybe I exaggerate.

Writes Felten:

"A monstrous crowd of people is in the city," Daniel Webster wrote on Inauguration Day, 1829. "I never saw any thing like it before. Persons have come five hundred miles to see General Jackson; and they really seem to think that the country is rescued from some dreadful danger."

After the oath and his address, the old general climbed on his horse and headed for the White House. As one witness told it: "The President was literally pursued by a motley concourse of people, riding, running helter-skelter, striving who should first gain admittance into the executive mansion, where it was understood that refreshments were to be distributed."

The unruly bunch pushed into the White House, clods standing on the silk-upholstered furniture in muddy boots to get a glimpse of the new president (who was trying not to be crushed by his well-wishers). "The reign of King Mob seemed triumphant," wrote Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, appalled. When the stewards finally delivered buckets full of Orange Punch, the crowd lunged for the pails, overturning furniture, smashing the glassware, and — perhaps worst of all — spilling the punch itself. Quick-thinking waiters lugged the remaining barrels of punch out onto the White House lawn, enticing Jackson's admirers to take the party outside.

Felten didn't care much for the Orange Punch recipes he read—"it isn't anything I'd trample White House furniture to get at," he writes—so he devised his own version of the sweet rum-and-brandy punch. You can get Felten's doctored up recipe here.

Image by Flickr user tostadophoto

The great thing about the blogosphere? Other people can now do your work—and you get all the reading traffic. Hey, it works for Huffington Post! Sorry, back to the topic. Below is a collection of inauguration dining guides compiled by bloggers, journalists, advocacy groups, and God knows who else.

• DC Gastronome has a round up of 10 or so inaugural options.
• Campus Progress gives us the low down on ACKC's ChocObama, a mint-infused bar, as well as other goodies.
• Washingtonian has produced a pretty decent guide to inaugural eats (though it kinda runs out of steam at the end of the alphabet).
• The Going Out Gurus break down the breakfast options for Inauguration Day.
• Capital Spice has something for the tourists: a guide to D.C.'s historic eating establishments.
• VegDC.com reports that, among other vegetarian-friendly options, Sticky Fingers Bakery in Columbia Heights will be offering "an animal-friendly" Chicago-style hot dog.
• Metromix has compiled a list of cheap places to eat for those who have already shelled out too much for inaugural housing.
• OpenTable, of course, has a long list of restaurants doing something for the inauguration. It may be as little as selling you a bottle of wine for $44.
• And, finally, your dedicated Young & Hungry scribe offers his take on the inaugural eating madness and gives you some practical stuff, too: places serving special inaugural pizzas as well as places serving something a little sweeter. 

Image by Flickr user jurvetson

As you might have guessed, Inauguration Day/Obama posts captured most of the top spots:

1. Inauguration Eats: An Early Look at Obama-Related Food and Drink
2. Liberal Cause Alert: Protect Seals by Avoiding Canadian Seafood
3. New York Food Snobs: They Love Us. They Love Us Not.
4. Obama Doesn't Know What a Half-Smoke Is? So What. Do You?
5. And, as predicted: Where Will Halle Berry Be Dining During the Inauguration?

Image by Flickr user tostie14

So don't fool yourselves that some of the city's finest restaurants—the very ones hyped by everyone for the past week—will have a spot for you and your guests. They won't. But you can still eat well. Below are three places, each well-regarded by critics and diners alike, that still have spots available for Tuesday night. (Or they did yesterday when I checked—sorry, I've been out of commission for 24 hours.)

• PS 7's has a number of seats available, which is great, because you'll have a chance to taste one of the most creative chefs working in town. Peter Smith has put together a special, multi-course tasting menu for the inauguration; it will include mini-Chicago hot dogs (much like the mini-dogs he already serves but with the standard Windy City condiments), Chicago thin-style pizza with spicy diablo sauce, Illinois pan-seared trout, and a slow-roasted pork loin with a sauce of ginger and crack seeds. Crack seed, for those who don't know (including me before I talked to Smith), is the name given to a variety of preserved fruits popular in Hawaii; Smith ate the snacks as a kid in Hawaii, where his Army father was stationed. 
• Vidalia was booked up for Inauguration Day, but things quickly changed when a bunch of diners got their hands on ball tickets, says chef R.J. Cooper. "We had a lot of large parties that have canceled within the last three days because they were celebrities or politicians that were invited to balls," he says. The only problem with trying to book a reservation at Vidalia is that you won't be able to reach the restaurant by car; the streets around the place will be closed, Cooper says. You'll need to take the Metro or the bus. It should be worth the hassle. Cooper has constructed a build-your-own inaugural tasting menu from a wide number of Vidalia dishes, including smoked Carolina mountain trout, a sweet onion crepe, Rhode Island skate wing, Wagyu short ribs, and rabbit saddle. But he's also put together a killer bar menu, available all day, that features chicken fried steak, a charcuterie board, a deep-dish "Obama Mama Pizza," and Cooper's very first ground-beef hamburger (on onion focaccia bread) at Vidalia. "It's food you like to eat when you're tipsy," he says.
• Ardeo, unlike the other restaurants in Ashok Bajaj's group such as the Oval Room or 701, has tables available on inauguration night. That has more to do with Ardeo's location in Cleveland Park, far away from the downtown crush, than with the quality of the cooking. Alex McWilliams was hired as chef last year, and from what I've tasted, he's well worth putting on your list for a visit. I'm tempted, in fact, to call McWilliams' wild striped bass with sunchoke puree and oil-cured olives the dish of the winter. Bajaj says that McWilliams will have a few surprises on the menu for Inauguration Day diners.

Photo by Charles Steck

Rustico Executive Chef Frank Morales has turned to Chicago’s hearty (if not heart-stopping at more than 400 calories per slice) deep-dish pizza traditions for inspiration. He’s created a small line of deep-dish pies, including one with housemade Chicago-style sausage. (Never mind that Obama’s favorite pie comes from Italian Fiesta Pizzeria in Hyde Park, which serves a decidedly thin-crust round.)

Building his own deep-dish pies was not exactly a labor of love for Morales, who prefers the thin, Neapolitan-style pizzas that emphasize dough over toppings. Chicago-style is “sort of the opposite,” he says. “It’s a pizza that’s overly topped.” Nonetheless, the chef invested countless hours in researching Chicago deep-dish—only to realize that he couldn’t really afford to make the real, real thing. True deep-dish pizza can be more than two inches thick and require 45 minutes or more of cooking time; diners just won’t wait that long for pizza at the Alexandria gastropub.

“It takes about 11 minutes to drink a beer in a noisy place and 14 to drink one in a quieter place,” says Morales. “So it would be several rounds” before they got their pie.

You might think that’d be a selling point, but not in this time-crunched market. So Morales has produced smaller pies that still adhere to tradition without making clock-watching Washingtonians wait so long that they start posting angry messages on Yelp.com from their iPhones. The deep-dish pies are available this week.

Other chefs are turning out rounds for the inauguration, too. Enzo Fargione, chef at Teatro Goldoni, has created a tongue-in-cheek line of presidential pies, including the Jimmy Carter (a chef's choice pizza, because Carter couldn't decide which way to part his hair), the Franklin Delano Roosevelt (an everything pizza for a man who was elected to four terms), and the James K. Polk (which comes with a much-needed glass of white wine since no "refreshments" were served at receptions during his presidency).

Finally, Vidalia chef (and former Windy City resident) R.J. Cooper has created the Obama Mama Pizza, a six-inch deep-dish pie stuffed with smoked ham, pineapple, pepperoni, buffalo mozzarella, and red sauce. It'll be available only at the bar at the downtown restaurant.

Image by Flickr user bucklava

I'm no Reliable Source, and the City Paper  is not exactly known for its celebrity gossip. But these are trying times, and the Young & Hungry blog could use the hits that will no doubt come his way once he types "Halle Berry" into the meta-tag field.

• Berry is supposed to be dining Monday night at Teatro Goldoni, as part of a private party at the K Street institution, now under the creative command of chef Enzo Fargione. According to Fargione, the party will also include the likes of Spike Lee, Ron Howard, and Susan Sarandon. But you autograph seekers should just cool your jets. All the celebs will be safely ensconced in private rooms, and there will be security at the front door. You could nurse a few drinks at the bar, and sample a few plates from Fargione's dynamite bar menu, in hopes that you might still be there when the famous folks walk out the door. But that's as close as you're gonna get.
• NewsHour host Jim Lehrer and Joel L. Klein, chancellor of New York City's public schools, will be dining at Ardeo on Inauguration Day, presumably separately. They'll have a chance to sample the cooking of Alex McWilliams, a promising chef who took over the kitchen late last year.
• Washington Post Chairman Donald Graham is planning to eat at the Oval Room on the big day. Lucky him. Tony Conte, I think, is the most underrated chef in town.

Oh, and just to mess with the Google search engines: Halle Berry, Halle Berry, Halle Berry.

Image by Flickr user tostie14

Obama's inauguration has given the New York Times and one of its former minions plenty of opportunity to opine on the District's ever-evolving restaurant scene.

First came this polite nod on Sunday, in which the once Gray Lady dubbed D.C. one of "44 Places to Go in 2009." The District's main selling point? "[O]ne of the best reasons to visit the nation's capital this year is its suddenly lively food scene." The piece mentioned Michel Richard, of course, as if he just moved to town.

Then came today's long feature by Kim Severson, in which the reporter profiles our burgeoning neighborhood restaurant scenes in Columbia Heights, Shaw, Petworth, and H Street NE. "Washington neighborhoods that for years were considered too dangerous or too poor for a viable sit-down restaurant," Severson writes, "are suddenly entertaining quite a few."

You could argue that the piece implied that the quality of the restaurants in each 'hood is higher than the reality. I mean, you can count the ones worth visting on one hand (well, if you had six fingers): CommonWealth, RedRocks, Dr. Granville Moore's, W Domku, Cork, and Marvin. You could also argue that the Times regurgitated that tired old cliche about the divide between official D.C. and neighborhood D.C., a divide that can be as porous as the U.S.-Mexican border. But still, the feature did single out a few of the city's best neighborhood restaurants, which no doubt will help business at those places in the coming days.

Now in between those two articles, Politico ran this piece of barely serviceable service journalism about D.C.'s Top 10 restaurants. Well, it was supposed to be about D.C.'s Top 10 restaurants, but poor, beleagured Marian Burros, a former Times food writer, could find only eight worth hyping. Writes Burros:

One thing, though, has not changed. Having lived in both New York and Washington for the past 27 years, I find it is still true that only a handful of restaurants here — Restaurant Eve and The Inn at Little Washington (tied for best), CityZen and Citronelle, when Michel Richard is in residence — can compete with New York’s finest.

There are others that are generally very good, and many of those have good to great wine lists, but finding the area’s 10 best restaurants took some digging. And when faced with having to rate them, the top 10 list shrank to eight.

Burros' velvet-wrapped hatchet job caused at least one indignant local foodie to write to Politico. Mike Bober, the author of the Capital Spice blog, shared his letter to the editor with me. It reads:

I was almost as disappointed by Marian Burros' "Hot Tables" article in your special inaugural issue as Ms. Burros is with the state of dining in Washington relative to that of New York. 

Her inability to set aside her Big Apple bias in a piece where it had little to no relevance ruined an otherwise insightful article. 

What use do visitors to DC for this momentous event have with the knowledge that "only a handful of restaurants here...can compete with New York's finest?"  Perhaps if she had been looking for longer than a month, she might have been able to find 10 truly enjoyable experiences, instead of lamenting her inability to find more than 8 that reminded her of New York's premier establishments. 

As someone who works in politics and writes a local food blog, I can assure you that it is possible to celebrate the best of Washington's dining scene without even mentioning New York – and this would have been a far more positive piece if Ms. Burros had kept the focus on DC.

I hope in the future you'll look to those of us here in Washington who can write critically about local restaurants without looking down our noses.  We would welcome the opportunity to introduce visitors to some of the best dining experiences in the city, instead of having them settle for national chains and fast food when they come to town.

My response to Burros' piece? It's not the first time she's played that NYC superiority card. Recall this dust-up from 2007. At this point, I have to think Burros is just baiting Washingtonians to bare our provincial fangs. No need to do that now. Not when you have Burros' former paper singing our praises.

Hope and change are such ephemeral qualities subject to the whims of health, wealth, and the latest scandle in the White House. But now "hope" and "change" are something you can literally ingest, like a pill to fix what's ailing you. Artisan Confections in Arlington and Biagio Fine Chocolatein Adams Morgan have taken Obama's two favorite buzz words and turned them into a limited-edition line of artisan bonbons.

Biagio owner and artist William Knight created the designs that adorn the two chocolates. He even made sure to spell out "hope" and "change" in several different languages, no doubt his own sly expression of hope that America will stop acting like an international schoolyard bully.

According to a press release sent my way from Artisan, the "change" message will appear on a pineapple-passion fruit bonbon, "which features a tart pineapple pate de fruit and a dark chocolate passion fruit ganache." The "hope" design will adorn a coffee-hazelnut bonbon, in which "[l]ightly roasted Kenyan coffee beans enhance a milk chocolate ganache paired with a layer of hazelnut praline." The former is a nice nod to Obama's Hawaiian roots; the latter references the future prez's Kenyan ancestry. (The coffee, of course, might also be a reminder that Obama's gonna need to stay up really late to fix all these damn problems.)

The chocolates are available at both Artisan and Biagio. Artisan is located at 4815-B Lee Highway in Arlington. (703-239-0616), and Biagio is located at 1904 18^th St NW (202-328-1506).