One by one, we’re running through the 50 restaurants that made the cut on this year’s Young & Hungry Dining Guide. If you have visited the day’s featured restaurant, let us know what you think. If you’re planning to visit for the first time, tell us about your meal when you return.

With each passing month, you can just feel maverick meat man Michael Landrum inching closer to mainstream respectability. First, it was his decision to move Ray’s the Steaks to a spacious spot in the Navy League building, more than doubling his previous capacity. Then it was his bold move to lure sommelier Mark Slater away from Citronelle. Finally, it was Landrum’s quasi-brown-nose behavior when Barack Obama and Joe Biden visited Ray’s Hell Burgers earlier this year. Of course, as Landrum would be the first to point out, none of these things actually define him or speak to his operating philosophies. Truth is, Landrum continues to subvert the expense-account mindset of most steakhouses at his Arlington flagship, where you can slice into a well-aged, charred-to-your-liking steak at a fraction of the price of those downtown meat emporiums.

Ray's the Steaks, 2300 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, (703) 841-7297

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Much to Y&H's surprise and delight, more of you clicked on the item about Mark Furstenberg's forthcoming street food restaurant than on Obama's much overhyped (guilty as charged!) visit to Ray's Hell Burgers. Congratulations on being so damn cool. The top posts of the week:

1. Furstenberg's Street Food Restaurant Will Stretch Far Beyond Bread-Based Snacks
2. President and VP Waited in Line at Ray's Just Like Everyone Else
3. Spike Mendelsohn Set to Open Pizzeria in D.C.
4. Everyone's Squeezing the Juice Out of Obama's Visit to Ray's Hell Burgers
5. Obama and Biden Order One "Hell" of a Burger

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

If you haven't heard already — and I really hope that you've been spared — Hannity, Ingraham, and other right-wing pit bulls have been attacking Obama for ordering his Ray's Hell Burger with spicy mustard, which they see as elitist or French or something so drastic that it'll mean the downfall of God and country. (MediaMatters has a decent breakdown of the right's nervous breakdown over spicy mustard.)

But, really, why stop there? Why not go after Obama and all those other tree-hugging liberals who like to eat their hamburgers on fermented bread, which was created around 1,000 B.C. in ancient Egypt? I mean, c'mon Hannity, don't you remember what those ancient Egyptians believed in? Math! Science! They probably didn't believe in Jesus either. Oh, wait, Jesus wasn't born yet. But still, they didn't believe in Jesus! No one should ever, ever eat their hamburger on a bun!

ObFo waves a tsk-tsking finger at President Obama and Joe Biden for not doing their homework and for not ordering their burgers well-done:

In future, when the President is making "unannounced" stops at local eateries, it would be terrific if he'd order his burger fully cooked, since his "people" clearly aren't checking the health records of restaurants, which are frequently available online (yes, Arlington, VA posts its restaurant inspection records online).

I admire ObFo's righteous muck-rucking zeal, but I can't get behind well-done burgers. Y&H would rather die first.

OK, I know y'all must feel like you've had it up to HERE with the Obama burger madness, but allow Y&H to add a final footnote to this presidential prole moment at Ray's Hell Burgers. Michael Landrum, over at donrockwell.com, swears that this interchange occurred between him and the prez:

Actual true moment, and the most beautiful moment in my life—something that will never make it into the press—when the President sat down to eat, this was what was playing: click Harvest for the World. Can you believe that shit?

Me to the President: "I don't know what's on your I-Pod, but check out our soundtrack. Here we play the Isleys"

President to me: "Right on."

No lie.

See Landrum's other Rockwell note after that jump.

Wrote Landrum:

Now, those of you who don't know me might not believe me, but what I set out to do do ten years ago when I first set out to have a business, I had one thing, and one thing only, in mind.

To see my plan come to fruition, and to have a national stage to do so, blows my mind in a way that is incomprehensible even to me.

Now that I have a direct ear to the White House and have finally established a foundation for my plan, I can now reveal just exactly what I have been about for the past ten years: To achieve a Presidential Pardon for Gil Scott-Heron.*

Once this is done, I can rest.

* Note: This was Landrum's original link for Scott-Heron, but Y&H switched it for more background on the artist.

What is it about hamburgers that turns this town upside down? It might be a simple roundup of new joints or it might be a March Madness-like competition. Whatever it is, Washingtonians get absolutely apoplectic around ground beef.

Case in point: Obama and Biden's visit today to Ray's Hell Burgers practically elicited more media coverage than his last two press conferences combined.

A small sampling:

Wonkette (complete with video!): "The biggest political news of the day is that Barack Obama and Joe Biden made local traffic more miserable than usual because they were stoned (for Cinco de Mayo) and wanted rich-people hamburgers at a gourmet junk food restaurant in Northern Virginia."

The AP: "When you want a burger, you have to have a burger."

USA Today's The Oval (with 31 comments and counting): Sample comment: "What? Did all that money Michelle wasted on all those fancy chefs just go down the drain?"

Politico: "Michael Landrum, the burger joint's owner, was ecstatic after the visit, calling it 'one of the greatest days of my life.'"

The Post: In desperate need to play catchup — ketchup? — it had to re-run the AP story.

Image by Flickr user chichacha

Michael Landrum has never been one to suck up to the rich and powerful, so to hear the owner of Ray's Hell Burgers suddenly turn deferential to President Obama took Y&H by surprise. (Michael, I'll have the cell phone on all night, so you can call and bitch about this intro.)

Getting info from the chronically talkative toque is usually easy. But when Obama and Biden visit Ray's Hell Burgers? Waterboarding wouldn't have parted Landrum's lips.

Did the president's staff call ahead to make arrangements or was this a surprise visit? "The less I say about how the president got here, the better," Landrum says. What did Obama order? "He had a cheeseburger," the owner allows. What kind of cheese? "Any details beyond that are his private business," Landrum adds.

[Nevermind that this video spills all the details of Obama and Biden's orders. The president got a cheddar cheeseburger, medium-well, with spicy mustard, lettuce, and tomato. The VP ordered a medium-well burger with Swiss cheese, jalapenos, and ketchup. Biden also got a root beer. Y&H wonders if medium-well is a required precaution for all members of the executive branch. How else to explain such poor treatment of the working-class sandwich?)

Landrum did allow that Obama demanded no preferential treatment. The President preferred to wait in line with the rest of the Hell Burger faithful. "I wish all my customers were like that," Landrum jokes.

The owner says he didn't take Obama's order, nor did he cook Obama's burger. Landrum thought the honors should go to his staff, not some owner looking to take over their tasks just to interact with the most powerful man in the world. "I already get too much glory for what I do," he says.

Landrum spoke briefly to Obama and Biden to see how they liked their burgers (only one guess as to their response) and to express his faith in the president's economic initiatives. "Thanks to him," Landrum says, "I'm confident in creating new jobs and restaurants." The latter includes Landrum's forthcoming Ray's the Steaks at East River (formerly known as Ray's the Heat) located in Ward 7, a part of the District starving for sit-down restaurants.

And with that, Landrum says, Obama and Biden finished their meals and left. They were at the burger joint no more than 30 minutes, just long enough to give Landrum the final punchline you'd expect from the iconoclastic meat man. "I don't care if he is the president," Landrum jokes. "It's the rule. You eat and leave, baby."

Following up on last week's celebrity tip-off sheet, Young & Hungry has been working the phones to find out where the rich and famous have been dining this Inauguration Weekend. Here's what we've heard:

• Yo-Yo Ma dined at 701 on Saturday night.
• The Biden Family, minus the big daddy himself, enjoyed breakfast at the Oval Room on Sunday. Actor Richard Schiff (Toby on The West Wing) also dined at this private meal arranged for the future vice president's family.
• The Blue Duck Tavern was Celebrity Central over the weekend. The West End restaurant played host to Tom Hanks and wife, Rita Wilson, as well as Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, actor Ben Affleck, and country superstar couple, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw.
• Jessica Alba chowed down at the Bombay Club on Saturday.
• Wolfgang Puck shared a table on Sunday night with Sharon Stone and Forest Whitaker at—where else?—The Source by Wolfgang Puck. According to The Source's publicist, the trio dined on asam vegetables, warm Maine lobster-daikon roll, steak au poivre, grilled lamb chops, and the pan-roasted rockfish with red Thai curry shrimp.
• The night before, The Source also hosted Redskins cornerback Shawn Springs.
  

Image by Flickr user dipalbhagde