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.

Some restaurants like to brag about their eco-friendly ways—I mean, seriously, half of Hook’s appeal has been its sustainability come-on—but some restaurants just are eco-friendly. OK, sure, Poste Moderne Brasserie has gotten a few press notices about its organic and sustainable garden in its courtyard, from which chef Robert Weland will pluck vegetables and herbs for his dishes. But did you know that Poste uses 100 percent recycled paper? Or that it composts all its food scraps? Or that it eliminated all bottled water in favor of its own filtration system? Yeah, I know, none of that means Weland’s food is worth a damn, but here’s the thing: It is. The discipline that Weland injects into his environmental efforts is the same discipline he injects into his kitchen. His dishes are among the most consistent in the area, from his superb terrines to his handmade pastas to his rotating selection of seasonal fish entrées, including his most recent, a wild Alaskan king salmon with parsley sabayon, salmon caviar, and spring onions.

Addendum: Y&H goes whole hog at Poste’s courtyard pig roast.

 Poste Moderne Brasserie, 555 8th St. NW, inside Hotel Monaco, (202) 783-6060

Shortly before the holiday weekend, a small shitstorm started brewing over the the elevated levels of lead discovered earlier this year on the White House lawn, site of the vegetable garden heard ’round the world. In a column for Huffington Post, Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety, wrote that National Park Service tests found “highly elevated levels of lead — 93 parts per million.”

“It’s enough lead for anyone planning to have children pick vegetables in that garden or eat produce from it to reconsider their plans: lead is highly toxic to children’s developing organs and brain functions — however, it’s below the 400 ppm the EPA suggests is a threat to human health,” Kimbrell added.

As leader of the Center for Food Safety, a non-profit dedicated to fighting Big Ag and its anti-environmental and sustainable ways, Kimbrell figured he had cornered the devil living in the White House dirt: a commercial fertilizer called ComPRO, made from a wastewater plant’s sewage sludge, which the Clinton Administration apparently had agreed to spread on the lawn during its temporary stay at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a theory that Kimbrell borrowed from Mother Jones, which first reported on the possible ComPRO connection.

Kimbrell took this rare gift horse — a highly visible White House vegetable garden and a major commercial fertilizer with potentially harmful effects — and rode that sumbitch as far as he could go. He rode her hard:

Read More “A Tale of Two White House Vegetable Gardens: Toxic or Not?” »

The brilliant parody aims for and hits a number of targets: corporations jumping onto the green bandwagon, vacuous TV morning programs, even the dining public’s naivete over what foods are really good for the environment.

Taco Bell’s New Green Menu Takes No Ingredients From Nature

Say what you will about Alice Waters—that she’s given too much credit for the local/sustainable movement, that she wasn’t the chef who really put Chez Panisse on the map—but she did help push the White House to plant the first vegetable garden since World War II. The slow movement now has one powerful mouthpiece.

If you haven’t heard already, Alice Waters was in town during the inauguration, trying to raise money for D.C. Central Kitchen, among other groups, and beat the drum for local and sustainable food issues while the world’s attention was turned to D.C. I don’t know how successful these celebrity-chef-driven dinners were in meeting their goals, but one meal did make headlines when uber-toque and Top Chef judge Tom Colicchio performed the Heimlich maneuver on cookbook author Joan Nathan and saved her life.

But that wasn’t the only scene at Nathan’s dinner party that caused someone to choke. Yesterday, Marian Burros reported this juicy little scene between Walter Scheib, a former White House chef, and Waters, who had criticized the Obamas for not replacing current White House chef, Cristeta Comerford, with a toque more aligned with the local/sustainable movement. Writes Burros: Read More “Walter Scheib to Alice Waters: Lay Off the White House Chef” »