Michel Richard may soon join fellow D.C. chef Robert Weidmaier in opening a restaurant—perhaps even three of them—in Atlantic City. [Eater DC]

Shaw's forthcoming Bistro Bohem could open earlier than Shaw's Tavern. [Prince of Petworth]

Next week is D.C. Meat Week. Alexandria's Pork Barrel BBQ is taking the opportunity to unveil its new Carolina vinegar sauce. [PR Web]

Hollywood starlet Drew Barrymore is turned away at Komi. So she hits up Shake Shack instead. [Glitterazi]

Chef Geoff Tracy warns his customers to watch out for D.C.'s speed cameras: Tickets cost $150, which, he helpfully points out, "equals FIVE three course dinners at Lia's during BCC Restaurant Week." [NBC Washington]

Brian McBride is frying up some severed shrimp heads, part of an ambitious recipe for a new pasta dish.

For a veteran of the restaurant scene in Washington, with its sizeable international population and its proliferation of sushi joints, the noggins might not seem especially out of the ordinary. But McBride, the former chef at D.C.’s Blue Duck Tavern, is testing this garnish for an entirely different market: Atlantic City.

If all goes as planned, the gritty gambling town on the Jersey Shore will represent the first trans-Beltway effort by McBride and his equally D.C.-regional collaborator, Robert Weidmaier, proprietor of Marcel’s and Brasserie Beck. The duo is opening a new 230-seat eatery inside Revel Atlantic City, the state-government-backed, 47-story hotel tower and resort slated to be the newest competitor to A.C. landmarks like Harrah’s, the Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa, and Caesar’s.

Atlantic City, of course, has made some significant gustatory strides in recent years, importing kitchens created by the likes of San Francisco-based Michael Mina, New York-based Bobby Flay, and Philadelphia-based Stephen Starr. McBride and Weidmaier are perhaps its first D.C.-bred toques. But like the already established celebrity chefs who regularly helm eateries in tourist towns like Atlantic City and Las Vegas, they’re hoping to become national players.

And the vehicle for their pan-American ambitions is one that Washington diners—at least those among them willing to brave suburban Maryland—would recognize. They’re calling it Mussel Bar—just like Weidmaier’s existing beer-centric, steamed mollusk-based eatery in Bethesda.

Of course, the actual establishment will feel more like Weidmaier’s more sophisticated Brasserie Beck, located downtown. “It’ll be definitely a little more upscale dining than the Mussel Bar,” says McBride. The restaurant, he points out, “sits right on the edge of the casino floor.” The new venue will feature, among other things, an open kitchen “so that everyone has a view from the dining room,” he says, as well as a proper stage for other performances, including live music.

While the current suburban Maryland location has its charms—“it is what it is and it works,” says McBride—the partners are hoping the flashier Atlantic City venue will redefine the brand for future expansion.

The foray onto the national stage suggests a new benchmark for D.C. chefs: the ability to extend name recognition and reach beyond the Beltway. Sure, there are a couple of local cooking celebrities who have already managed to open restaurants in far-flung places. Both José Andrés and Michel Richard operate eateries in Las Vegas, for instance. Andrés’ empire also extends to Los Angeles, Miami and, coming soon, Puerto Rico.

But few others have managed to make it farther than Tysons.

In Atlantic City, McBride and Weidmaier round out an impressive lineup of bold-named chefs from other cities, including Philadelphia’s Jose Garces and New York’s Marc Forgione, all of whom have been recruited to help make Revel a respectable dining destination. That’s what the hotel’s developers hope, at any rate: Weidmaier says executives from Revel Entertainment approached him after dining at Marcel’s one night four years ago and suggested he bring his business to Jersey.

“At the beginning, I was kind of, like, Atlantic City? I don’t know,” Weidmaier says. It took a few trips to some of the Jersey city’s newer resorts before the Marcel’s boss was sold on the idea. “I was amazed at how nice The Water Club and the Borgata was,” he says, “and how packed the restaurants were—even during a recession.”

For the local guys’ purposes, however, the seaside setting is just a launching pad—an example of what can be done elsewhere up and down the East Coast and beyond. “We’ve been approached from as far away as New Orleans,” says McBride. To hear him tell it, the pair has multiple concepts in mind for multiple locations, including an altogether different restaurant of McBride’s own design somewhere in the D.C. area.

But first, they’ll need to get the Jersey joint up and running. The goal is to open on Mar. 15. And there’s still a lot to do.

The duo has hired a chef de cuisine from Oakland, Calif. to head-up the staff. They’re still looking for sous chefs, among other positions, to round out the kitchen crew. Prospective candidates, know this: love of travel is a big plus. “We’re looking for guys that we can move to A.C. and move to different cities as we build,” McBride says. “We’re going to build a farm team for the future.”

* * *

On Friday afternoon, McBride is working in the kitchen at Brasserie Beck, testing new recipes for the beachfront launch. One dish is a traditional onion soup with a slight spin: a gruyere soufflé on top of the standard crouton. (“Needs more cheese,” he decides after sampling the delicate topping.) Another is a homemade shrimp ravioli made from wonton skins, tossed in a creamy butter and white wine sauce with fresh-cut corn. Fried shrimp heads or not, he thinks the pasta will prove quite popular come summertime, when the restaurateurs expect to “get hammered,” he says—at least in terms of foot-traffic.

McBride is also tinkering with what could be the most important component to the menu in Atlantic City: the steak. The seaside town has about as many steakhouses as casinos and a prime cut of beef is virtually obligatory for any restaurant that wants to lure high rollers.

“We want a sexy steak,” McBride says, brandishing two substantial cuts of beef, a 52-ounce porterhouse and a noticeably smaller but still considerable tomahawk chop. He plans to cook both and see which works best. “We’re going to do this in more of an Italian style,” says McBride. “We’re going to crust it heavily, with salt, pepper, garlic, rosemary, thyme, and we’re going to put it on the grill until we get a huge char on it.”

As he chops up the seasonings, McBride dishes a bit about his new deal with Weidmaier, a guy he’s known for more than 20 years. “I had a few things that I wanted to do,” he says. “He had a few things that he wanted to do. We decided to team up and do ’em together.” Normally, you’d expect the pairing of two big-name chefs to quickly devolve into irreconcilable ego-clashes. But so far, McBride says, things are working out nicely.

Locals who don’t want to drive to Atlantic City to lose at blackjack can also sample McBride’s current handiwork on what he says is a revamped menu at Brasserie Beck, where he’s attempting to refocus the kitchen on “traditional techniques and the long slow cook.” Working with new chef de cuisine Will Morris, McBride’s already jettisoned the restaurant’s previous incarnation of a cassoulet, which he describes as a sort of modern deconstructed version, and replaced it with a more classic style. He’s also streamlined the varieties of mussels available, reducing the options from nine to five. The old lamb ragout pasta is gone, but McBride has added salmon cooked inside parchment paper. In a few months, he aims to introduce new plats du jour and more seafood.

“I would like to see things like octopus and squid on the menu,” McBride says. “In researching the brasseries of Belgium, you know, they were kind of a seafaring nation. And there was a lot of seafood to be had. Not enough here.”

In interviews, McBride casts Weidmaier as a partner. But while it’s true that McBride has an interest in the shared venture, the Marcel’s proprietor is the boss. “I brought Brian in as basically my corporate chef for all my restaurants,” Weidmaier says. “I needed to bring in a seasoned chef that I trust as a good friend to help me expand and do what I want to do.”

In exchange for his chef-partner’s culinary retooling, Weidmaier will be backing McBride in developing a new restaurant concept that is all his own. He doesn’t elaborate on what it will be. “I don’t believe necessarily in chef-driven concepts,” McBride says. “I like concepts. Concepts last forever. Chefs come and go....You have to come up with the right concept and then the concept will continue.” He says he hopes to include a retail component to the standard sit-down dining experience.

After some substantial grilling time, McBride slices his two test steaks into thin slivers, almost like roast beef—a style he cribbed from former Tosca chef Cesare Lanfranconi. He suggests that the skinny cuts help to even out the steak’s inherent saltiness. “Cutting it like this gives you all that flavor, but it doesn’t overpower you,” he says.

McBride plates the sliced meats alongside their bones and adds a little red wine jus. But the key ingredient comes last: fresh-squeezed lemon splashed all over. “This makes the difference right here,” he says.

Maybe the best part about launching a new restaurant on the Jersey shore: McBride and Weidmaier get a crash pad on the beach. Leasing such a spot is another item on McBride’s to-do list this week. It’s the sort of set up one might expect to attract some of the Jersey shore’s most nefarious characters. McBride fields that question with a wry grin.

“That was the whole PR plan—get Snooki in sometime,” he says. “We joke around. But, hey, who knows?”

Photos by Darrow Montgomery

Eatery tips? Food pursuits? Send suggestions to hungry@washingtoncitypaper.com.

Michel Richard

“I sold them the recipe,” was all the chef offered. And he stressed that “we must try harder every day,” a not-so-subtle hint that things could be better. Otherwise he was mum.

Photo by Chris Shott

We put some of Richard's balls on the scale to see how his hugely ballyhooed, saucy orbs compared to those at neighboring meatball mecca Carmine's, both in terms of overall size and price per ounce. Here's how both sets of balls stacked up:

An order of the "classic" variety at Meatballs nets a total of four balls, costing $9.89 (that's $8.99 plus tax). We weighed each ball individually. Ball No. 1 weighed a measly 1.4 ounces. The other three were a slight bit bigger: No. 2 weighed in at 1.7 ounces, No. 3 rang up at 1.6, and No. 4 also hit the 1.7 mark. This works out to an average ball size of about 1.6 ounces.

Each meatball costs about $2.47, meaning you're essentially paying $1.54 for each ounce of rounded meat at Richard's place.

At Carmine's, a side order of meatballs gets you six balls per serving, at a total price tag of $18.15 (after tax). On visual inspection, these balls appeared a great deal bigger than the kind at Richard's place and the scale confirmed this: Ball No. 1 weighed in at a whopping 3.4 ounces. Ball No. 2 came in even bigger: 3.9 ounces. Balls Nos. 3, 4, 5 and 6 were somewhere in the middle:  3.6, 3.5, 3.5 and 3.7 ounces, respectively. This works out to an average ball size that is considerably larger than Richard's: 3.6 ounces. Quite a mouthful!

Each of these hefty balls costs about $3.03, meaning you're paying just 84 cents or so per ounce.

In short: you get a lot more balls for your buck at Carmine's, you know, if you're into that sort of thing.

Photos by Stephanie Meyer

Today, WaPo food critic Tom Sietsema jumps into the Meatballs ownership mystery in his "First Bite" column:

When I reached out to Bucher for a comment, it was Jonathan Theriault, the general manager at Meatballs, who returned the call. "It's all Michel Richard," he replied when I asked about Bucher's role. But what about Bucher's signature on the records? "Michel is too busy to do all that himself."

Regardless of who's actually behind the hugely hyped meatball shop, Sietsema seems pretty nonplussed with the finished project, calling the eatery's signature spheres "inconsistent: sometimes dense, sometimes pasty in the center, sometimes mute." The critic ends his initial take with a savage quote from a friend: "The best thing about lunch at Meatballs...is going to lunch afterward at Rasika."

Photo by Chris Shott

This is not a formal review, but rather an off-the-cuff first-impressions-style riff on a brand-spankin' new D.C. restaurant.

Michel Richard's hugely ballyhooed Meatballs had barely opened (I counted 17 people in line, 13 seated at tables) and already staffers were telling folks that they had run out of the lentil variety around 11:30 a.m. on Thursday. No worries. Y&H wasn't particularly interested in that particular type of orb, anyway. I came for the real deal, ordering up the classic beef ball (four of 'em per order) on a garlic-y grinder. The seasoned bread came pre-toasted and already charred along the edges. Adding mozzarella meant it was headed back into the toaster to melt the cheese, making for one crispy, crunchy baguette when it was finally ready. Maybe too crunchy.

My biggest concern, however, was the meatballs themselves. I'd previously heard good things about the pork and chicken meatballs at the also greatly hyped ShopHouse and walked away rather underwhelmed: the spheres didn't taste like meat at all—they tasted like falafel. Thankfully, Richard's version stays true to the fine print of his storefront signage ("meat") in addition to the bigger brash descriptor ("BALLS").

Total price of sandwich plus fountain drink: $12.41.

Photos by Chris Shott

For a concept as prosaic as ground meat shaped into savory spheres, the new Penn Quarter eatery simply called Meatballs sure has generated a lot of buzz.

Part of the hype is probably due to the restaurant’s brash marketing strategy. Consider the eye-catching signage out front, which heavily emphasizes the word “balls” in large capital letters.

Another big attraction is the famous chef at the forefront of the project: Michel Richard, the celebrated French toque behind acclaimed fine-dining destinations Citronelle in Georgetown and Central in Penn Quarter, as well as the newly opened Central Las Vegas at Caesar’s Palace.

This unique combination of culinary celebrity and cheeky advertising has provided the place with a slew of pre-opening publicity. Virtually every food blogger in town had posted photos of the interior, weeks before the planned launch this week. The restaurant was expected to open Wednesday, but city inspectors had yet to give it the green light. Leading up to the long-awaited opening, it seemed, the whole D.C. food scene had been talking about Meatballs.

Well, except for one guy.

“I really don’t want to be in public involved with this,” says Mark Bucher—a pretty strange request for someone whose name and notarized signature appears all over public records on the project.

Bucher is the creator and operator of Cleveland Park’s popular steak frites spot Medium Rare, as well as the founder of BGR: The Burger Joint, with locations in Dupont Circle, Bethesda, and elsewhere.

Ask him or his PR rep about his possible involvement in the new meatball shop and you’ll get a pretty firm denial. Neither “Mark nor BGR is involved in this,” Bucher’s publicist told me last week. “[N]ot/never,” she later clarified via email. Contacted by phone, Bucher, too, initially denied any involvement.

Then why has he taken such an active role behind the scenes?

The restaurant’s application for a liquor license, for instance, notably lists only one owner or partner in the business—and it’s not Michel Richard. That lone proprietor, according to the application: Mark Bucher, described as the “managing member” of Meatballs E St, LLC, who also, as the paperwork helpfully notes, holds licenses for BGR Dupont LLC and Medium Rare Cleveland Park LLC. (See the documents below.)

The number listed on the application as Meatballs’ business telephone rings Bucher’s cell. Placards posted in the windows of the restaurant appear to have been doctored with correction fluid to conceal Bucher’s name as the listed contact, but the posted phone number is the same.

Lest you think this stated managerial role carries merely a minority interest in the actual business, the application pegs Bucher’s stake in the venture at 100 percent.

Yet, despite having certified in writing “under the penalty of perjury” that he is the “true and actual owner of the business,” Bucher still insists that he has zero ownership stake in Meatballs. “If there is something that says otherwise, that is inaccurate,” he says.

According to him, the real “true and actual owner” is a company based in New York called Food Research Corporation. “Michel Richard is the front man on it. We all like him to be the front. It’s important for lots of reasons, but they’re the ones that have put the money up, and they’re the ones that have backed it,” he says.

Bucher describes his role as merely advisory. “I’m helping my friend,” he says. “I’m helping Michel. I’m not an owner of this thing at all. I’m just helping him get coordinated.”

Contacted for comment, Richard’s usual rep at Central and Citronelle, Mel Davis, curiously referred me to Bucher.

That Bucher and Richard are somehow collaborating on the concept isn’t much of a surprise. Richard was often mentioned as a consultant on the launch of Bucher’s Medium Rare restaurant this past spring; its opening chef, Cedric Maupillier, previously worked for Richard at Central. Bucher also credits Richard with helping him launch BGR.

Neither restaurateur can really take credit for coming up with the idea for Meatballs. The menu submitted alongside the liquor license application isn’t even original—it’s a print-out of the offerings at the similarly themed Meatball Shop in New York, which also seems to be the inspiration for all the D.C. eatery’s ballsy humor. “You’ll get thirsty eating our balls,” the New York menu reads in its drinks section. A different menu, inviting patrons to “pick your balls” from a list of classic beef, chicken, lamb, crab, or lentil, was posted in the windows of the D.C. restaurant on Wednesday.

What’s odd is Bucher’s caginess about the whole thing. Given his résumé, he would seem an ideal candidate to help spearhead the development of this kind of project. Like Meatballs, his prior restaurant concepts, BGR and Medium Rare, are both tightly streamlined operations, focusing on a single food form—burgers and steak, respectively—served in fashionable but casual surroundings. And both appear to be thriving enterprises. BGR currently boasts 17 locations either open or in the pipeline from Arlington to Alabama, according to the company’s website.

Meanwhile, stop by Medium Rare any given night of the week, and you’ll see a location bustling with diners, despite its limited menu of gravy-smothered sirloin caps, fries, salad, and bread. Ask Bucher about the steak frites place, and he isn’t the least bit shy in talking it up: “People love it. It’s consistent. It’s a rule-breaker. And it just continues to do great.” His biggest concern seems to be whether to expand the concept to other corners of the city or simply keep it as a single location.

Bucher’s pedigree is also more in sync with the style of service planned for Meatballs. BGR, in particular, is a similar quick-serve sort of joint, complete with the vibrating buzzer to signify when your order is ready for pickup and the DIY satisfaction of self-busing your tray to the nearest trash bin when your meal is over.

Contrast that with the résumé of Richard, whose other restaurants are the sort of fancy full-service places that refold your napkin every time you leave the table.

French chefs aren’t typically known for their meatballs. But Richard has shown a real knack for elevating Americanized comfort foods. His burger at Central, topped with a crispy potato tuile, is often mentioned among the best in the city. And his take on fried chicken inspires similar raves.

For a chef of Richard’s caliber, mastering the meager meatball shouldn’t present much of a challenge.

Getting a handle on the assembly-line pace of a quick-serve business, though, could be a different story.

According to Bucher, any behind-the-scenes effort on his part is purely to help ease his chef buddy’s transition into this altogether foreign form of food service.

“I’m helping him learn quick-serve,” Bucher says. “Learning quick-serve is very different than Central and Citronelle for him—staff and training and speed of service and line set-up and equipment. There are lots of things in quick-serve that move differently than in a fine-dining restaurant.”

That certainly explains why Richard might seek Bucher’s help in developing the concept. It doesn’t explain why Bucher is putting his neck on the line legally for a business that he claims to have no actual financial interest in. “Friends help friends,” he says.

No matter what the forms say, Bucher says he couldn’t be an owner in Meatballs because it too closely conflicts with BGR. “It wouldn’t be appropriate for my partners and investors in Burger Joint,” he says. Burgers, meatballs—it’s all ground beef, right?

As for why Bucher’s name and signature are on the legal documents for Meatballs instead of Richard’s, Bucher says it was sort of an oversight. “He probably should’ve been, to be honest with you,” Bucher says. “I think it was a speed issue and we just moved fast.”

Whatever his official level of involvement, Bucher can’t seem to distance his public persona from the project fast enough. Following this week’s planned opening, he says, “my work there, my help there, is done.”

He insists his future ground-beef ambitions come purely in patty form: “Burger Joint’s on a huge trajectory—that’s my full-time focus and attention.”

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Meatballs, 624-A E St., NW

Eatery tips? Food pursuits? Send suggestions to hungry@washingtoncitypaper.com.

D.C. diners may have to wait a little longer to taste Michel Richard's Meatballs. The much anticipated eatery had been expected to open on Wednesday. But not according to the sign posted on the door when Y&H stopped by at 11:15 am. "Not Open!" To further tease our taste buds, menus have been put up in the front windows.

UPDATE: A manager tells Eater the hugely ballyhooed meatballery will open "probably around 1 p.m."

UPDATE, 1:02 p.m. Still not open. At the scene, a staffer tells Y&H correspondent Caitlin MacNeal that the restaurant is still waiting on city inspectors to show up and give the green light. Stay tuned.

Photos by Chris Shott

Deviled eggs, like the common hot dog and macaroni and cheese, are one of those classic comfort foods that have lately taken on a sort of contemporary chic—and, in some cases, sheen.

To wit: One recent evening at Boundary Stone in Bloomingdale, a plate of the $3 hors d’oeuvres arrived in the standard fashion—hard-boiled, bisected, and served cold. Except for one glaring element: The yolks were frickin’ pink! What horrible deformity had befallen that poor chicken embryo?

Thankfully, the blushing semi-orbs didn’t taste all that abnormal. They were just slightly sour and a tad tangy. It seemed no genetic mutation was at play here, nor was this some ill-conceived promotion to benefit the Think Pink campaign for breast cancer awareness. “I take some pickled beet juice and add that in with the yolk to make the deviled mixture,” chef Vincent Campaniello later explains.

When I made a return visit a few weeks later, the eggs had changed from bright pink to a sort of greenish gold. They smacked of heavy salt and spice, as well as a more subtle flavor that I couldn’t immediately identify but eventually found out to be dill.

This sort of guessing game has become commonplace at the increasingly hip neighborhood’s newest boîte.

A woman sitting next to me at the bar, who described herself as a “deviled egg snob,” claimed to have previously tried three different colors of eggs at Campaniello’s rustic-looking restaurant on Rhode Island Avenue NW: pink, orange, and purple. Her favorite? The orange—though she added that she had no clue what was in that one.

“My deviled eggs will change nightly depending on what I feel like playing around with and putting in them,” says Campaniello, whose Sunday trips to nearby farmers markets often dictate what sort of creamy egg filling his patrons will be eating for the next week. “I try and give the people something new.”

Despite the mystery, or maybe partly because of it, the bar snacks have become quite popular sellers, according to the chef. “I get a lot of questions sometimes,” he says. “But once [customers] try them, they fly out of here. I get in trouble stocking them. I’ll think I make enough orders and they’ll be gone with plenty of time left in service.”

Campaniello’s eggy experiments underscore a larger trend. At D.C.-area eateries, the summertime picnic staple has become as common an appetizer as fried calamari, yet as varied in preparation as pizza.

Perhaps the local standard-bearer of the genre is 2Amys in Cleveland Park, where deviled eggs have been listed on the menu since the restaurant first opened in 2001. Peter Pastan’s place is best known for its traditional Neapolitan-style pizza, but the eggs are outstanding. They win my vote for best in the entire city. The yolk filling tastes of curry, but not overpoweringly so. And, the accompanying oily green sauce—whipped up with chopped parsley, pickles, anchovy, capers, and mustard seed—piles on the salt.

Prior to the pizzeria’s opening, Pastan, also proprietor of Obelisk in Dupont Circle, had served the dish at local fundraisers. “Either people would get it, and they’d be like, ‘Oh, who doesn’t love deviled eggs?’ or, they’d be like, ‘What? Deviled eggs?’ like it was nothing special,” says 2Amys co-owner Amy Morgan.

Between the deviled delights and other egg-laden recipes, 2Amys generally goes through about five cases of eggs each week, she says. That’s 150 dozen.

In recent years, other venues have tried to elevate the old cold egg in weird ways, with varying degrees of success. At Ray’s to the Third in Arlington, the latest establishment in beef-centric restaurateur Michael Landrum’s empire, the traditional yolk mixture is tossed out entirely. Landrum instead fills his white ovals with steak tartare and smothers them in Hollandaise. The powdery yolks are scattered about the plate as a sort of garnish along with some pickles, capers, and diced onion. Call me old-fashioned, but the yolk is where the payoff is. Relegating it to the side is just plain wrong.

Retro-chic comfort food, like overpriced pet food, seems to cause marketers to break out the puns: At Ray’s, the classic deviled descriptor is altered to “devilishly good” on the menu. At Founding Farmers, the Foggy Bottom church of farm-to-table dining, eggs filled with lobster, crab, and salmon-infused mixtures are labeled “devil-ish.”

* * *

Economics may help explain the ascension of the old-school, albumin-rich dish to prominence on local menus. Eggs are cheap. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average retail price of a dozen grade-A eggs in September was less than $2. Slice each of ’em in half and your profit margin on the main ingredient instantly doubles.

Another financial factor: Prominent local chefs I’ve interviewed give me the distinct sense that they think the cure for our current national economic malaise involves healthy doses of mayonnaise, plus yolk.

“In these times, people are looking for what comforts them,” says Boundary Stone’s Campaniello. “I’ve done the five-star fine dining and everything. People aren’t really looking for the white linen service anymore. They want to come in and just enjoy the simple things that spark a little memory.”

And yet, even some of the city’s finer dining establishments are churning out deviled eggs. Consider Central, where fancy French chef Michel Richard serves what his compatriots calls œufs mimosa, a quartet of creamy egg halves topped with marinated anchovies called boquerones, for $7. They are quite good. The seafood topping is neither too fishy nor too salty.

At Richard’s even fussier Georgetown location Citronelle, a more traditional version of deviled eggs also appear on the menu of a special pre-theatre promotion honoring the Washington Ballet’s upcoming production of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic jazz-age novel The Great Gatsby. (The story’s action, you’ll recall, takes place in fictional West Egg.) It seems that what was good for the dapper gents and flapper-clad gals of the roaring ’20s is also perfectly suited to the 21st-century high rollers still raking it in within the Beltway’s yet-unburst bubble.

On the flipside, you find the same style of finger food getting hands sticky inside some of the District’s dingier dives. At DC9, where former Frank Ruta acolyte Amber Bursik now helms the kitchen, deviled eggs help ease the sting of whiskey shots and ear-ringing indie rock.

Bursik infuses her egg filling with pimento cheese. It’s a natural extension of the chef’s go-to morning-after remedy: grilled cheese filled with the pimento spread. “That’s one of my favorite hangover foods,” she says.

Add some paprika and a sliver of real pimento on top and you’ve got one potent bar snack. “It’s got a little bit of a smoky flavor to it, then it’s kind of sweet, a little salty, a little cheesy, and a little eggy,” she says.

Beyond the homey appeal of the dish—“They remind you of your childhood, they’re tasty and they’re kind of a guilty pleasure,” the chef says—Bursik floats another reason why folks flock to local restaurants for their deviled egg fix: “They’re a pain in the ass to make for yourself.”

Photos by Darrow Montgomery

Eatery tips? Food pursuits? Send suggestions to hungry@washingtoncitypaper.com.

Boundary Stone, 116 Rhode Island Ave. NW

2Amys, 3715 Macomb St. NW, (202) 885-5700

Founding Farmers, 1924 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, (202) 822-8783

Ray’s to the Third, 1650 Wilson Blvd., Arlington

DC9, 1940 9th St. NW, (202) 483-5000

Richard tells Eater DC the ballsy eatery is still a few weeks away from opening. For some early looks at the space, click over to Washingtonian, HuffPo, or Dining Bisnow.

While Richard might be the first D.C. chef to devote an entire space to the tasty spheres, the city is by no means devoid of the things. As we await Richard's take on the traditional spaghetti garnish, let us consider the hearty globes already pleasing palates across the District.

Some of my favorites: the spicy little orbs served with goat cheese agnolotti, tomato fondue and basil at Proof and the eclectic lobster lumps at 1905.

What's your favorite meatball in town?

Photo by Krista/Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license