Okay, not really. But Richard’s recipe for chocolate-covered grapes, expertly executed by Young & Hungry’s bud Yoram, were the highlight of our Super Bowl dessert course, which also included macaroon-and-chocolate “sliders.” Can you tell we got a little carried away last night?

Well, you don’t know the half of it.

The Shitheads—plus Shithead hangers-on—were in rare form for pro football’s finale. Our menu included the following:

Read More “Michel Richard Made an Appearance at the Super Bowl” »

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

Try as they might to prevent it, downtown restaurants, even fine ones like The Source by Wolfgang Puck or Central Michel Richard, will lose customers on Inauguration Night. Some folks won’t show up because they got a better, last-minute offer, like a ball invite. Others simply won’t arrive because they’ve decided the benefits of the meal don’t outweigh the hassles of traveling downtown (even after many of the streets open back up after 7 p.m.).

Just ask Ashok Bajaj, the veteran D.C. restaurateur who owns a number of operations downtown, including 701, the Oval Room, the Bombay Club, and Rasika. Bajaj has been through five previous inaugurations, and every time, he says about 10 percent of his reservations don’t show up. That compares to about two percent of his reservations on an average weekend.

The problem for restaurateurs like Bajaj is that it’s hard to fill those no-shows on Inauguration Night, because everyone already has plans or they decided long ago they weren’t going to deal with the BS. Bajaj says he can fill those empty seats only about 30 percent of the time.

Read More “Can’t Get into Your Favorite Restaurant on Inauguration Night? Just Wait.” »

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:

Read More “New York Food Snobs: They Love Us. They Love Us Not.” »

As I wrote about last week, my friend Lou Cantolupo had tried to use me (and this precious piece of food-writing real estate known as the Young & Hungry column) for his own purposes, namely to win an office-party cookie contest. Of course, even after I contacted the esteemed Michel Richard to hunt down holiday cookie recipes, Lou rejected the celebrity chef’s offerings as too pedestrian. He also rejected my idea of turning Richard’s Ginger Graham Cookies into holiday s’mores, by taking a pair of those cookies and pressing them down on a gooey mess of melted dark chocolate and marshmallows dyed green and red.

Instead, Lou devised his own recipe, a sort of twist on the classic peanut-butter cookie topped with Hershey’s Kisses. It’s an ingenious recipe that, as you might expect, did indeed win Lou the office cookie contest. As the humble winner wrote via e-mail: “I now hope that you all too will enjoy the pleasures that these little delicacies of happiness brought to my own palate and ever expanding gut.”

The full recipe is after the jump.

Read More “The New Generation of Hershey’s Kisses Cookies for the Holidays” »

My friend Lou is a terrific home cook, particularly with desserts. Get a load of his red-wine poached pears—the treat that was almost too gorgeous to eat. (Almost.) As you can see from that one example, Lou doesn’t take shortcuts, even when it comes to a cookie-baking contest for a holiday office party. The dude really wants to win.

Lou e-mailed me yesterday, saying that it “might be an interesting column” if I’d ask “big shot chefs/pastry chefs in town to divulge or come up with their great Christmas cookie recipe.” Little did I know that Lou was working me for his own ends. I found that out this morning when I called him on the way to work, informing him that the Post had just devoted its Food Section to holiday cookies. None of the paper’s recipes, he thought, would win him the office-party bake-off.

He wanted something more fanciful. He wanted something more elaborate. He wanted something from Michel Richard. I reluctantly agreed to contact the city’s master chef for a recipe. By day’s end, Richard’s PR coordinator Mel Davis e-mailed me a couple of cookie recipes (you can see them below the jump). I forward the recipes to Lou for review. His response:

They “look like fantastic cookies but they’re just cookies. I need something that’s gonna wow ‘em. Any thoughts on what I could fill them with (a la sandwich cookies) that’s holidayish?”

Tough crowd.

Read More “Michel Richard Cookies for the Holidays: Not Good Enough?” »