Allow me to offer a disclaimer before I start: You can trust my picks for the District's best shopping districts as much as you can trust Bernie Madoff's financial advice. Through years of selective focus, I can walk through any neighborhood and ignore all manner of shoe shops, clothing stores, and perfumeries, my mind singularly focused on the latest eatery to open its doors.

As such, you'll have to cut me some friggin' slack if I missed one of your favorite shopping meccas. This ain't my area of expertise. So, with that in mind, here are the best neighborhoods to mix shopping and eating on Black Friday, the day that I personally plan to stay at home, far from the marauding hordes armed with their razor-sharp plastic cards.

• Dupont Circle: I've heard you can buy good shit around here. I know you can eat well, although that hasn't always been the case. I think some recent additions have significantly improved the dining in Dupont, particularly in the fast-casual area, which will probably capture most of the shoppers on Black Friday. You can't go wrong (well, you can, but not usually) at BGR: The Burger Joint, Panas Gourmet, Sweetgreen, Nando's Peri-Peri, and even Pizzeria Paradiso (if the place is on its game that day.) For more upscale options, you have the exquisite Obelisk and the newcomer Eola.
• Georgetown: With a few exceptions — Citronelle, La Chaumiere, and Leopold's Kafe + Konditorei — I've long considered Georgetown a wasteland of food options, a tourist destination where many eateries are content to slide by on mediocre fare. The neighborhood has improved of late. I like the big juicy patties at Thunder Burger & Bar (and the craft beer selection). I admire the Neapolitan pies at Il Canale, and I know I can always get some decent sweets at Georgetown Cupcake and Baked & Wired. And if all else fails, I can just slip into my favorite little bistro in the area.
• U Street Corridor/14th Street Strip/Logan Circle: OK, granted, this is really several neighborhoods clumped together, but what the hell. It's the holidays. I'm feeling generous. The dining options in this area have exploded. The hard part is not finding a decent place to eat, but deciding which one to pick. There's Masa 14, Teak Wood, Bar Pilar, Oohhs & Aahhs, Cork Wine Bar, Great Wall-Szechuan House, Little Ethiopia, JJ's Cheesesteaks, and, of course, the mother of all beer emporiums, Birch & Barley/ChurchKey. I know where I'll be shopping this holiday season.
• Capitol Hill/Barracks Row: I've heard this is a good shopping area, but I have my doubts. I do know that you can get quality bites in the neighborhood. You, of course, have Spike Mendelsohn's fast-food two-fer, Good Stuff Eatery and We, the Pizza. Come to think of it, casual dining (some more refined than others, obviously) rules in this neighborhood. You have Matchbox, Ted's Bulletin, DC-3, Zest Bistro, Montmartre, Ba Bay, Market Lunch, Taqueria Nacional, and Tunnicliff's Tavern. If you want to take a few steps up the gastronomic ladder, you can always hit a pair of restaurants run by two of the District's most notable chefs: Johnny's Half Shell under Ann Cashion and Bistro Bis under Jeffrey Buben.

Good luck with your shopping on Friday, and please, someone, let me know when it's over.

The prosciutto sandwich at Seventh Hill

If my 50 faves were based on style points alone, Seventh Hill Pizza would top the list. Pizzaiolo Anthony Pilla puts on a show every time he preps a pie for the wood-burning oven at the Capitol Hill pizzeria, owned by the same team responsible for the neighboring bistro Montmartre. Pilla takes a ball of fresh dough, stretches it thin with his fingertips, spins it skyward, and stretches it again along the edge of a stainless-steel counter with a few swift, almost imperceptible movements, as fast and graceful as a magician. Once the dough is shaped to his satisfaction, he pulls down a peel, spins the instrument in his hand as if he were between serves at Wimbledon, and places the round on it. The performance alone is worth a stopover at Seventh Hill—and the pies aren’t bad, either. Thin and crispy, they borrow from Neapolitan traditions without slavishly following them. All that dough manipulation? It ain’t really a Naples thing. But traditional or not, Pilla’s pies speak in bold accents, whether the salty language of the Seventh Street, with its prosciutto and Parmesan, or the rustic French patois of the Eastern Market, with its goat cheese, herbs, and tapenade. Don’t overlook Pilla’s sandwiches, either, served on Parm-dusted pizza-dough bread, which acts as a umami megaphone for such bites as the Italian, trumpeting the flavors of Genoa salami, mortadella, capicola, provolone, and hot peppers.

327 Seventh St. SE (202) 544-1911

The pie-maker at Seventh Hill Pizza is named "Anthony," an employee tells me at the pizzeria on Capitol Hill. Try as I might to secure his surname, I can't get the job done because no one, the following day, will pick up the damn phone at the place. No matter. Anthony is a show all by himself. He has style to burn. Every move he makes with the raw dough — flipping, spinning, stretching, securing the round on his peel — has more flair than your average NFL end-zone celebration.

His crusts, by contrast, don't feel the need to show off. They're ultra-thin and crispy, which makes me think Anthony doesn't use olive oil in his dough. Perhaps Anthony doesn't let his dough rise long enough, either. His crusts are content to supply a basic cracker-ness, but they're also nicely chewy and his toppings provide more than enough flavor to fill in the blanks.

 I'm particularly fond of the Navy Yard toppings ($10.95 for a small), mostly because of the Toulouse sausage, which releases enough grease along the surface to add a layer of fatty goodness to the pie. The French sausage is not only a delicious addition but also a sly indication of Seventh Hill's owners: They're the same folks behind Montmartre.

Montmartre's monsieur: Put some cheese on that mofo.

This has happened to all of us who've become fans of a particular restaurant: The place lets us down.

Sometimes the disappointment is (relatively) minor, like when the kitchen runs out of a favorite dish or drops the plate entirely from the menu. But then there's the kind of disappointment that I encountered this weekend at Montmartre on Capitol Hill: During Sunday's brunch service, the operation seemed to have shed its thick, fatty bistro skin and adopted the mantle of every other joint catering to America's fear of calories and offal.

I know what you're thinking: "Relax, Tim, it's just brunch, pandering to the easiest of all restaurant-goers, those people who think four-cheese omelets are sophisticated." I would agree with you if it were any place other than Montmartre, where I have previously enjoyed brunch plates as righteously rich as liver and coarsely ground country pâté shot through with lots of flavor-heavy fat. Yesterday's brunch, by contrast, was a hollow imitation of a bistro lunch.

Let's start with the latest version of the country pâté, which would have barely tripped my taste buds if it hadn't been for the coarse salt sprinkled on top and the plum sauce stuffed in the middle of it. This was like the Lean Cuisine of pâté, if that's possible.

My guest's croque-monsieur was a bigger slap at the French Republic and its affinity for that one-two coronary punch of butter and cheese. The bread, barely toasted and with nary any butter, was whole wheat or multi-grain, which gave the sandwich an odd texture and, dare I say, a healthy nutty flavor. The crusts were still attached, too. The final insult was the cheese/béchamel sauce, which I know is optional on the monsieur but which has become standard on just about every other version served in town, including the one at Cafe du Parc, where the sandwich is practically laminated with the stuff. The cheese didn't even cover the top of the croque-monsieur at Montmartre, which meant that some bites were as dry as...toasted whole wheat bread.

Listen, if I wanted to watch my calories — if I wanted a standard-issue soup, like the mediocre gazpacho on Montmartre's brunch menu — I wouldn't go to a bistro. I'd go to Teaism or Chix or some such place.

Now your turn, readers: What old favorite has let you down recently? E-mail your experiences to me at hungry@washingtoncitypaper.com and I'll post the best (or worst, as it were) ones on the Young & Hungry blog.