The news that New Belgium bottles were re-appearing in D.C. was enough to cause a work stoppage among hop heads, who immediately checked out the Lagerheads' report about Black Squirrel making a beer run to North Carolina.

Their report was our No. 1 item last week. Take a look at how the rest of the Top 5 played out:

1. A Taste of Home for The Lagerheads: New Belgium Beer Available at the Black Squirrel (*)
2. D.C. Brings Home the Hardware from Beard Awards (media edition)
3. Chefs and the Mothers Who Influenced Them
4. D.C. Chefs and Restaurants Come Home Empty-Handed at the Beard Awards
5. Rebel Heroes May Already Be the Best Food Truck on the Streets

* A certain light-drinking Budweiser beer was, once again, a popular item among readers, but we’ve stopped counting it.

OK,I know I said on Friday that Y&H was finished with our short hymn to a mother's influence on chefs, but late yesterday, Mark Furstenberg, a man of some renown, wrote a moving tribute to his mum and her kitchen skills. You need to read it, and not just because it's a 71-year-old chef praising his mother, who's nearing her 100th birthday. This is a missive from another era:

My mother will reach her 100th birthday on May 20th and she is in very good shape. That fact alone would seem to vindicate her cooking (as well as her genes and her will and her energy).

I was one of six children. We were an eating family. We ate dinner together; we even ate breakfast together. And although our food was influenced by my father's having been born in Sweden (herring and knaeckebrot for breakfast), my mother made the food decisions.

She came from a somewhat aristocratic German-Jewish family and her mother didn't cook. Her family's meals were prepared by Miss Hen (one generation out of Slavery) followed by Bobbelee who started working for my grandparents when she was 15 years old. (She lied about her age.) My mother may never have turned on a stove until the War.

But in 1942 my father was assigned to Florida and my mother had to learn to cook. Happily she had an aptitude.

Our family dinners were simple — it was a time of simple food. I have memories from the War when rationing demanded from even experienced cooks a level of ingenuity that our affluence today has made entirely unnecessary. We didn't have meat very much; we certainly didn't have butter. But even without ingredients easily obtainable now we ate very well.

It was in the Fifties that my mother's cooking flourished. She used to describe meals as "the flower of my art." Scallops, pot roast, Swedish meatballs, Beef Stroganoff, always vegetables simply cooked, nearly always potatoes that my father loved, salads, and desserts. We ate well. The dinner table was chaotic. Six children, all eaters, my father trying to tell stories from his workday, my mother trying to gather our attention for my father. She was the cook; she was the mistress of ceremonies.

"Mom," someone (usually me) would say, "We just had lamb." And my mother would bolt from her chair and bring back from the kitchen her notebook, look through it to say, "We haven't had lamb since March 10th."

It's sad that what we have exists so little now. Dinner wasn't always joyful. My sister (Carla Cohen, owner of Politics and Prose) regularly knocked over her water glass and, in anticipation of my father's disapproval, would begin to cry.

But whether joyful or not, stormy or not, our dinner was a family time, the most important family time. And always my mother was in charge.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

As a coda to our short hymn to a mother's influence on chefs and restaurateurs, I turn to Cathal Armstrong, chef and owner of this year's Best Restaurant.

Here's what Armstrong had to say about his "mam":

My father usually did most of the cooking. But when my mother made her pies — that rocked my world.

She would send us out to pick the 'blackers' blackberries from the side of the road. My brothers and I would eat most of them before we even made it home. Mam would have the pastry ready to go — one of my fondest memories of my mother cooking.

Eve and Eamonn have taken up the tradition back in Dublin, picking 'blackers' by the roadside.

In Round One of this Mother's Day exercise, Y&H focused mostly on chefs. This time around, two restaurateurs and a food writer discuss the influence their mums had on their career choice. Or didn't.

Former WaPo food writer Kim O'Donnel:

I didn't learn to cook from my mom who had 3 kids at 28 in 1971 and who was mesmerized by the marvels of instant mashed potatoes and Steak-umms. PopTarts for breakfast, anyone?

That said, Mom taught me how to color outside the lines and appreciate color, texture, and how not to make a pot of coffee.

Restaurateur Jackie Greenbaum, who co-owns Jackie's and Quarry House in Silver Spring:

My mother was one of 8 girls, poor, Italian, and raised near Lincoln Park in DC. She was a great cook. Above all she taught me to be picky about ingredients, to cook simply and boldly, and to never under season. I grew up in Wheaton and remember her weekly ritual of stopping by Marchone's to pick up freshly grated Romano cheese, homemade sausages, etc. Her repertoire also included DC "country" cooking, which I relished. Outside of the occasional trip to Parkway Deli for lox, eggs and onions (I'm Jewish, too), our family Sunday breakfast was the same every week: fried green tomatoes, eggs basted in bacon fat over onions sauteed in bacon fat, hash browns, bacon, sausage patties, and a stack of Wonder bread toasted and buttered about 12 slices high on a plate.

One last anecdote that has served me throughout my lifetime. She confessed to me once that she learned how to modify many of her best recipes to be cooked in no more than 30 minutes so that when my dad came home from work he would think she had slaved over the stove all day when in fact she'd been at the golf course.

Matt Ashburn, co-owner of Capital City Diner:

Some of my fondest memories are of large family meals in southern Virginia, where everyone got together for the holidays to socialize, reflect, and enjoy each other's company over a plate of comfort food. Mom and grandma both cook honest-to-goodness southern dishes, usually from scratch (especially grandma), and we try to feature some of those styles at Capital City Diner. From homemade meatloaf to grilled pork chops to Dixie-style slaw dogs to seasoned collard greens, we take great effort to prepare good home-cooked meals...Just like mom (and grandma) would.

A good number of our recipes are, in fact, family recipes that we have adapted for the restaurant. The best example is Pat's mom's meatloaf, which has become the most popular dinner platter we serve.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Perhaps José Andrés can help. The ever-expanding celebrity chef (as in empire, not girth) just shared his flan recipe with OpenTable.com, which has its own blog now.  Andrés claims that he "serves his mother's flan recipe at Jaleo," but then provides a recipe that is "in my mother's style." He even, in a nice moment of simultaneously praising and criticizing his mama's flan, writes:

My mother Marisa’s flan is imperfect, but I love it. Like all good Spanish mothers, she cooks her flan in an oven that gets too hot, creating small air bubbles in what should be a perfectly smooth and creamy dessert. Yet each of those bubbles takes me back to the Sunday lunches of my childhood, when me and my brothers would try to slurp up a flan in one glorious mouthful. This recipe is inspired by my mother’s flan, but the results are even better.

OpenTable has the full recipe here, if you're so inclined to serve flan on Mother's Day.

Calling Dr. Freud. Calling Dr. Freud. We may have an Oedipal patient for you.

For other Mother's Day suggestions, Y&H turns you to the Washingtonian's brunch guide and Open Table's listings.