Beer and controversy, controversy and beer. They are the backbone of the Young & Hungry blog. Here's what you've been reading this  week: Budweiser Launches Select 55, Light Beer Arms Race Gets Absurd WTF: Makoto Is Once Again the Top-Rated Restaurant in the Annual Zagat Guide Not So Fast: There's No Deal for a Ray's [...]

Kyle Bailey was shopping for wedding rings with his fiancee at a Jersey City mall last month when he got a call on his cell. He didn't recognize the number, but he decided to take the call anyway. On the other end of the line was Michael Babin, co-owner of Neighborhood Restaurant Group, who was [...]

Birch & Barley/ChurchKey, the long-delayed project from the ever-expanding Neighborhood Restaurant Group empire, should open in September, even though NRG still hasn't hired a chef for the gastropub in the former Dakota Cowgirl space on 14th Street NW. So says Michael Babin, co-owner of NRG. "I say that with all the necessary anxiety and stress," [...]

Former Rustico chef Frank Morales told Tom Sietsema on Friday that he left the Alexandria gastropub because he had done everything he could at the Neighborhood Restaurant Group property. What Morales apparently didn’t tell the Post, though, is that he still has much more to accomplish in the area of beer-related food. "Rustico gave me [...]

While Y&H was peeking into civil court records and poking around a chef contest, others were actually hunting down news about restaurants that are opening and closing. Here's a quick run-down of what we've missed — or what I've missed: Tom Sietsema reports that the guys behind the mini-Matchbox chain are planning a small, personal [...]

I didn't get to Tallula in time to see Nathan Anda do some butchering. But the former Tallula chef, who's heading up the Neighborhood Restaurant Group's cured-meat initiative, Red Apron, had plenty to show me.

Frank Morales III, executive chef at Rustico, is addressing a group of ninth graders from the Minnie Howard campus of T.C. Williams who are considering restaurant careers. "When you get in the restaurant business, it's really cool," he says. "You get to choose where you'll work 80 hours a week." Morales is a natural ham [...]

Ten years after Kris Mullins moved to the Outer Banks, a period of time that saw him going from waiting tables to owning restaurants, he had an epiphany. "There's gotta be more to things than this," he thought. Through his restaurants, he'd gotten the wine bug; he packed it all in, sold the restaurants, and [...]

Josh Short's day began at 4 a.m. The pastry chef at Alexandria's Buzz Bakery arrives as the night crew finishes baking the day's cupcakes. Many of these will be sold at Buzz, but Neighborhood Restaurant Group, which owns Buzz, also wholesales to places like Peregrine Espresso, Misha's in Old Town, and On the Fly. Short [...]

For reasons that don't bear close scrutiny, I found myself last week wandering the streets around Logan Circle on an unseasonably warm afternoon. Like others in the 'hood that day, I pressed my face against the window of the old Dakota Cowgirl space, hoping to see how far construction crews were on the forthcoming Birch [...]