Asylum, R.I.P. [Prince of Petworth]

José Andrés ranks No. 41 among the "50 Most Powerful People in Washington." His restaurant Minibar, you'll recall, ranks No. 1 in our book. [GQ]

Former Galileo III chef Roberto Donna has skipped town for Scottsdale, Ariz., carrying more than a little baggage. [WaPo]

Sommelier smackdown! Professional oenophiles Theo Rutherford of Fiola, Brent Kroll of Adour and Eli Benchimol of Chef Geoff's, among others, will compete in a "race of the taste" at the International Wine & Food Festival next month. [NBC Washington]

Is your server drunk right now? [Grub Street]

Photo courtesy of Galileo III

Now Open: Finally, after years of different businesses eyeing the former and long-shuttered McDonald's space in Cleveland Park, Tackle Box has opened and will serve "favorites like the popular lobster rolls, grilled trout and fried and grilled calamari while incorporating new steamed seafood offerings and straight-from-the-water menu items." [via release]

Field Report: Over on Barracks Row, Senart's Oyster & Chop House has been packed. "Just try getting a seat at the bar during happy hour." [WeLoveDC]

Debts to Arlington Coffers: Most local restaurateurs and franchise owners who owe Arlington County overdue taxes are making progress on their payments. While Roberto Donna continues to "make small court-ordered payments on his $150,715.96 debt," a Quiznos location near the Virginia Square Metrorail station saw its debt increase as four other franchise owners have been paying down what they owe. "That makes Quiznos the most delinquent chain in Arlington (by number of restaurants)." [ARLNow]

Planned: Local bagelry Bethesda Bagels will be moving into Dupont Circle. [WBJ]

Photo by Flickr user La Chiquita using an Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic Creative Commons license

Noble Mobiles: Local standouts Curbside Cupcakes and Sâuçá listed among best food trucks nationwide. (City Paper readers tend to disagree.) [Delish via The Feast]

Local Mixologist Shakes Things Up:  Another staffer jumps ship at Roberto Donna's Galileo III [WaPo]

A Spike in Notoriety: Reality TV stars credit reality TV for bolstering D.C.'s food scene. [Glittarazzi]

First Class Dining: The old U.S. Post Office building at 1407 T Street NW is slated to become a  "casual and relaxed bistro restaurant serving an extensive Saturday & Sunday brunch..." [PoP]

Photo by Joseph Barillari/Creative Commons Attribution License

That's some progress, but there's still a long way to go for the Galileo III chef and home cooking instructor.

It's Monday, so let's get straight to the news ...

• The space occupying the former Mar de Plata restaurant at 1827 Jefferson Place NW will soon be transformed to house St. Arnold's of Jefferson Place, a Belgian restaurant and pub. (Prince of Petworth)
• Alejandra Owens takes a holiday stroll through the Dupont Circle FreshFarm Market and lives to tell about it! (Borderstan)
• Old-school baking twine and donut-shaped donut makers? Yeah, these are just a few holiday gift ideas from the Cakespy herself for that baker in your family. (Serious Eats)
• In a Justice League-esque kind of move, the owners of Cava will be joining forces with the owners of Mamma Lucia in order to open Sugo Macaroni and Pizza Bar in Potomac early next spring. (Bethesda magazine)
• Maybe, just maybe, fruitcake isn't the most awful thing in this world. Liz Stevenson gives readers her tips on how to actually enjoy eating the holiday treat. (Northern Virginia magazine)
• In some rather sad and unfortunate news, Petworth's beloved Sweet Mango Cafe experienced a fire over the weekend causing "moderate damage" and thankfully no injuries. (Prince of Petworth)
• It's the most wonderful time of the year: where to get your candy cane martinis, Crown Royal gingersnaps, and a whole slew of other festive holiday cocktails. (Northern Virginia magazine)
• Looks like Roberto Donna may have some more trouble ahead of him: A judge ordered the Galileo III chef to pay $527,000 in back pay, damages, and legal fees to 12 workers who have sued him over the previous two decades. (WaPo)
• Completely out of gift ideas? How about a D.C. Metro Chocolate Tour? This two-and-a-half hour walking tour will cover a good deal of the District's decadent landscape, hitting spots such as Biagio Fine Chocolates, Hello Cupcake, and Chocolate Chocolate. (Thrillist)
• Girl Meets Food gives us her rundown of winter comfort foods for the cold nights ahead of us. S'mores by the Ritz-Carlton of Georgetown's fireplace anyone? (Girl Meets Food)
• The Arlington Rooftop Bar and Grill in Courthouse opened today and is currently seating its first customers. The actual rooftop component will not be ready for patrons until early spring however. (ARLnow)

Photo courtesy of Cava.

The editors promptly tore it apart, word by word. I’m not sure how many editors had a say on my first draft, but it felt like management was treating my Y&H debut as the journalistic equivalent of a tackling dummy. I figured it was a test of my mettle, particularly when an editor told me I wasn’t brilliant enough to use metaphors. I couldn’t tell if he was bullshitting, but I knew for certain that if I were to survive as the City Paper food columnist, I was going to need to develop thicker skin. This was no place for wallflowers who want to craft their prose in monk-like solitude, guided only by their “muse” and some arch, overly precious sense of the food world. The editors stood steadfastly against preciousness on all fronts.

Half a decade later, I look back on the edit of that first column (sample comments: “Fuck this; I hate this equivocation. Forget what I said up top about you keeping a strong POV throughout this piece” and “I don’t give a flying fuck what your entrée was!”) with a mix of nostalgia and bile-churning, spit-hurling anger, which was probably the whole point. Editors had time back then to find your pressure points and see if, by pressing them, they could make you a better writer and reporter.

Don’t worry. I’m not going to turn my farewell column into some sentimental, revisionist claptrap about how journalism needs more editors who treat their reporters like Bo Pelini treats his star quarterback. No, I’m just reflecting back on how much things have changed in five years, starting with the very job I’m leaving. Back in February 2006, when I officially became the paper’s next Young & Hungry, I wrote exactly one column a week. I went through at least three drafts on each column. I answered further questions from the copy desk. I didn’t blog at all. We didn’t even have a blog at City Paper. And today? Well, let’s just say I miss the old work load.

The food and dining scene has experienced its own growing pains. Consider that in late 2005:

• Washingtonians had a president who never visited restaurants. George W. Bush was content to sit in the White House, choking down pretzels while watching football. By contrast, Washington now has a president who has stopped at some of the area’s most recognizable restaurants, both high and low end, from Komi to Five Guys Burgers & Fries. In one instance, the president’s visit propelled a popular eatery, Ray’s Hell Burger, into the stratosphere. Owner Michael Landrum was forced to put his planned seafood restaurant on hold and expand the Hell Burger empire. That’s a good problem for a local restaurateur to have.

• The District boasted restaurants by Todd English and Charlie Palmer, but our biggest celebrity chef was a Frenchman, Michel Richard, who dared to base his operations in D.C. In the intervening years, chefs of varying celeb status have decided to throw up a restaurant and drill down into our wallets. On one end you have a TV-generated, semi-celebrity like Spike Mendelsohn who has also made D.C. his home, while on the other, you have a Michelin-star hoarder like Alain Ducasse who thought he’d send some emissaries down to D.C. and start cashing in on his considerable reputation. There are benefits on both sides of this star spectrum, but there are also sinkholes. Some of these culinary carpetbaggers take dining dollars (and sometimes kitchen talent) away from the home team.

Michel Richard

• Roberto Donna still had his Galileo empire. He not only had the flagship restaurant, but also the Osteria and the Laboratorio. He was also hawking grilled sandwiches on the sidewalk outside of Galileo. Five years and one failed restaurant later, the chef returned to D.C. with a storm cloud over his head. He owes taxes to Arlington County, owes money to former employees, and owes the people a better accounting of his abuse of public money.

• H Street NE was a great spot for fried whiting and a tall boy. No strip has changed as much as this patch of Northeast. The Ohio Restaurant was one of the early pioneers on H Street, hawking chef-driven soul food from a ragged outpost at H and 14th streets. But other dining destinations soon popped up. Granville Moore’s, Taylor Gourmet, Sticky Rice, Liberty Tree, Biergarten Haus, H Street Country Club, The Atlas Room. These (and others yet to come) are turning the street into a dining destination. Imagine what the area will be like once the city completes that goddamn streetcar project.

• Unless you count those motorized hot dog wagons down by the National Mall, the District didn’t have a single food truck. D.C.’s streets have made a remarkable turnaround in the past two years, breaking the death grip of the depot owners who have controlled the city’s curbside eats for decades. If and when the D.C. Council ever passes new vendor regulations, you can expect to see even more variety on our streets. I know for certain that Kushi, my current favorite for Japanese cooking, plans to launch a yakitori truck in D.C. But what the District really needs, as a colleague recently pointed out, is a gourmet coffee truck. Nick Cho, are you listening? Have you paid off your tax bill yet?

• The craft beer craze was just in its embryonic phase in the District. We had brewpubs, of course, but if you wanted to sample the best of the world’s craft beer, you pretty much had to give your money to Dave and Diane Alexander, whether at the Brickskeller in Dupont or Regional Food and Drink in Chinatown. These days? You can’t wander the streets without running face-first into a Dogfish Head tap. Craft beers are everywhere. Rustico (two locations now, with perhaps more to come), CommonWealth Gastropub, Pizzeria Paradiso (three locations), Meridian Pint, Brasserie Beck, Granville Moore’s, Black Squirrel, Restaurant 3, and the mother of all beer emporiums, ChurchKey, have transformed D.C. into suds city.

• Peter Chang and Fabio Trabocchi were still cooking in area kitchens. At the time, Chang was mesmerizing diners at TemptAsian Cafe in Alexandria, while Trabocchi was blowing away patrons with his gourmet takes on Italian cooking at Maestro in Tysons Corner. Within two years, both Chang and Trabocchi were gone. But after a rollercoaster ride in New York City, Trabocchi is returning next year to open Fiola in the former Le Paradou space in Penn Quarter. And Chang? Well, after forcing his fans to follow him around the country like jilted lovers, the chef has apparently settled down in Charlottesville, where he’s scheduled to open Peter Chang China Grill in January. Has anyone started a pool yet to see how long it lasts?

• The Washington area had only three four-star restaurants, according to Tom Sietsema’s 2005 Dining Guide. They were Maestro, Citronelle, and the Inn at Little Washington. Sietsema’s latest Dining Guide listed five four-star performers. Citronelle and the Inn made repeat appearances on the list, joined by Komi, Rasika, and Restaurant Eve. A previous four-star restaurant, CityZen in the Mandarin Oriental, was nowhere to be found on Sietsema’s 2010 survey. No one can accuse the critic of ratings creep at the top end.

• The boutique pizza market had two main players: Pizzeria Paradiso and 2Amys (OK, and maybe Ella’s). The pie options today are stupefying, a reminder that the recession continues to force many restaurateurs into safe, cheap, and consumer-friendly choices. The new pizzerias are too numerous to mention, but here’s one indication of how ridiculous our pie market is today: Not one but two Frenchmen have opened pizza joints (Pizze in Woodley Park, and Seventh Hill in Capitol Hill), no doubt generating a small forest of raised eyebrows among the Gallic community, which tends to view Italian cuisine as something to feed the family pet.

• There was no Urban Daddy, no Thrillist, no Tasting Table, no TBD, no NBC Feast, and damn few bloggers ambitious enough to fight for every scoop that used to land like a butterfly onto the lap of print journalists. The competition for information today is fiercer than ever.

With this week’s column, I’m ending a City Paper tenure that has had its own mood swings. My beat and responsibilities have had to evolve and expand to reflect a changing media environment as well as a changing culinary one. This is the truth of modern journalism. We must find new ways to look at old subjects. We must venture beyond our usual circles to find the next person who wants to revolutionize what we eat. Anyone in my line of work knows that food can never, ever be treated like something too precious to withstand tough scrutiny. But my time at the paper, from that brutal first edit back in the one-column-a-week days to the radical shifts in job responsibilities that accompanied the old news media’s discovery of the Internet proves that we dead-tree types are more adaptable than you think.

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

Photos by Darrow Montgomery

So let's score Ask Roberto!

No. 1: The first question out of the gate for Donna (and the whole Ask Tom chat) is sort of a snoozer: "How are today's restaurant customers different than say customers from the 1980's or mid 1990's?"

Donna responds with an appropriate answer:

Yes, guests nowdays are much more aware of good food and service. I think is a very good thing because it pushes us (chefs) to perform at our best every day, even if it is very difficult to do that, every day.

Guests also blog and tweet up a storm these days! Donna's first question was a softball, but that was to be expected, no?

Praises customers, tells them they've grown smarter: +2

No. 6: The first controversial question came pretty quickly in the chat:

[Y]our conviction for [t]ax evasion troubles me on multiple levels. As a Arlingtion resident and a past diner at Bebo can you tell me what you are doing to make amends? Being a responsible partner in the community is just as critical to me as the quality of your cooking. A response will be appreciated. I wish you luck on your new venture.

Donna takes a few cues from Crisis Communications 101: Move forward!

Thank you for your concerns. That's why I am here working hard and being responsible person and working on repaying and making amends. People learn from their mistakes, let's not dwell on the past and looking forward to a brighter responsible future!!

How was his response?

No direct apology: -3
Uses the phrase "brighter responsible future": +1

No. 8: Oh, a question about localish Italian cooking, "[p]referably close to Baltimore" that tastes like mom's.

Donna's response is a crowd-pleaser, but not particularly helpful:

First of all nobody will ever cook like your mother...Everybody's mom is the best and we can't compete with that!!

Next time you are in the DC area please come and see us!

Overall, he fell flat on this question.

Assumes your mother's cooking is great: -2
Projects D.C. arrogance, pretends Baltimore doesn't exist: 0

No. 11: A wine question about a "disappointing Dolcetto." In Las Vegas! How can the chatter rectify the situation?

Donna has an answer! "Next time please try a Dolcetto di Dogliani from Chionnetti and then let me know...."

Helpful response: +1
Wants feedback from chatter: +1

No. 14: Here comes a question that references Donna's tax troubles. "Do your financial problems have any bearing on your cooking? That is, do you use different, cheaper ingredients? Does the cloud stifle your creativity at all?"

His answer, more or less, is a rehashing of his response to No. 6:

My cooking and my passion for food is my forte and now I can just concentrate in what I do best cooking and scope for great ingredients. Getting back to the kitchen is my home and I feel great there!

How'd he do?

Recycled talking point: -1

No. 15: Someone sure has an ax to grind about "jaw-droppingly bad service" in the Donna restaurant empire! This question details how "three requests for silverware" were ignored at the now-shuttered Bebo Trattoria.

These types of dining chat questions are annoying, so we have sympathy for Donna for having to answer it. "We all train very hard every day our employees and ensure that service and food will be just like in Italy."

Dealing with the ax-grinder: +1
Assuming all food and service in Italy is good: -1

No. 19: Somebody wants to know if the grilled lunchtime sandwiches are coming back. Me too, those were tasty!

Sadly, they will not be returning.

Delivers bad news with grace: +1

No. 20: This should be good: "From the restaurateur perspective, what makes a good customer?"

Donna:

I think to be a good customer is not based on the amount of money that you spend but your willingness to embrace the experience of the restaurant that you are dining in.

Oh, doesn't that sound nice?

Warm and fuzzy response: +1

No. 27: Donna answered a question about his favorite soup or stew. "My favorite soup for a weather like today, there is nothing like the chestnut soup." Although the question was soup or stew, not soup and stew, Donna answered both when he didn't have to. His favorite nasty-weather stew is caciucco alla Aretina.

A seasonal response: +1
Going above and beyond: +2

No. 29: Donna gets a question from a seemingly snooty person who travels to "Florence, Rome and Sorrento several times a year." Apparently, there is no good Italian on the East Coast, not even Donna's!

Personally, I really wised Donna would have ripped into this guy, just because. Instead, we got a "I really don't agree on your statement" and "I would like personally to invite for you to come to have dinner and discuss the food that I will preparing for you."

Lost opportunity to show up Mr. I Travel to Sorrento Several Times a Year: -1

Let's Cut to the Chase:

At this point, Donna seems to be more comfortable. To quicken the scoring process, he gets high marks for how he answered No. 31 (+2) and No. 35. (+2)

He didn't have any terrible response, but plenty of just OK ones: No. 32 (0), No. 33 (0), No. 38 (0), No. 40 (+1), No. 43 (0), No. 50 (0)

Doing the math with our (non) scientific assessment methods, Roberto Donna gets a score of 8, assuming his pre-Ask Roberto rating was at zero. So, he's made some good progress in rehabilitating his image by doing the chat. How much further does he have to go? (No scoring ceiling was set for this exercise.)

The first person? Roberto Donna, D.C.’s accomplished Italian super chef and restaurateur better known these days for pleading guilty to felony embezzlement—and escaping jail time.

For the Post, having Donna on is the dining equivalent of having Tom DeLay wear red pants and dance a samba on Dancing With the Stars! It will generate instant buzz among those who buzz about such things. “…I think the occasional (hopefully regular) extra voices will add a bit of buzz to these weekly conversations,” Sietsema wrote on Nov. 17.

A “bit of buzz?” How about a heaping helping of buzz?

When Sietsema announced Donna’s upcoming chat appearance, a few readers asked some pointed questions. Take this for example:

Wow!! You're starting off big. Will you publish the angry posts from the old employees and creditors? I'm guessing they will come flooding in.

Or this:

Will Roberto be taking questions on how to evade Federal income taxes. [C]ommit Federal felonies and avoid serious jail time? I would like to nknow [sic] how to this as would many PG county pols and residents. You are the man Tom!

Sietsema’s responses:

I think Mr. Donna can expect some heat, but I hope we can keep the discussion civilized. … Um, no one has any questions on how he likes to serve white truffles? It's the season, you know.

Truffles? Hmmm, maybe somebody could ask Donna whether that casino mogul in Macau was crazy for paying $330,000 for two truffles? What is the best way to prepare a six-figure truffle, anyways?

Anyhow, here are some of my questions for Mr. Donna. Feel free to add yours in the comments.

Have you ever waited in line for pasta at Pasta Mia in Adams Morgan? If so, is it worth the wait?

Your new restaurant, Galileo III, is located very close to the Wilson Building. It is conceivable that Ward 8 Councilmember and former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry could wander on in for lunch or dinner. What do you think of his track record of tax problems?

Arlington County has a bustling restaurant scene. You were once part of it! Do you have any desire to do business again across the river in Arlington?

When you used to serve those tasty grilled sandwiches for lunch out of your old place on 21st Street NW, was it really cash only? I can’t remember. (Your sandwiches were tasty, though!)

Submit your questions to Roberto here. We’ll see what questions make the cut and score Donna’s performance on Wednesday!

Photo of Galileo III by Darrow Montgomery

Y&H doesn’t have the bona fides to judge where on the spectrum between actual political rally and Yuksapalooza Saturday’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” will fall. But he does know there will be plenty of hungry out-of-towners combing through guide books and looking for advice on where to eat. The last thing you’d want, as a Jon Stewart fan, is to end up at an establishment better suited to the Colbert Nation. Thankfully, Y&H is here to help.

Below are a number of the District’s tourist-approved dining spots. Y&H has taken the liberty of labeling which ones are more suitable for Daily Show devotees and which ones cater to the church of The Colbert Report.

• Celebrity chef restaurants

Washington, D.C., is the new Vegas, at least in terms of celebrity chefs, who have decided our money is as green as Sin City’s even if they can’t legally spend it on hookers here. In the past few years, Eric Ripert (Westend Bistro), Wolfgang Puck (The Source), Alain Ducasse (Adour), Michael Mina (Bourbon Steak), and Jean-Georges Vongerichten (J&G Steakhouse) have all opened up shop in the District. They have one thing in common: A Stephen Colbert-like belief in their sheer brilliance, a combination of talent and hubris that makes them think they can go into anyone’s neighborhood and take over the place.

Westend Bistro, 1190 22nd St. NW, (202) 974-4900

The Source, 575 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, (202) 637-6100

Adour, 923 16th St. NW, (202) 509-8000

Bourbon Steak, 2800 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, (202) 944-2026

J&G Steakhouse, 1515 15th St. NW, (202) 661-2440

• Ray’s Hell Burger

President Obama has made two stops (and counting) at Michael Landrum’s Arlington patty parlor, but those trips alone do not place Hell Burger in the Daily Show camp, given Stewart’s repeated criticisms of the president. No, what does the trick is the fact that Landrum, like Stewart, refuses to align himself with any particular cause or constituency, except for one. With Stewart, the cause is comedy. With Landrum, it’s undermining the bloated economics of the restaurant industry.

Ray’s Hell Burger, 1725 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, (703) 841-0001

• Busboys and Poets

Andy Shallal’s chainlet is a bastion of progressive thought and cost-conscious cooking, which alone qualifies it as a dirty little lefty hangout. But take a few steps back from the liberal vortex and peer into Shallal’s macro business plan—there are already three B&P outlets with a fourth coming to Harlem—and you see good ole capitalist empire building. Rupert Murdoch would be proud.

Busboys and Poets, 2021 14th St. NW, (202) 387-7638; 1025 5th St. NW, (202) 789-2227; 4251 S. Campbell Ave., Arlington, (703) 379-9757.

• Five Guys Burgers and Fries

When announcing his rally last month, Stewart told viewers that our political discourse is dominated by loud, divisive, fringe voices on both sides. His Rally to Restore Sanity, he said, would be a chance to “Take It Down a Notch for America.” Similarly, Five Guys, the once-proud burger joint from Northern Virginia, has been taking it down a notch for America even since it started franchising across the country in 2003. Just ask the noted burgerologist Josh Ozersky, who wrote last month: “Five Guys is as bad a burger as there is.”

Check fiveguys.com for locations.

• Galileo III

Roberto Donna may have been the original Tea Bagger. Long before those anti-tax and anti-big government zealots started mailing tea bags to the White House, Donna was staging his own revolt. The entire time he ran Bebo Trattoria in Crystal City, the chef never paid a single dime to Arlington County in meals taxes. When the authorities finally put the screws to Donna, he owed more than $156,000, including penalties and interest. Now Donna has to pay his back taxes or face jail time. Stephen Colbert himself might want to dine at Donna’s new restaurant and shake the chef’s hand for standing up to the man.

Galileo III, 600 14th St. NW, (202) 783-0083

• Food trucks

Maybe Donna should start a food truck in D.C.? As a mobile vendor in the District, he’d have to pay only $1,500 annually in sales tax, compared to the 10 percent shelled out by the brick and mortars for their sales. That’s the kind of tax burden even Colbert could live with. But then again, these food truck operators aren’t exactly fat cats looking for tax loopholes so they can buy a second home in Tahoe for coke-and-stripper parties. Whether selling poutine (Eat Wonky truck) or Maine-style lobster rolls (Red Hook Lobster Pound truck), these vendors are the little guys, fighting the cops, the inline restaurants, and powerful political interests for their right to work the streets. Sounds almost like an immigration problem.

• Birch & Barley/ChurchKey

Beer may have been invented in Mesopotamia and perfected in Belgium many centuries later, but it took good ole American ingenuity to turn the ancient craft into a (draft) arms race. Everyone knows who’s armed to the teeth in the District: ChurchKey, the upstairs bar at the beer-centric Birch & Barley. The joint has more than 50 tap arms and five ales on cask. Colbert would no doubt approve of the gratuitous stockpiling of (non-powder) kegs, laughing in the face of the mutually assured destruction they clearly represent.

Birch & Barley/ChurchKey, 1337 14th St. NW, (202) 567-2576

• Old Ebbitt Grill

Old Ebbitt is indeed old. (It can trace its roots back to 1856.) It makes a ton of money annually. (It was No. 5 on Restaurants & Institutions’ Top 100 Independent Restaurants list, raking in more than $20 million.) It has played host to numerous U.S. presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew Johnson, and Theodore Roosevelt. Likewise, Jon Stewart is old. (OK, he’s 47, old by TV standards.) He makes tons of money. (Forbes pegged his salary in 2009 at $14 million.) And he’s played host to presidents. (Well, he played host to his first sitting president on Wednesday when Barack Obama appeared on The Daily Show.)

Old Ebbitt Grill, 675 15th St. NW, (202) 347-4800

• José Andrés Empire

The District’s most celebrated/prolific/motor-mouthed chef already has four restaurants in Penn Quarter, not including his chemistry experiment within a restaurant (minibar inside Café Atlantico). Andrés also has a strolling gastronomic playground in Los Angeles and plans to open two new places in Las Vegas and another in South Beach. He was profiled on 60 Minutes. GQ named him Chef of the Year in 2009. He has his own PBS series. We get it: José Andrés is everywhere. In fact, he’s almost as ubiquitous as Colbert, who still has one accomplishment that Andrés can’t touch yet: a painting of the faux pundit at the National Portrait Gallery. Curators valued the Colbert portrait to such a degree they hung it where the museum traffic is greatest—near the toilets.

Check thinkfoodgroup.com for locations

• Founding Farmers

Last month, Colbert testified before a House Judiciary subcommittee that, “American farms are presently far too dependent on immigrant labor to pick our fruits and vegetables.” The solution? “Now the obvious answer,” Colbert noted, “is for all of us to stop eating fruits and vegetables.” But how about this, Stephen: Pay a visit to Founding Farmers, the Foggy Bottom restaurant owned by real American farmers. The place strives to source ingredients from “fine, high-quality, family farms,” although a Post investigation later revealed that this category broadly included salmon farmers, those scourges of the environment. No matter. Colbert’s testimony wasn’t always sincere either.

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

• Ben’s Chili Bowl

Regardless of what you think of Ben’s Chili Bowl—I’m always surprised at the vitriol this U Street NW institution can inspire—you have to respect the Ali family for its commitment to keeping their greasy spoon pure. They’ve refused offers to chain the Bowl far and wide, understanding part of what makes Ben’s great is its historic location and vibe. Regardless of what you think of Stewart’s rally on the Mall, the man himself has similar integrity, refusing to compromise his brand for the sake of any one administration. He’s on a crusade to make politics civil. I’ll raise a Ben’s chocolate shake to that.

Ben’s Chili Bowl, 1213 U St. NW, (202) 667-0909

Eatery tips? Food pursuits? Send suggestions to hungry@washingtoncitypaper.com. Or call (202) 650-6925.