Appearing on CBS This Morning, Andrés said he expected more of a mea culpa from Deen but suggested there is plenty of blame to go around, pointing the finger at Food Network, Hollywood, and the sports industrial complex, as well, for contributing to the country's unhealthy eating habits just as much as the Southern fried-chicken diva has.

"It's not like Paula Deen now is the cause of obesity in America," Andrés said.

Check out the full video below:

"It's kinda frantic around here," says the former bartender turned proprietor, explaining that the ongoing construction at the corner of U and 18th Streets NW caused the restaurant's gas to be cut-off for two hours earlier in the day.

The grand opening is planned for a few weeks from now, so there won't be any specials tonight. But the menu has already changed, and Lee says "we're still kind of evolving." The meatloaf and mac and cheese will remain, as Lee instills an even "more of a Southern twist" to Duplex's options, including shrimp 'n' grits and fried green tomatoes.

Opening time? "You can write 7 p.m.," he told me, "just to make sure we're ready."

Photo by Chris Shott

Y&H has been a fan of the Lee Bros. ever since 2006, when I got my hands on their first cookbook, The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook, a hefty tome that was six years in the making.  Well, almost from the day I got my hands on their cookbook.

Four years ago, I didn't know much about the brothers, but something about the cookbook's cover photo — the brothers' wiry, nerdy physiques standing on some classic Charleston piazza — didn't scream "Southern" to me, even with their gingham dress shirts and casual khaki pants. It screamed "poser."

I obviously had a lot to learn about the Lee Bros.

The more I read, the more I liked 'em. No, they weren't Southerners by birth, but by parental fiat: Their parents moved to Charleston when they were young boys. But Matt and Ted Lee didn't sulk about being dragged out of God's gift to urbanites, otherwise known as New York City. They took to Charleston culture like, to use a Southern phrase, water off a duck's back.

In fact, the brothers became so fond of their adopted hometown that in 1994, when they were back in New York and struggling with their post-collegiate careers in a cramped apartment, they got a hankering for boiled peanuts. They, of course, couldn't find any in the Big Apple, so they secured a 50-pound bag of raw peanuts from a Bronx wholesaler and starting a-boilin'. Check out their remembrance of that day from Southern Cookbook:

Within minutes of our return, the apartment began to fill with steam that smelled like hay, sweet potatoes, and tea; about eight hours later, we were cracking the peanut shells, with brine running over our hands, and slurping the nuts down. Their earthy, beanlike flavor, in that cramped room overlooking the heroin dealers and hipsters on Ludlow Street, conjured up the creek banks and marshes south of Charleston. The feeling of having cheated geography through food was exhilarating.

The brothers would soon find themselves in the unlikely position of being a two-man distribution company, bringing boiled peanuts, sorghum syrup, and other Lowcountry staples to lonely Southern transplants around the world. That business would lead to another unforseen career choice: food writing, which, as you can tell from the passage above, the brothers do extremely well.

Their Southern Cookbook is a delight to read, not just cook from. There are personal memories, historical anecdotes, and exacting recipes.  There is also a basic understanding that most people are bipolar about food: Sometimes they want indulgence, sometimes they just want good food fast. The brothers give it to you both ways.

I haven't got my hands on their latest cookbook, The Lee Bros. Simple, Fresh, Southern, but I will soon. (You can learn more about the cookbook in the video above.) Perhaps I'll pick one up on Tuesday, April 6, when the brothers host a Smithsonian Associates program at S. Dillon Ripley Center,
1100 Jefferson Dr. SW.

If Young & Hungry readers would like to attend, Smithsonian Associates is offering a $10 discount. Go to the Lee Bros. program page and buy your tickets. You'll need to create a login account, if you don't have one already. When you do, punch in this promotional code: 182291. It'll automatically give you the discount.

See you there!

If you ever had any doubts about a dish's ability to cross cultural boundaries, all you need to do is look at the trajectory of chicken and waffles. Once considered a staple of soul-food joints, chicken and waffles has become a fixture at trendy neighborhood operations like Marvin and Creme, where gentrification has ensured that the dish enjoys a much wider audience.

It has even filtered down to genuine suburban haunts like Restaurant 3, the Southern-minded eatery in Clarendon that, believe it or not, does a version of C&W far superior to the one at Marvin. And for $15 a plate on the brunch menu, Restaurant 3 also does it a buck cheaper than Marvin.*

The key to chef Brian Robinson's chicken and waffles is the bird, a generous hunk of (mostly) breast meat that's thickly coated and fried to just the edge of greasiness.  Technically, I believe this is called an airline cut, which seems to be making a comeback in the Baltimore area. Whatever you call it, though, Robinson's bird provides that salty and savory counterpoint to the sweet waffle — not to mention a nice crispy fried-chicken crackle against the soft, syrupy buttermilk pillow.

This dish, in fact, may be the ultimate brunch option. It combines breakfast and lunch in a way that eggs and pancakes can't begin to touch.

* Correction: The brunch (and not dinner) price for Marvin's chicken and waffles is $13, which makes it $2 cheaper than Restaurant 3's.

One by one, we’re running through the 50 restaurants that made the cut on this year’s

The influx of celebrity chefs to D.C. can excite local diners, but it can deflate local chefs, who see these carpetbaggers stealing their customers, their line cooks, maybe even their thunder. Back in 2007, before Eric Ripert or Michael Mina or even Alain Ducasse opened doors here, chef R.J. Cooper at Vidalia was one of the reigning badasses in the kitchen, fresh off his Mid-Atlantic Beard Award, which he split with Frank Ruta at Palena. But if Cooper and/or Vidalia have suffered since these culinary hawks have swooped into town, you wouldn’t know it from eating at this downtown institution. Cooper, in fact, seems to be cooking with a renewed passion since the competition increased. My most recent meal at Vidalia included a number of dishes that blew me away, notably a pigtail croquette with strawberry-rhubarb mostarda and an artistic plate of mix-and-match bites, from raw cubes of hamachi to squares of lime gelee to tiny diced pieces of watermelon to little slivers of jalapeño. Cooper even plated something I had never seen before—a deep-fried blowfish from the lower Chesapeake, commonly known as the “sugar toad.” It tasted a thousand times better than the name would suggest.

 Vidalia, 1990 M St. NW, (202) 659-1990

Chef Rusty Holman, the chef at Eatonville

My tablemate and I are sitting at a two-top by the large picture window at Eatonville, which provides a semi-comfortable, climate-controlled view of the parade of mini-skirts and flesh that walks up and down the bustling 14th Street NW corridor.  We're half way through our appetizers when the food runner brings our entrees. She seems oblivious to the fact that we're still eating our first course; she's also a little slow on the basic laws of physics. Our tiny table barely contains all the plates she has just unceremoniously dropped off, her job here done.

The fact is, I really want more time to savor chef Rusty Holman's cheddar tart, this precisely executed savory pastry crammed with white cheddar, roasted tomato, and Vidalia onions, all topped with a weedy garden of microgreens. The tart is the perfect appetizer — balancing flavors and textures and temperatures with the kind of verve seen by circus bears on bicycles. (I mean that in the best way possible, really.)

The tart gives me hope that owner Andy Shallal, better known for his playpens for bleeding hearts, has indeed picked the right person to lead Eatonville's kitchen following his ill-fated chef-search contest. But then we dig into those entrees waiting for us on the table's edge. My "crispy chicken breast" is an odd almalgamation of fried and smothered chicken, a hulking piece of breast meat, dry and flavorless underneath its thick coating, which is not redeemed by its mushroom gravy. The "fish and grits" is a plate brimming with fried catfish, bland and muddy, which provides little satisfication without a generous scoop of jalapeno-cheddar grits to accompany it.

I would like to report that I could wash away the bad taste in my mouth with my Blue Lemon Drop, but I can't stomach another swallow of the cocktail, which goes down like sugary, blueberry-scented serum. Instead, I'm left to drink in the wild ambiance of Shallal's Eatonville, an homage to Zora Neale Hurston, which feels like Tobacco Road meets the antebellum charm of Gone with the Wind meets the post-radical elements of commercial graffiti art. I have to say, I'm quite fond of the interior-design mashup.

Scratch that.

During a phone conversation yesterday, Ziebold said that South by Southwest, which replaces Cafe MoZU at the Mandarin Oriental, wouldn't open until September. The problem, Ziebold said, is that the original designer envisioned a "bold, bright" space. Unfortunately, that wasn't Ziebold's vision.

"We were looking to make a statement by not making a statement. You know what I mean?" Ziebold told Y&H. "I'm a less-is-more kind of person...It wasn't going in that direction."

But it took the SXSW team six weeks to pull the plug on the first designer, Ziebold said. The new designer, based in Los Angeles, is working out far better, helping put together a space that doesn't feel so designed, the chef added.

Still, the new designers have run into delays, too, whether learning that the curtain fabric they originally wanted was no longer in production or trying to design custom-made china for South by Southwest. The china maker is apparently based in Colombia, Ziebold said. "So the process of getting samples is not exactly efficient," he deadpans.

Photo courtesy of the Mandarin Oriental

Ziebold was not at all defensive. He even agreed with my basic premise: that MoZU's new name, South by Southwest, said more about the hotel where the restaurant is housed than the cuisine itself, which presumably will funnel Eastern Shore flavors. But he wanted me to understand where he was coming from. His concept, as you might expect from the City Paper's top toque, was pretty well thought out.

If you walk outside the hotel, he says, and into the D.C. neighborhood that is SW, you start to get a sense the slower pace that once marked this sleepy Southern town. You might feel it down at the Maine Avenue Fish Market, where folks still haggle over the price of rockfish, or along the Tidal Basin, where you can still take a leisurely walk.

South by Southwest will capture, in part, "this mindset of Southern hospitality and Southern ease and comfort, but in Southwest Washington," Ziebold says.

Photo courtesy of Mandarin Oriental

Note: Busboys & Poets owner Andy Shallal is taking an Iron Chef approach to hiring the chef for his forthcoming Eatonville, a Southern-oriented restaurant that pays homage to Zora Neale Hurston. This is the second in a series of blog posts chronicling the competition. This series will not announce the winner; it will be revealed later in the City Paper.

After four previous rounds and God knows how many tastings in CulinAerie's smaller classroom, the competition for Eatonville's chef had come down to two men. Both had grown up in the South, which no doubt helped them grasp the cuisine they were expected to prepare, but both chefs also had dramatically different personalities. One had the gift of gab, the other a gift for silence.

Tasked with making the final decision, the judges began to dissect the intangibles—the chefs' personalities, their potential management styles, even their ability to chat up a customer in the dining room. The intangibles had become paramount. When evaluating the two cooks by their food alone, the judges were all but deadlocked. Some liked the talkative toque, some liked the quiet one.

For the final cook-off, owner Andy Shallal asked the men to prepare a signature appetizer, entree, and dessert for Eatonville. The quiet one prepared some stuffed hush puppies, a fried rockfish over greens and vegetables, and bread pudding. The talkative one produced barbecued and fried oysters, blackened flounder with tasso ham and crab, and gingerbread tea cakes with warm pears.

But the talkative one also had stories to share. For his "sweet and spicy" barbecued oysters, he told the judges, "I think we all know that Zora [Neale Hurston] was a sweet and spicy person." He went on to talk about Hurston's connection to the Southern coast, where the sea would offer up its bounty to satisfy her appetite. His dessert was even inspired by the character, Tea Cake, in Hurston's novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

The judges ate that stuff up.

The stories would prove important in the final analysis of the chefs. "I loved the story," said Carla Hall, the former Top Chef contestant. "Can you imagine having little stories on the menu?"

Besides,  dining out is "an experience," Hall added. "How will I be different after I come to this place?" She thought the talkative toque's stories would show people "what happens in the chef's head," a sort of inside look into the creative process.

Fellow judge Mike Curtin, CEO for D.C. Central Kitchen, also picked up on the stories. Curtin felt they showed the chef was putting the Eatonville concept before his own ego. "It's clear that [the chef] is cooking for this restaurant. He's not cooking to show off."

But the true turning point likely came when Pamela Pinnock, director of marketing for Busboys & Poets, pulled a flip-flop worthy of John Kerry. Throughout the contest, Pinnock had supported the quiet one. No, in fact, she had done more than that. She had sang his praises throughout the competition.

She changed her tune.

"This was more than a competition of cooking," Pinnock said. This was a contest in which the chefs were supposed to be inspired by Hurston's life and, specifically, by her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The talkative chef "followed the assignment and executed the assignment best," Pinnock added. "So I'd have to say it's [that chef] for those reasons."

Shallal had made up his mind. He called the two chefs into the judges' room and apologized for "slightly" misleading them in his initial employment ad, which didn't offer specifics about the grueling contest. Then he dropped the final bomb.

The quiet chef was toast.

The quiet one showed poise in defeat. He shook the winner's hand and even placed his hand on the victor's shoulder, a sign of friendship in loss.

As for the winner, he mostly felt relief. He had been searching for a gig "for a long time."

"I have a job," he said matter-of-factly. "That's good."

[Note: The winner's name and more details on the contest will be revealed later in the City Paper.]

Note: Busboys & Poets owner Andy Shallal is taking an Iron Chef approach to hiring the chef for his forthcoming Eatonville, a Southern-oriented restaurant that pays homage to Zora Neale Hurston. This is the second in a series of blog posts chronicling the competition. This series will not announce the winner; it will be revealed later in the City Paper.

The chef, one of five left standing in Andy Shallal's unorthodox hiring process, didn't waste a second letting the judges know that he had absorbed their criticisms from the previous round. He had taken the fuss out of his Southern-minded food. "The tutu came off," he told the judges.

Then he rolled out his menu for this third round of competitive cooking, which required the chefs to plate some vegetarian dishes. Mr. No Tutu served up a vegetable pot pie, creamed corn, a root-vegetable gratin, a casserole, and a salad with grilled shrimp and green goddess dressing. These descriptions, however, were just rough outlines.

Mr. No Tutu's gratin, for example, was this gorgeous, puff-pastrylike stack of mandoline-sliced turnips, parsnips, potatoes, and sweet potatoes. His casserole was a delicate combination of yellow squashes and wild mushrooms. His creamed corn was creamless. His salad included tiny golden cubes of spiced peach gelee. But it was his pot pie that truly confounded the judges. It wasn't traditional at all. His vegetable-loaded liquid came with an accompanying piece of sweet-potato flatbread, a thin plane that rested on the edge of the bowl, where it was easy to overlook as a vital part of the dish.

"I think he would have done better to call it a hearty vegetable stew," one judge noted while the chefs loitered in the kitchen at CulinAerie, the downtown cooking school where the Eatonville competition took place. "It's not a pot pie."

"Maybe he doesn't know what one is," another judge chimed in.

Two other judges thought the pot pie was too thin and watery; they apparently wanted more thickeners. Some also wanted to see a real, honest-to-goodness crust on that baby.

It was around this time that I broke with all professional decorum and expressed my admiration for the chef's work. I told the judges who cared to listen that it was a sort of deconstructed pot pie, and while it may be too fussy for a place like Eatonville, it was absolutely delicious. The liquid was closer to a delicate, creamy bechamel than a pot-pie gravy; it had none of the usual heavy-starch content of such a pie. Plus, I thought the sweet-potato flatbread thingy added just the right amount of sweetness to the savory soup.

My thoughts really didn't change their minds much, which was good. I should have just shut up, but I couldn't help it. That poor pot pie needed a defender.

When the chefs entered the judges' room for the final verdict, one of the arbiters echoed her earlier comment and told the chef that he should have called his pot pie a "stew or soup...or a take on pot pie."

That's when the chef said the single smartest thing of the day: "I've never had a pot pie that I actually enjoyed," he told the judges. "It always seems like a glutinous bowl of glop."

In the end, the chef didn't need anyone's help. He was at the top, or near the top, of every judge's scorecard. He, along with two other toques, made it to the semi-final round tomorrow, when they will have to prepare a po' boy sandwich as well as a dish (other than gumbo) that incorporates both shrimp and okra. The last two ingredients were apparently favorites of Zora Neale Hurston.

As the day's contest came to an end and the winners were packing up their gear, I stood there with two of the semi-finalists. They were excited. They were also stressing about where to find good okra, since it's not exactly season for the Southern vegetable.