Fargione has made good on his word — to a point. He has just signed a letter of intent to open ELISIR at 427 11th St. NW in the same building at Central Michel Richard and Ten Penh. As promised Fargione will offer two different tasting menus — one with eight courses and another with 12-14 courses — but he'll also provide a la carte options for dinner as well as a $15 bistro lunch.

The restaurant concept expanded and developed "because of the area, and it's developed because of the economy," Fargione tells Y&H. "I had to be completely honest with myself, with what I can and can't do."

The chef says he never wants to dictate to his customers.  He says he doesn't believe in the philosophy: "You eat the way I want or you don't eat...I don't think that's a good way to do business these days."

ELISIR, which is Italian for "elixir," will be located in the space currently occupied by Via Cucina, which will vacate the spot soon. Fargione has hired the design and architecture firm, Grupo 7, to completely renovate the old space. It will be transformed into a 90-seat restaurant with a semi-open kitchen, a bar, a private dining room, and a wine cellar. Both the bar and private dining room will offer an additional 20-25 seats. The kitchen, incidentally, will also become something of a showcase for diners who want to watch the chef and his team work; it will feature HD cameras focused on work stations with feeds going to screens placed above the bar.

Fargione's long-time companion, Julia Saah, who operates her own money management company, will run the financial side of ELISIR, the chef says. Fargione noted, with admirable understatement, that some chefs aren't always so good with managing the financial side of restaurants.

The chef expects to re-introduce a number of modern Italian dishes that he made famous at Teatro, including his smoked branzino carpaccio and his tomato popsicles. He also wants to keep the prices down, or at least down for a restaurant devoted, in large part, to tasting menus. His eight-course menu will run about $75 per person, while the larger, 12-14 course menu will be around $100.

Fargione hopes to have ELISIR open by March of next year.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

R.J. Cooper's "24" tasting menu abruptly ended this month at Vidalia.

Putting together this year's Young & Hungry Dining Guide was an exercise in managing the chaos of the local dining scene. Several places that had all but secured a spot on my list of the 50 most fascinating restaurants — Inox, Teatro Goldoni, and Vidalia — suddenly found themselves on the outs. In Inox's case, it was unavoidable; the fine-dining operation closed after putting up a good fight in this poor excuse of an economy.

In Vidalia's case, R.J. Cooper's abrupt departure threw the kitchen into flux, lowering expectations enough to force me to give the downtown restaurant the boot. I say that even though Jeffrey "Mr. Obsessive" Buben continues to oversee Vidalia, no doubt applying the whip whenever his feverishly high standards are not maintained. But you cannot immediately replace one chef's vision, particularly Cooper's refined one, with another's and expect instant results.

The same holds true for Teatro Goldoni, whose owners gave chef Enzo Fargione his walking papers for doing nothing less than making that dated, commedia dell'arte restaurant relevant again. With Fargione out of the way, Goldoni installed a more casual, rustic Italian menu, which instantly put the K Street institution in the same league as about 1,000 other places.

After bumping these three destinations off the list, I ultimately selected only 10 fine-dining restaurants for this year's guide, which still represents 20 percent of my picks. The rest of the 40 slots have been taken up with casual or neighborhood or even fast-casual operations, which  makes sense. These kinds of eateries continue to multiply like bacteria on raw chicken.

One of the traps of putting together such a guide is to fall under the spell of the new. All the hype that surrounds freshly launched restaurants can distract a critic from the more mature restaurants that still deserve attention. I tried to be aware of that as I compiled this guide.  Seventeen restaurants from last year's list held their spots this time around. Of the 33 other spots, 15 are occupied by restaurants that have opened since the 2009 guide, which means 30 percent of the list features new eateries.

That's an uncomfortably high number for me. So I've decided to list the five veteran restaurants that just missed the cut.

• Corduroy: Chef Tom Power is a master at manipulating seasonal ingredients for maximum flavor.
• Blue Duck Tavern: The hotel restaurant still has one of the best brunches in the city.
• El Pollo Rico: The legion of Super Pollo fans is wrong. Those dry, lackluster birds don't begin to compare to EPR's.
• Poste Moderne Brasserie: Chef Rob Weland has turned his outdoor patio into a backyard farm for his kitchen — not to mention a backyard barbecue with his Poste Roasts.
• Joe's Noodle House: Still my favorite spot for authentic Szechuan cooking.

The top two items last week couldn't be further apart in terms of culinary aspiration, from the high-tech, high-concept imagination behind Enzo Fargione's chef's table at Teatro Goldoni to the Cereal Bowl's milky, hand-pour combo of Lucky Charms, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Fruity Pebbles, and other tooth-rotting "ingredients."

It seems we 're more than a nation polarized by politics. We're a nation polarized by food.

A look back at the week's most popular items:

1. Enzo Fargione Fired from Teatro Goldoni (*)
2. Cereal Bowl Set to Open March 27
3. Does This Photo Make You Mad?
4. Food News You Can Use: Top Chef in D.C. Edition
5. Are You All Quick-Fired-Up About Top Chef in D.C.?

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

"Apparently no one is very happy about the drastic changes or the new retro concept the owner wants to implement," says the anonymous tipster.

The owner is Michael Kosmides, who told Y&H last week that he had to dismiss his chef because "customers weren’t responding to the changes he made in the menu...Our sales declined significantly since he changed the menu and concept."

A spokeswoman for Teatro confirmed that GM Denny Lyon no longer works at the K Street restaurant. She couldn't yet confirm any details, like whether Lyon quit or was fired, or anything about the cooks.

In the meantime, in case you missed it, a Y&H reader wrote that she and her husband ate at Teatro on Saturday, post-Fargione. Marykay77 wasn't impressed:

I was there for dinner on Saturday with my husband. The dining room looked like a funeral procession of mourning servers. There was no bit to it. The maitre d’ older gentleman with white hair was as rude as he could be with the party that was sat before us as well…..bad day or poor customer service?

The food looked and tasted like a photobrushed postcard of Teatro’s better days: mediocre in taste and rough in execution. The pasta was very good.

On our way out a disco dance music from the 80’s started playing full blast: 8:35 pm. Is this restaurant really turning into a disco type gathering place for the youngsters? They told me a new menu will be starting soon: do not count on my vote for your re election.

Y&H got a little crabby last week.

Last week was one for the books: The Lagerheads found a cache of cool beers, two different sources reported that Top Chef would fire up stoves here in the District, and one of the city's own top chefs was suddenly without a job. 

And what was one of the top items? The "news" from May 2009 that Spike Mendelsohn was evicted from his apartment. WTF? Seriously, WTF? The best I can tell, no single Web site drove traffic to the page. Hundreds of readers came through Google searches.

Your Top 5 from last week:

1. Enzo Fargione Fired from Teatro Goldoni (*)
2. Dangerously Delicious Pies and Ezme Set to Open Next Week
3. Policy Lays Down the Law With Rare Beers
4. A Day in the Life of the Maine Avenue Fish Market
5. Spike Mendelsohn Evicted from His Capitol Hill Rental House

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

• WaPoster wrote: "My guess is this jerk had allowed the joint to circle the drain for too long so all that was left to respond to the new menu was a nest of barflies. That and some leftovers from the Phyllis Richmond days when the mark of quality was judged from how much free coffee yenta hags were allowed to swill after splitting a dinner. I wish the chef well but it sounds like his vision his long on gimmicks."
• Hess14 wrote: "Another sad story in the restaurant business. You have a financial crisis in your hands? Easy! Fire the talent who made it all possible. Screw him out of his contract and mock him for everyone to see. This person Kosmides does not seem to be either too honest nor too bright."
• OTBerbur wrote: "I read this story with mixed emotions. On the one hand, the manner in which the discharge was carried out appears entirely callous. On the other, the owners’ desire for a change in direction may not be entirely unwarranted. We had dinner at Teatro Goldoni for a special occasion on a Saturday night in December — when the place was two-thirds empty..."

But the most trenchant comment may have come from this writer over at DonRockwell.com:

RWBooneJr. wrote: "I never sat at the chef's table, but I ate at the restaurant both before and while Chef Fargione was there. It was a terribly decorated space, set up in a decades-ago era of expense account silliness, that never modernized. The service and management always seemed disinterested when I was there. And the chef's table never bled into the dining room. It sounds like the chef's table was essentially it's own restaurant and now deserves to be. People, like me, will pay for that experience, we just won't if we're turned off by the place that houses it."

Boone's comment even merited a response from the fired chef:

"Somehow, you just nailed it!!!"

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Enzo Fargione, the chef who put an antiquated Teatro Goldoni back on the culinary map, was fired from his job earlier this month after owner Michael Kosmides allegedly told the toque that he was "just too expensive," according to the dismissed cook.

Teatro's owners, says Fargione, plan to turn the K Street institution into a more informal trattoria. The first step in the process was apparently firing the guy who had created what is possibly the best chef's table in the D.C. area.

According to Fargione, Kosmides approached him earlier about the possibility of converting Teatro Goldoni into a trattoria but did not indicate it was a done deal. Then about a week later, Kosmides fired the chef and gave Fargione approximately 20 minutes to gather his books and tools and leave via the back door without saying goodbye to either his kitchen staff or his fans in the dining room.

"I was left without even a crumb of gratitude," Fargione says, "and that kind of hurts my feelings."

The chef was also left without a severance package. Fargione says that, according to his five-year contract with the Teatro owners, he was due, if terminated, a severance package worth two years of his base salary. He was also due a 90-day written notice before any firing. Fargione says he received neither but hopes the attorneys now involved will work out a deal to everyone's agreement.

Kosmides says that the firing had nothing to do with Fargione's food costs or expenses and everything to do with customer feedback. "Our customers weren't responding to the changes he made in the menu," the owner says. "Our sales declined significantly since he changed the menu and concept."

The decline, Kosmides adds, started from the moment Fargione revamped Teatro, despite all the good press he received. "We were as surprised as any," he says. "I would have loved for it to work out."

Kosmides describes Fargione as a "genius chef suited for 40 seats," not a sizable space like Teatro, which needs a menu that will draw large crowds night after night. In this down economy, the days of $40 entrees are over, he says, maybe forever.  Customers who will pay that kind of money are "few and far between," says Kosmides who is indeed revamping Teatro's menu to include more pasta plates, smaller plates, and half-portions.

As far as Fargione's abrupt firing and hasty exit, Kosmides thought that they had parted on good terms. He says his former chef was asked to leave quickly but had returned to the restaurant the next day. And what about the severance package? Kosmides says it only kicks in if the owners decide to exercise the non-compete-clause in the Fargione's contract, which they haven't.

Which brings us to Fargione's future. He's currently lining up investors and, starting next week, scouting locations for his own place. He envisions a restaurant that's an expansion of his chef's table, with two separate tasting menus and a glass-enclosed wine cellar with a private dining space. "Something like Komi," Fargione says.

He hopes to have all the financing lined up by the end of April, if not a location by then. "I'd like to think that my best is yet to come," he says.

"Maybe this is a blessing," Fargione says. "Maybe it was time for me to move on."

Get Enzo Fargione's cooking, at discounted prices, through Jan. 24 at Teatro Goldoni.

I know, I know. You've got a million excuses why you haven't been able to do Restaurant Week. Your kid's sick. You've got too much work to do. Your car needs repairs. Your stars are out of alignment.

Well, a number of restaurants are giving you a second chance (and third) to take advantage of the (relative) deals afforded by Restaurant Week. Here's the list to date (please add others in the comments section as you hear of them):

• Teatro Goldoni (through Jan. 22)
• Dino (dinner only, through January)
• 2941 (lunch only, through Jan. 29)
• Againn (lunch only, through Jan. 22)
• Art & Soul (through Jan. 24)
• Oyamel (through Jan. 24)
• Jaleo (through Jan. 24)
• Cafe Atlantico (through Jan. 24)
• Asia Nine (through Jan. 24)
• 1789 (dinner only, through January)
• Bastille  (dinner only, through Jan. 24)
• Bangkok Joe's (through January)
• Redwood (through Jan. 24; they may extend one more week after that)
• Zengo (through Jan. 24)
• Zola (through Jan. 24)

Enzo Fargione, the typically self-effacing chef at Teatro Goldoni, makes no attempt to hide his ambition with his revamped chef's table at the K Street institution. He says, plain and simple, that he wants to "create one of the best culinary experiences in the area."

Perhaps you think Fargione's timing is off, that now is not the time to offer diners 14 to 18 courses of exquisitely pampered plates for $125 per person? I would argue just the opposite: If you're not going to eat out much, this is exactly the kind of meal you should seek out when you do. It makes more sense than dropping a Benjamin (or more) for a dinner for two featuring yet another fillet of sea bass on wilted greens, drizzled with some second-rate olive oil.

For your cash at Teatro, you will sit at the best table in the house: the curving banquette with a view of Fargione's spotless, eerily quiet kitchen. Your table will be covered with a tablecloth imported from France. Your food will be served on Bernardaud porcelain china. Your wine will be poured into Turgla stemware. Your dinner will be personally planned, prepared, and painstakingly explained by Fargione himself.

Fargione hails from Turin in northern Italy, which has influenced his palate from the moment he started taking solid food. But the chef also has a restless spirit; he shies away from calling himself a molecular gastronomist, even though he employs foams and gelatins and even transforms olive oil into a mousse. Instead, Fargione likes to say that he takes a "modern approach" to traditional Italian cuisine, employing new techniques while respecting old flavors.

However he wants to describe his cooking, Fargione never "makes the same menu twice" at his chef's table. It a point of pride for him. "I have a passion to change it from one day to another," he says.

After the jump, you can get a glimpse of that passion. You can see the courses I sampled at Fargione's revamped chef's table.

Bread basket: Piedmont-style grissini rubata, Tuscan focaccia, white bread with mashed garlic and rosemary, black olive loaf, and toasted walnut and raisin bread.  Aside from the sublimely crunchy grissini, the bread basket strikes me as the weakest link of the meal; the toasted walnut and raisin bread was dry, while the white bread could have used more flavor.

Course 1: Spinach foam with Manila clams, candied cherry tomato, and caper berry. This dazzling amuse came with a little pipette of clam broth, which you squeeze onto the bite right before eating.

Course 2: Marinated wild Coho salmon with smoked spinach, crispy fennel, Sicilian green olives, pink grapefruit, and licorice froth. The licorice froth sounds like one ingredient too many, but it's not. It adds this light, sweet note on top of a fresh, smoky, sour, and salty bite.

Course 3: Chilled honeydew shooter with sour cream, thyme, spicy pepper gelatin, and roasted Gulf shrimp. The narrow shooter glass prevented me from experiencing this course as Fargione intended. I found it hard to scoop out all the complementary flavors in one swift spoonful. As such, I ate this shooter too much in a piecemeal fashion.

Course 4: Deconstructed buffalo mozzarella with balsamic gelatin strip, cherry tomatoes, and basil gelatin. This modern, almost Cubist take on Caprese salad was as flavorful as it was gorgeous.

Course 5: Cornets of tempura-style zucchini blossoms filled with fava-bean mousse. This delicate, savory ice cream cone was fun to eat, but I found the fava-bean mousse too dominating.

Course 6: Pedestal of roasted veal sweetbreads with fennel pollen, chestnut honey, and red wine-infused Maldon salt. These little works of art, literally presented on their own pedestals, boasted a crunchy exterior, which quickly gave way to a soft, savory interior, accented with chestnut honey. My only quibble: The dusting of fennel pollen was a little too heavy for my tastes.

Course 7: Snifter of duck-egg zabaglione with fonduta, crispy speck, white truffles, and oven dried mushrooms.  Rich, earthy, and so delicious I wanted to eat three more of them.

Course 8: Glass vase of roasted artichoke puree, cornflake-like artichoke hearts, and black olive froth. The olive froth adds color, texture, and a sharp, salty edge to this vase of warm artichoke soup.

Course 9: Spoon of poached quail egg, Milanese-style chanterelle mushrooms, port-wine glaze, winter black truffle, crispy pancetta, and chives. This bite goes down way, way too fast; its rich delights vanish almost before you can savor them.

Course 10: Milk chocolate-coated virgin olive oil mousse lollipop with focaccia bread crumbs, and gold leaf accents. This sweet-and-savory lollipop is inspired by the salty chocolate that Fargione used to eat as a child. The gold leaf may be superfluous, but the crunchy bite combines two seemingly combative flavors, the milk chocolate and olive oil, in ways that must be tried to be believed.

Course 11: Shellfish fritto misto in an eggshell with Saba, candied celery, and spicy peperoncino powder. The candied celery provides a surprisingly sweet and complementary flavor to this first of several main-course dishes.

Course 12:Goose-liver-and-Cremona-mostarda torchon with merlot wine caramel, salty hazelnut texture, crispy brioche, balsamic  gelato, and hazelnut tuile. The main components of this dish don't necessarily make sense until you combine them into one forkful, then wham! Crunch, salt, richness, life's sweet pageant...all in one bite.

Course 13: Butternut squash soup with spinach raviolini, duck sausage, roasted pancetta, winter black truffles, and Reggiano foam. Despite the wealth of garnishes and surprises at the bottom of the bowl, it's the sausage that makes this dish, adding a deep meatiness to soup that too often relies on sweetness to score points.

Course 14: Cavatelli with roasted garlic cream, smoked roasted lobster, porcini, peas, thyme, and white truffles. At this point in the meal, my appetite was showing signs of serious fatigue, which Fargione seemed to understand intuitively. This pasta course was not exactly light, with its roasted garlic cream and cavatelli made with ricotta, but it ate light. I was astonished at how much of it I ate.

Course 15: Traditional white truffle risotto with Barolo "surprise." You'd think that following one starch with another would be too heavy by half, but Fargione managed to pull it off with this small bowl of white-truffle risotto surrounded by a luxuriant sauce of reduced Barolo wine and veal stock. Two weeks after the meal, I can still taste the muskiness of the white truffle as it added one more element of earth to these superior grapes and grains.

Course 16: Baked turbot with acqua pazza, arucola pesto broth, and baby vegetables. "Acqua pazza" translates into "crazy water" in English, which of course means the dish has a colorful history in Italian cuisine, even if many cooks take the term too literally and throw any old leftovers into the sauce. Fargione's version was freshness personified, from his meltingly soft turbot to the bright pesto sauce and veggies that accompanied it.

Course 17: Glass vase of six-hour braised veal cheek in port wine with crunchy corn, pancetta and mascarpone sauce, and huckleberry froth. OK, the wine had taken control by this point. (Incidentally, the wine pairings are $45 for four or $59 for seven.) I forgot to take a picture until I was almost finished, which may tell you something about the quality of the dish. I was stuffed but couldn't stop eating this rich braised veal complemented with elements of crunch and sweetness.

Course 18: Tea light deconstructed roasted sour apples with cinnamon fumes. Fargione had painstakingly prepared this showstopper of a dessert, with its cloud of cinnamon fumes, but we never got to try it. The Teatro refrigerator had frozen the poor thing.

Course 19: Hazelnut coffee zuccotino with gianduia sauce, warm Prosecco orange cider, lemon mascarpone cheese sorbet, and dry chocolate texture. The dessert requires some deft utensil maneuvering, a skill that you may not possess at this point, but once you secure all the ingredients on one fork, you have a most satisfying balance of textures, temperatures, and flavors.

Course 20: Frivolezze is Italian for "frivolity," but this sweet frivolezze seems anything but. A plate of pinenut cookies with powdered sugar, truffles with caramel and almonds, cranberry and orange squares, and pistachio biscotti. I wish I could have eaten more of them. Really.

Voting is just a couple of weeks old for the inaugural class of the D.C. Dish Hall of Fame, but already a pattern has emerged: Fast foods are dominating the competition.

That's hardly surprising, of course. On a daily basis, you know that people order about 500 more half smokes at Ben's Chili Bowl than, say, order Frank Ruta's roast chicken at Palena Cafe. But just because the odds are stacked against your favorite dish, that's no excuse to sit back and let the fast foods run away with this.

Start pressing your friends to vote for your favorite dish. The voting doesn't end until Dec. 11, when we will induct the top 5 into Washington City Paper's inaugural D.C. Dish Hall of Fame.

Take a look at the current leaders:

1. Half-smoke with chili at Ben's Chili Bowl, 191 votes
2. Hamburger at Five Guys, 92
3. Peruvian chicken at El Pollo Rico, 80
4. Falafel at Amsterdam Falafelshop, 64
5. Margherita pizza at 2Amys, 59
6. Burger from Ray's Hell Burger, 59
7. Salty oat cookie at Teaism, 57
8. Pho at Pho 75, 55
9. Palak chaat at Rasika, 49
10. Smoked branzino carpaccio at Teatro Goldoni, 37

Don't like the looks of the current leaderboard? Get voting!

Photo by Darrow Montgomery