Rounding up the roundups:

5. WaPo's "Best and Worst Dishes of 2011." I totally agree with Yonan on El Centro D.F. Worst. Tacos. Ever.

4. Washingtonian's "Top 10 Dining-World Dramas of 2011," complete with a gracious nod to Y&H. Hey, thanks for the plug!

3. HuffPo's top 6 suburban Chinese spots (and two in D.C.) to spend Christmas if you're Jewish (or just hungry)

2. Burger Days' "2011 Burgers of the Year," complete with several glossy, virtually pornographic close-ups of all the juicy beefy glory.

1. Bitches Who Brunch's "2011 Brunches: The Best, The Worst." I simply can't say enough about the bitching.

Quick hits on the meatless beat

Yes, We Said Free: Oct. 1 is World Vegetarian Day and to honor the holiday, The Counter, a burger place in Reston, is offering a free mini veggie burger with the purchase of any burger.

The Fruits of Our Labor: Tomato season is over, but that doesn't mean the politics of this vegetable-like-fruit is settled. Barry Estabrook, author of Tomatoland, comes to Georgetown’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor on Oct. 4 to discuss the economic realities of growing tomatoes. Details here.

Heed the Veg Heads: After WaPo exposed that ShopHouse Southeast Asian Kitchen was less than upfront about its fish sauce-filled curries, Chipotle's sister restaurant added new language to the website and now double warns customers (at least those accompanying Joe Yonan) about the non-vegetarian friendly sauces.

Just One? Earlier this month, Seasons restaurant switched up its brunch service "action station," retiring last round's Mexican tacos and now featuring Indian-inspired dishes. Unfortunately for meatless eaters, "Indian-inspired" doesn't translate into the usual plentiful vegetable options from this subcontinent. Seasons whips up just one: black chickpea pakoras. But the salad, sides and omelet station offer plenty of options for meatless consumption. (Sundays from 10:30 a.m. until 2:30 p.m.; $80 per person.)

Critics Choice: Even though the sentiment only deserved a parenthetical nod, props to WaPo critic Tom Sietsema for calling out the lack of nutritious meatless bites in his review of Old Town's Virtue Feed & Grain: "For my taste, there aren't enough vegetables in the mix. I'd gladly sacrifice some deviled eggs or garlic mushrooms for something greener and leaner."

Photo by Stefanie Gans

Photo by Chris Shott

Photo by AgnosticPreachersKid/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Photo by Wouter Hagens/GNU Free Documentation License

"Mr. TS from Wash post just left the house. Suprised us on our second night."

In last week's Young & Hungry column, "Critical Distance," Sietsema dished a bit about his policy on reviewing new restaurants. While the city's senior-ranking food critic says he tries to abide by the standard one-month wait when working on his starred reviews for the Post magazine, he sometimes takes an earlier peak for the paper's separate "First Bite" column: "I feel free to visit new establishments as soon as their doors open to paying guests, although I’m not big on going the first night, when the paint is still drying.” He said nothing about going on the second night.

Photo by Greg Powers

Last week, the Washington Post announced the final results of its annual Beer Madness tournament. For the past five years, the Post's food section has put together a panel of local beer enthusiasts and had them position dozens of beers against each other in a blind tasting. The Post then shares the bracket results in a multi-week series that mirrors college basketball's March Madness.

Unlike previous years, I am taking note of the 2011 Beer Madness winners. Here's why:

My bad attitude about the beer competition isn't over not being selected for the panel, which I applied for back in 2008 before I started my tenure at Y&H.  (I thought my story about hiding and successfully retrieving a nice bottle of Belgian beer outside RFK Stadium after failing to smuggle it into a Nats game would get me in, but no dice.)

My initial excitement and desire to participate quickly waned when I saw which brews were selected, and worse yet, how they were organized. Year after year, the list of contenders seemed to me a bizarre mix of primarily mass produced beers, the kind that are light on carbs and even lighter on the palate (think of your typical grocery store beer aisle). Among them was only a sprinkling of brews with actual flavor.

And often beers were seated in pairs so different from each other that they seemed impossible to compare. For example, in what has to be the worst matchup ever, Ommegang's delicate but complex Hennepin artisanal farmhouse ale was put head-to-head in the 2008 bracket with Miller Chill (as in "chelada"), a mass-produced light American lager spiked with lime and salt. Whether a panelist chooses the subtle grass, earth, and citrus flavors of the saison or a margarita-themed light beer is likely a matter of personal preference.

"Within the groups it seemed like they picked beers out of a hat and randomized which beers were put up against each other. It didn’t seem like there was any logic," says Raul Arroyo-Mendoza, who sat on the 2010 Beer Madness panel.

This kind of nonsense led to winners like Brooklyn Lager (2007), Hook & Ladder Backdraft Brown (2008), Tröegs Hopback Amber (2009), and Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout (2010)–all decent beers, with Hopback Amber at the top of the list, but none worthy of a championship title in my opinion.

But this year Beer Madness was run differently. The organizers at WaPo partnered with Birch & Barley/ChurchKey beer director Greg Engert. Together he, food section editor Joe Yonan and beer columnist Greg Kitsock, who has orchestrated the event each year, made some significant improvements.

First, they decided to choose only American craft beers, meaning those from breweries in the U.S. producing under six million barrels per year. There were no Budweiser, Miller, or Coors products, or lines of beer owned by affiliated large companies like Rolling Rock or Red Hook (AB-InBev) or Blue Moon or Leinenkugel's (SAB Miller).

Engert suggested categorizing the beers by flavor profile, similar to the way he organizes his beer menus, rather than by ales and lagers, a grouping that means little in today's terrain of innovative brews mostly dominated by ales. Within each profile, he wanted to pair beers of similar styles and alcohol content against each other to avoid early round mismatches.

"I wanted to leave that subjectivity of preferred style to the end, in the later rounds," says Engert.

Engert himself selected the breweries and made a list of styles in each flavor profile he wanted to cover. This year's tournament would be a four-quadrant bracket with eight to ten styles in each flavor category, represented (when possible) by two breweries each–for a total of 64 contestants. He then started the grueling process of filling the slots with a beer from each brewery's year-round offerings.

The organizers also split the tasting into two sessions on separate nights instead of one marathon evening of boozing. This counteracted palate fatigue and allowed for not only more beers than in previous years, but also the inclusion of brews with higher alcohol levels, which tend to be the most popular ones. According to Engert, the organizers actually wanted to spread the tasting across four nights and are likely to do so next year.

Finally, the organizers had a different way to choose the panel, which included industry professionals with developed palates as well as the usual Joe Sixpack. WaPo recruited Kat Bangs, sommelier at Komi in Dupont Circle, JP Caceres, mixologist at Bourbon Steak in Georgetown, Brian Robinson, executive chef at Restaurant Three in Arlington, and Ellie and Bob Tupper, brewers of Tuppers' Beers and celebrated local beer enthusiasts. Along with these four panelists (the Tuppers counted as one vote), five readers were selected from this year's application pool: Justin Garcia of Centreville, Hiromi Kowaguchi of Arlington, Whitney Meager of D.C., Duff Gillespie of Kensington, and Christina Hoffman of Arlington.

The panelists received a crash course in beer judging before participating. "I wanted to turn things away from pure subjectivity, but didn't want to tell people what to think," says Engert. "I told them it should be a balance between what you prefer but could incorporate some ideas of what makes certain beers more palatable or interesting than others."

The upshot of all this thought and effort is a winner's circle worth noting. The victors in each profile, which are each champions themselves, include:

• MALT – Misery Wheat Wine Ale from DuClaw in southern Maryland
• FRUIT & SPICE – Exit 4 American Trippel from Flying Fish in New Jersey
• ROAST – Rise Up Stout from Evolution in Delaware
• HOPS – Maximus IPA from Lagunitas in California

These four brews then competed against each other for the Beer Madness title. Misery and Exit 4 faced off in the semi-finals, as did Rise Up and Maximus. The victors, Exit 4 and Maximus, then competed in the championship round, with Flying Fish Exit 4 American Trippel, a 9.5 percent alcohol by volume Belgian-style ale, grabbing the win in a 6-3 vote.

Personally, I would have flipped the semi-finals bracket to pit the Malt and Roast champs and Hops and Fruit & Spice winners against each other–just to see how the final result may have been different. Other than that, this year's tournament took most of the madness out of Beer Madness, and for the first time I am looking to the winners list and seeking out the late-round beers I have yet to try.

Image courtesy of WashingtonPost.com

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Tim Carman in today's Washington Post defends the District's honor from The New York Times, which has historically belittled the nation's capital in the food department, including Jennifer Steinhauser's recent declaration that there's a "steady rise" of "Everyman Eating" on Capitol Hill, with plenty of chefs trying to capitalize on "food that is affordable, nostalgic and deeply accessible."

This all seems to have ruffled Carman's feathers:

Allow me to apply some ointment to our many probe marks and ask a small favor from the Gray Lady's staff: Could you please stop rubbing our noses in our inferiority? We understand by now. You're better than we are. Your fashion is better than ours, your art is better and, of course, your restaurants are better. Washingtonians will forever cower in the long shadow cast by Gotham, nervously picking our nails and hoping you will like us one day. I mean, really like us – and not just like us so that you can tear us to shreds another day.

Fuck yeah!

Photo by Flickr user ReservasdeCoches using an Attribution 2.0 Generic Creative Commons license

As reported Tuesday, art critic Blake Gopnik is leaving The Washington Post's Style section and is "taking on a new opportunity in New York, the place he has long understood and explained but will now fully inhabit." Let’s take a quick look back on Gopnik's brief but memorable 2004 foray into the world of D.C. food writing, reviewing the National Gallery of Art’s gelato offerings.

At the time, the review struck a nerve, with jokes about how Gopnik’s gelato-gazing might signal that it's a "good time to rethink the curatorial program of the museum."

Take a walk down memory lane with Gopnik as he pairs up noted artists with gelato flavors:

[Eleonora] Luciano, the [NGA assistant curator of sculpture] expert, made the call on the gallery's chocolate gelato: Bernini would be its patron saint. It was slightly firmer than the other gelati, richer and more baroque in flavor profile. It was also an obvious crowd-pleaser that still offered depths for further contemplation. Extravagant and carefully contrived, at once.”

But Blake shouldn't worry. There's plenty of great gelato in New York.

Photo of New York City's Ciao Bella gelato by Flickr user pravin.premkumar using a Attribution 2.0 Generic Creative Commons license