We're halfway through the calendar, so it's time to check in to see how accurately Young & Hungry has predicted the 2011 food scene so far.

OUT   →   IN

Burgers   → Hot Dogs
Verdict: No. No new specialty dog shops have opened yet–just a cart called Frank–but Shake Shack is now in Dupont. It sells both. In terms of notoriety, though, the Shack Burger probably trumps the Shack-ago Dog.

Mansion-Sized Bars   → Apartment-Sized Bars
Verdict: No. El Centro D.F. is huge. Standard is small. Smith Commons is huge. Toki is small. Jack Rose, however, is ginormous.

Anthony Bourdain   → Ruth Bourdain
Verdict: Yes. Ruth Bourdain wins James Beard Foundation Award for humor writing.

Vegetarian   → Vegivore
Verdict: Undecided. Fine dining restaurants offer vegetarian tasting menus. But are any non-vegetarian eaters ordering?

Where the Obamas Eat   → Where Sam Kass Eats
Verdict: No. With Obama's slaying of Enemy Number One, and just a day after his killer White House Corespondent's Dinner speech, all eyes still follow the first couple. Or is that old news? Whatever,  Mrs. O still looks amazing.

Bacon → Offal
Verdict: No. We're tattooing pig now?!

4 Loko   → Spiked Hot Chocolate
Verdict: No. It seems that as long as you have a million of one kind of booze, your place is set.

Gulf Seafood   → Gulf Sweets
Verdict: Tie. Po'boys may win at Bayou, but that sno ball from Bayou Bakery will cure the District's unrelenting heat.

Traditional Tacos   → Korean Tacos
Verdict: Undecided. But it's certainly NOT cactus tacos.

Jose Andrés in D.C.   → Jose Andrés Everywhere
Verdict: Tie. Jose is back again in the national spotlight by winning the outstanding chef award at last month's James Beard Awards. In fact, he's so magical that he helped 60 Minutes win an award for its show about him. According to Twitter, Miami is next on his radar. But not before he opens America Eats Tavern in the space currently occupied by Café Atlántico (R.I.P.).

Brickskeller   → American Tap Rooms
Verdict: No. It doesn't matter the bar, it just matters if they serve D.C. Brau.

H Street's Food Identity   → Wheaton's Food Identity
Verdict: Undecided. Anyone know what's up with Wheaton?

Small Plates   →   No Small Plates (at least here!)
Verdict: No. Even divey Toledo Lounge is now taking the tapas route.

Michael Landrum Doing Meat   → Michael Landrum Doing Salads
Verdict: Undecided. When is this finally opening?

Food Trucks   → Food Trucks Buy Store Fronts
Verdict: Yes. Mobile munchie moguls District Taco and Sauca have both established brick-and-mortar locations in the burbs.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

As the mercury drops... I find Eiji Nakamura’s soups the perfect antidote to a chill in the air.

This is true no matter what bowl you order from Ren’s concise menu, which offers three different kinds of Sapporo ramen and even a vegetable variation for those who find their warmth in a container of hot seaweed broth (which is not a knock, but a simple fact about this soup made hearty with floating islands of crunchy cabbage). With that said, though, let me not pussyfoot around here: If I really want to ignite my internal hearth on a cold night, I order Ren’s soy-flavored Sapporo ramen and request extra slices of roast pork and a few pieces of stewed fatty pork, these geological slabs that alternate between layers of flesh and fat. The pieces are like pig candy, melting on your tongue as gooey and satisfying as warmed caramels.

And that sounds great on a day like today. [via TBD]

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Food trucks flooded our streets and Twitter feeds. Connecticut Avenue welcomed a whole lot of ground-meat options (and then kicked one out.) In an age of comfort food, family-style Italian filled our carb-deprived bellies. But will mobile food, burgers and comfort food dominate 2011? Will small plates finally die? Here's our break down on what we'll eat in 2011.

OUT     →     IN

Burgers     →      Hot Dogs

Mansion-Sized Bars     →     Apartment-Sized Bars

Anthony Bourdain     →     Ruth Bourdain

Vegetarian     →     Vegivore

Where the Obamas Eat     →     Where Sam Kass Eats

Bacon     →     Offal

4 Loko     →     Spiked Hot Chocolate

Gulf Seafood     →     Gulf Sweets

Traditional Tacos     →    Korean Tacos

Jose Andrés in D.C.     →     Jose Andrés Everywhere

Brickskeller     →     American Tap Rooms

H Street's Food Identity     →     Wheaton's Food Identity

Small Plates     →     No Small Plates (at least here!)

Michael Landrum Doing Meat     →     Michael Landrum Doing Salads

Food Trucks     →     Food Trucks Buy Store Fronts

Andrew George and Scott Reitz contributed to this article
Photo by Darrow Montgomery

She met up with Robert Wulff of developer B.F. Saul, the firm overseeing Wheaton's redevelopment, at Saigonese and talked about lessons learned from Silver Spring's downtown redevelopment of the past decade:

He contends there are now more small businesses than before, since those that could adapt thrived, and the office development provided a customer base for more to start up.

The same will happen in Wheaton, he says, digging into a plate of chicken and rice at a Vietnamese place on Grandview Avenue. Even with top-notch bánh mì sandwiches at $2.50 a pop, the restaurant doesn’t do much lunch traffic, which is typical of Wheaton eateries. Adding a few thousand office workers would change all that—for restaurants that can market themselves to a new clientele.

“Small businesses have to think big. They can’t think about who their current customer base is and what their current products are,” Wulff says. “They have to think about who’s coming, what are they going to buy, what are they going to eat. Do they want to roll, or not?”

Easier said than done for Julio Cruz, owner of Sergio’s Place on Fern Street. He has expanded his businesses, offering karaoke and starting a pupusa-making operation, but business is still slow—his bread-and-butter clientele, day laborers on area construction jobs, haven’t had as much disposable income lately. And he doesn’t think he can serve his food fast enough to attract office workers at lunchtime.

“Even though I have some Americans that come, they like the food, but it’s not always enough,” he says.

While local neighborhood redevelopment narratives have been dominated by tensions and fights inside the District line, more suburban areas, where plenty of ethnic communities—some with distinct food cultures—have found a home and in the process, have created dining destinations.

How do you think the Columbia Pike corridor in Arlington County's food identity might change with a streetcar line planned? How has the food identity of Arlington's Rosslyn-Ballston corridor evolved over the past two decades as more dense development filled in along the Orange Line? What would happen to the Eden Center if Seven Corners became more transit accessible and Clarendon-style dense development started to take root?

Ethnic food geographic identity is something that's intertwined with urban evolution. And we've seen—and will continue to see—how it plays out, for better or worse.

Photo of Hollywood East's Janet Wu by Darrow Montgomery

It was hard enough swallowing the idea that my beloved hole-in-the-wall Nava Thai had moved into more spacious digs, which essentially forced the owners to expand their concise, noodle-soup-heavy menu to cater to the expansive new location. But now this: The Wheaton operation has added sushi to its offerings.

Several months back, Suchart and Ladavan Srigatesook built a new sushi bar, complete with these smooth river stones buried in it, and hired a chef to work behind it. The sushi menu includes the standard nigiri and sashimi items as well as some "signature" rolls, including a "Turtle Roll" ("Eel, Cream Cheese tipped with Avocado") and "Nava's Spicy Tuna Roll" stuffed with Thai chili.

As much as this shot-gun marriage between rice-oriented cuisines may conform to Wheaton's image as a culinary melting pot, I still have to resist this particular fusion, almost on principal. It smacks of all those Korean eateries and gentrified grocery stores that decide to peddle sushi as if they were adding a new line of craft beers. Sushi is not a "product" to stock. It's a craft that takes years to perfect. The best sushi requires a discriminating eye when buying fish and an exacting hand when preparing it.

Few things are as easy to spot as cut-rate or amateur sushi. The small sampling of nigiri sushi I bought at Nava came awfully close to falling into these categories. See the picture below.

The slices of tuna had turned gray at their edges from oxidation and, worse, had the distinctly wharf-like aroma of fish past its prime. The eel had been cooked until all its fat had been rendered out, leaving the only a chewy piece of fish behind, its flavor bolstered mostly by its sweetened soy-based sauce.

If it weren't for the sushi rice — fluffy, not-too-packed, and the perfect bite size — the nigiri would have been a disaster. We ate only three of the four pieces, leaving the last slice of eel to find its way to the trash, where it would clearly pick up more flavor.

I took solace from this misadventure in sushi by ordering a bowl of Nava Thai's true signature item: the floating market noodle soup, with its dark, gumbo-like broth that looks so tame and warm and inviting. It's a total ruse. The street soup remains one of the most savage spoonfuls around, a concoction whose sweet and savory subtleties are all too easy to miss as you're trying to extinguish the California wildfire on your tongue. This is a class A catapult rollercoaster of a dish. It is the reason to visit Nava, not the lukewarm efforts at sushi.

This week's Young & Hungry column takes a look at two very different dim sum parlors, Hollywood East Cafe in Wheaton and Ping Pong Dim Sum in Chinatown. One is a local, family-owned operation, the other an import from London. We're publishing the full version of the column in the blog, so that you can enjoy Darrow Montgomery's photography, which tells its own story.

Our waiter at Ping Pong Dim Sum, in an attempt to give us some perspective on the Chinatown restaurant, has just described its cuisine as “Western dim sum.” Now, I’ve been doing this beat long enough to recognize a gift when one is presented. I mean, in my two previous visits here, no other server had dropped such a broad suggestion that this London-based chain doesn’t trade in traditional Cantonese-style dim sum.

“What do you mean by ‘Western dim sum?’” I ask the waiter.

“Look around you,” he responds.

He’s got a point there. The main dining room has a black-lacquered sleekness about it, almost nightclub-like in intensity. There are no steam-heated carts here. There is only style: The tabletops are black. The stools are black. Even the floor is black. Throbbing, club-like music thumps over the sound system. The ambiance generates an almost Pavlovian response: You feel like you need a cocktail asap, and Ping Pong can accommodate—in ways that wander far from the streets of Hong Kong. Asian Manhattan. Kumquat mojito. Ginger and limoncello caipirinha.

But our waiter wants us to understand that the dim-sum menu itself leans more West than East, too. His speech is intended to be prophylactic: He’s trying to ward off any potential disappointment, should we want to order, say, fried taro dumplings or fried turnip cakes or steamed chicken feet or any other standards of the Hong Kong dim sum menu. He even tells us one startling fact: Ping Pong’s head chef is Australian.

When I tried to confirm the chef’s background, I was met with resistance from Ping Pong’s corporate offices. A locally based publicist informed me via e-mail that the chain’s “focus is on the food and not on the head chef at Ping Pong at any location. With that they would rather not send his information.”

OK, despite what you may think, I don’t have much interest in turning this column into an anti-chain, anti-corporate screed, which I find knee-jerk and tedious. The truth is, I’ve had some good plates at Ping Pong: three browned squares of puff pastry in which the stuffing of honey roasted barbecue chicken smartly balances sweet with savory. A trio of tiny toast rounds, each crunchy bite pregnant with delicately spiced prawn meat. A steam basket of shu mai, in which every little pork-and-prawn package comes encased in a wrinkly egg-based wrapper; the combination’s so soft and meaty that the dish lives up to its name: “cook and sell” dumplings, a reminder that chefs back in China can barely lift the shu mai out of the steam pot before they’re gobbled up by greedy customers.

But I’ve also had some dreadful plates at Ping Pong: honey-glazed pork ribs so bland and chewy I left most of the meat on the bone. Thin translucent tubes of Vietnamese spring rolls, presumably stuffed with prawns and vegetables, whose only discernible pleasure was their deep-fried crunch. A pair of Valrhona chocolate buns that were, essentially, gummy white-dough balls barely redeemed by their dark, liquid interiors. Even plates that had previously pleased my palate could turn disappointing: A second helping of prawn toast tasted only of fryer oil.

The selling point of any restaurant chain is supposed to be its consistency, its ability to put systems in place that almost guarantee a level of quality each and every visit. I haven’t found that to be the case at Ping Pong. And on my final visit, to Ping Pong’s dim sum bar, I may have received a small glimpse into the reason why. I chatted up one of the cooks who told me that the dim sum is not prepared in-house, but in Rockville, where imported ingredients are turned into dumplings and buns and then trucked to Chinatown every 48 hours, sometimes frozen. You could be, in other words, choking down a dumpling that is two days old. (By press time, Ping Pong had not yet responded to my question on this matter.)

Twelve miles to the north, at the recently reopened Hollywood East Café in Wheaton, the dim sum cooks hand-make every single item on premise, hundreds and hundreds of sweet and savory bundles for the restaurant’s daily lunch-time service. How do I know this? Because I asked owner Janet Yu to give me a tour of her kitchen, part of the restaurant’s new spacious digs at the Westfield Shopping Center. It was the first time, she said, that she had ever allowed a journalist to see the inner workings of Hollywood East.

What you find inside Yu’s kitchen are not gleaming, show-pony steamers like you see behind the dim sum counter at Ping Pong, where a short tower of bamboo baskets gets a steam treatment before arriving at your table. Instead, you find a narrow maze of prep tables and industrial-sized woks and cramped walk-in coolers, the quarters so tight you routinely have to walk over and around boxes of fresh taro roots or containers of sliced pork butts marinating for the following day.

Around one corner, you might run into head chef, Kenny Lei, who’ll be slicing up a thin roll of rice dough. He’ll flatten each piece of the wheat-starch dough into a perfect circle with his cleaver and then scrape that skin off the work surface so that the next cook can fill it with, say, a shrimp mixture and crimp it into these gorgeous, pleated, sea-shell like dumplings known ashar gau. The process will be repeated over and over and over again, perhaps 200 times in a short, 30-minute span.

Around another corner, you might meet the wiry woman who handles the noodle crepe station, perhaps the most demanding in the entire kitchen. Next to her station, there is a container of rice flour and water, which she will pour onto a perforated tray in a thin layer and let steam for a few minutes until it turns into this large translucent membrane. The cook then peels the sheet from the tray and places it onto a work counter, where she adds cooked shrimp and begins the painstaking process of rolling and cutting this delicate pan-size noodle until it resembles those folded-over crepes found on Hollywood East’s dim sum carts.

Did I mention that Ping Pong Dim Sum doesn’t offer rice noodle crepes on its menu?

Nor does Ping Pong serve fried taro dumplings. Allow me to attempt an explanation why—well, aside from the obvious notion that the starchy root doesn’t play to Western diners. Another reason may have to do with the dish’s preparation. The dumpling cannot simply be tossed whole into a basket fryer, like all the fried dim sum dishes at Ping Pong. At Hollywood East, chef Lei has jerry-rigged a device for deep-frying those dumplings: He takes a perforated metal disc and lowers it by hand into the hot vegetable oil—yes, by hand—via a handle fashioned out of old wire hangers. The stuffed taro balls sitting on the disc must be dipped gradually into the oil, little by little, until fully submerged. The technique ensures proper cooking and creates the taro balls’ fright-wig appearance. The technique, I’m sure, must require the arm strength of Albert Pujols.

Some of the skills demonstrated in Hollywood East’s kitchen are virtuosic. I’m thinking particularly about Lei’s ability to take a small wooden roller and quickly fashion a stack of round, almost cup-like dumpling skins from a length of dough. But like all good kitchens, this one also demands classical skills, like the ability to roast a whole duck and debone it for the chopped meat necessary for duck dumplings. Or just the knowledge to demand the right cut of beef short ribs for the braised, peppery dish on the dim sum menu.

Out in Hollywood East’s cavernous dining room, I suspect few customers understand how much work Lei and his team put into the plates that crowd those rolling steam carts. The fact is, I didn’t know until recently myself. It’s part of the perfect deception here: You show up for dim sum, you sit down, and you immediately start shoveling down one succulent dish after another. Finished with one plate? Three more are ready right now, if you’d like. It has the feel of an assembly line—just press a button and your dim sum arrives!

It’s a beautiful lie, of course, designed to mask the human, hand-crafted, and hard-earned skills responsible for every single bite at Hollywood East. Ping Pong Dim Sum seems to have diluted this art form into a multi-step, multi-location process in which the people who actually steam or fry or grill your dim sum at the restaurant sometimes have very little knowledge of the dishes they’re cooking. Something can’t help but get lost in that cumbersome process. It’s the main reason why I’ll choose Hollywood East over Ping Pong Dim Sum any day of the week—and not because the latter is part of a multi-national chain.

Ping Pong Dim Sum, 900 7th St. NW, (202) 506-3740

Hollywood East Café, 11160 Veirs Mill Road, Wheaton, (240) 290-9988

twitter.com/timcarman

This week's Young & Hungry column takes a look at two different dim sum palaces: the sleek, lounge-y, London-import Ping Pong Dim Sum in Chinatown and the informal, family-oriented Hollywood East Cafe, which recently reopened in the Westfield Shopping Center.

In preparation for the story, I asked Hollywood East owner Janet Yu if she would give me a tour of her kitchen, so that I could better understand the skill and labor that goes into her daily dim sum menu. City Paper photographer Darrow Montgomery joined us for the tour and took these short videos of head chef Kenny Lei preparing the skins and the actual har gau dumplings.

The second video is after the jump.

Whatever the reason — and there are many — the opening of Hollywood East has been delayed and delayed and delayed. But the wait is over. Hollywood East will reopen tomorrow at its new Wheaton location.

"All the nightmares are over," Yu tells me this afternoon.

But there's an asterisk to this good news. The restaurant will open without its signature dim sum service.

Yu says kitchen crews are busy stocking the pantries and walk-ins today and prepping like mad for service tomorrow. But due to the labor-intensive nature of dim sum — hundreds and hundreds of pieces must be hand-made in advance — Hollywood East's rolling-cart feast of dumplings and buns and rice crepes will not be available until later.

"We're going to really, really try for dim sum on Sunday," Yu says.

Of course, given the long wait for Hollywood East's rebirth following its unceremonious ousting from a previous Wheaton location, I'm sure people can wait another a day or two to get their dim sum fix. Yu has certainly shown a great deal of patience waiting out this process. Each passing week just meant another seven days without revenue, as the rent and the renovation bills kept coming due.

But Yu says that she was able to cut a deal with the mall until her opening date. Others contributed to her cause, too. "It was bad, but my relatives and my friends really helped me out," she says.

Maybe this trend has been around awhile and I've just overlooked it, but this weekend while I was tooling around Wheaton, I found not one but two restaurants that mix Latin and Vietnamese food.

Technically this isn't fusion fusion, in that these establishments aren't combining ingredients from the two cuisines into something unique. It's more like Pho Comida Tipica (part of the Internacional Mercado Latino) and Samantha's Diner & Bakery serve both cuisines side by side (or many cuisines side by side, since the Latin offerings tend to combine the plates of numerous countries). You'll find pho next to pupusas next to tacos next to banh mi next to tamales.

Samantha's breaks down the wall between ethnic cuisines

I guess it makes sense, given the ethnic melting pot that is Wheaton, where you can tour the world via the restaurants, from Peruvian chicken to Israeli falafel to Thai noodle soups to Scotch eggs. But for the most part, each cuisine has maintained a fairly high wall around itself, in part, I always assumed, to serve as a gathering spot for ex-pats.

But these two places break down the walls with authority. Samantha's, in particular, points its compass in half a dozen different directions. In addition to Vietnamese and a wide variety of Latin dishes, there is a menu of standard American plates like a hamburger with fries. In that sense, Samantha is the 21st century American diner, but substituting Vietnamese and Latin food for the Greek plates of the past.

This ethnic grafting reminds me of a story my bud, Robb Walsh, wrote in 2002 for the Houston Press, in which he noted how Vietnamese-Americans were embracing Cajun cuisine but not yet assimilating it into their own cooking.  Some seven years later, I wrote about how one restaurant at the Eden Center was mixing Vietnamese and Cajun cuisines.

It makes me wonder what we'll see in Wheaton in 10 years.

Samantha's menu mixes Vietnamese, Latino, and American dishes

Samantha's baked goods reflect their menu: banh mi baguettes and Mexican pastries

Hollywood East Cafe's construction delays would be almost comical if they weren't costing owner Janet Yu money. She has already started paying rent on her space inside the Westfield Shopping Center in Wheaton, and she could really use some revenue to offset her overhead.

"It better be [open] before the end of the month," Yu says, her voice taking on an edge. It's like she's issuing a threat to the thin air.

What stands between Yu and an opening date are some last-minute installations and a battery of inspections. Seven new wok burners and their water units are finally supposed to be delivered tomorrow as well as a ready-made bar that should sit 10 diners. Once those items are installed, and the dining room carpet laid, Yu will then have to start scheduling the inspections.

That's when things get really unpredictable. Yu doesn't know how long it will take to get the final mechanical and electrical inspections, not to mention the required visits from the health and liquor control departments. Then there's the occupancy permit.

Despite all the potential obstacles, Yu thinks she can meet her end-of-the-month deadline. "I think we can," she says. "We're really pushing."

Yu says her young dim-sum chef, Kenny Lei, has been using his time off well. "Since we've been off," the owner says, "he's gone back to China to learn a few more things." He's been working at tea houses in Guangzhou to fine tune his skills.

Well, my anticipation for the rebirth of Hollywood East has just increased by, oh, 1,000 percent.