UPDATE: While we earlier heard it was all day, Papa John's employees are saying the deal ended at 4 p.m. Sorry! But at least there's a closer pizza joint for those folks in Shaw, downtown, and Mt. Vernon Triangle. What's better than hot pizza on a hot, hot day? Well, maybe it's ice cream or water ice, but hey, the pizza is free! A new Papa John's location near 4th and Mass NW just opened,......

Another to add to the trite food list? This week Tom Sietsema wrote a feature article about tasting menus. He posits:They tend to be too much food and require too much of a time commitment. ... When I'm shelling out hundreds of dollars for dinner, I want an impression of more than the first thing I ate, the last thing I ate and the fact that the restaurant offered me a selection of salts from......

This past Friday night and with little fanfare, Alberto’s in Dupont Circle restarted its ovens and pizza-making operations, less than four months after a fire seriously damaged the P street location and left a pizza shaped hole in many pizza lovers' hearts. The same fire also forced the closure of the DJ Hut located above Alberto’s and the Subway next door, both of which remain closed. According to Alberto’s staff, renovations to reopen the......

Hope everyone had an excellent meal on the greatest American food day of the year. It's been a quiet week in food news as it seems everyone was more interested in turkey. DCist Food alum Erin Zimmer has an excellent recipe from Butterfield 9's chef Michael Harr for leftover cranberry sauce muffins. Mmm... Pizza Mania Looks like it's another pizza week in D.C. - everyone is covering pizza. From DCist's review of Pizza Zero,......

Written by DCist Contributor Andrew Chriss Self-deprecating moniker aside, Pizza Zero, located along on Bethesda Avenue next to the Edgemont neighborhood in Bethesda, has plenty to offer pizza explorers looking for a slightly different experience. Perhaps the best way to pinpoint what's unique about Pizza Zero is to have all the pizza joints in the area stand up and be counted. Standing? O.K. How many of you serve pizza that I can tolerate (being a......

Seattlest watches as a S.L.U.T. is born and Seattle Flickr users go nuts over a local art installation. A restaurant critic demands a Diner's Bill of Rights over a gnat next to her drink, and, in lieu of a Portlandist, Seattlest debates with itself over the identity of the Northwest's crown jewel. Seattlest also joins the guys from Fantagraphics for an ill-fated gun party in the woods. LAist saw national headlines soar this week with......

Clockwise from top left: Comet Ping Pong, Red Rocks, 2 Amys, Bebo There are many factors that affect a pizza. The type of flour used for the dough. The temperature of the oven. The quality of the toppings. The skill and hands of the maker of the dough. The vigilance of the pizzaiolo (the person manning the oven). D.C. may not be known as much of a pizza town, but a few of the......

Veg D.C. Names Best Veggie Restaurant VegDC.com has tallied the votes for the area's best vegetarian restaurant, and the award goes to Java Green, the downtown eatery that serves a wide range of vegetarian and vegan cuisine (and really great coffee drinks) in the Farragut North area of downtown. Even an avowed meat-lover like me can find something to enjoy at the busy restaurant; the fake meats they use taste and feel nearly like the......

In the summer of 2003, Chef Ed Hanson opened a pizzeria on the western edge of a neighborhood that had just renamed itself Penn Quarter. Four years later, Ella’s Wood Fired Pizza, named for Hanson’s young daughter, remains a rarity in downtown Washington: it is an independently owned--and not the least bit pretentious--place to enjoy a drink and a bite to eat. Located at 901 F Street, Ella’s features neither a unifying decorative theme (Matchbox)......

>> Poor little Village Voice music critic just can't seem to master L'Enfant's design for D.C., gets lost on the way to 9:30 Club and misses half of last night's Air show. Bwahahaha. The diagonals don't form a pentagram for no reason. >> Congratulations to local rising stars Le Loup for getting signed to Hardly Art, a new label under Sub Pop "focused on offering quality records for people to enjoy". You'll learn more......

With all that went down this week, we thought we thought we'd cheer everyone up by giving everyone a double dose of dogs. It was a rollercoaster ride of emotions this week at DCist. Like the rest of country, we were floored by the news of so many dead coming out of Virginia Tech, and with so many of the victims and their relatives from the D.C. area, we felt it important to pay......

Google Voice Local Search, aka Google 411 Experimental or just Goog-411, a free telephone-based information service, has apparently been live in Google Labs for several months now, but of course a lot of folks didn't take much notice until the ubiquitous TechCrunch finally posted about it late last week. Thanks to their influence, it's been making the rounds of just about everything in our RSS reader, so we thought we'd give it a spin and......

We're all familiar with The Rules. You know, that iron clad system by which every woman can land herself the man of her dreams and keep him, if only she's willing to act like the most obnoxious kind of person you've ever met. Of course, men have rules, too. They just don't publish them. They've been passed down in locker rooms, cigar-choked men's-only clubs, and fraternity houses for time immemorial. The fact is, I could......

Loosen that Belt, but Keep Your Surgery to Yourself As we enter the final stretch-of-the-pants holiday eating season, perhaps we all feel a little tight in the trousers, but apparently not as much as the chatters last week over on TomChat offering their inane advice on what a poor patron who has undergone gastric bypass surgery should tell a waiter who wonders why so much of a meal has been left on the plate. The......

It's safe to say that Pleaseeasaur is unlike most other musical acts. JP Hasson performs jingles for fake companies ("Pizza Brothers and Sons, Inc.") and goofy songs ("Warning: These Cobras Are Totally Cool") in front of a plain white screen, wearing a different costume for each, while "projectionist/costume designer/multimedia extraordinaire" Thomas Hurley III puts images on the screens using an overhead projector cued to the music and occasionally holds up cardboard cutouts. If it sounds......

The -ists this week had politics on the brain. And what goes better with politics? Partying-- that's two great tastes in one. Oh, and Kevin Federline...can't forget about Kevin Federline. That's three great tastes in one. -Bostonist discussed two big state issues-- what sort of math constitutes a marriage and what kind of alcohol can be sold in most grocery stores. And the politically minded Curt Schilling went on "Jeopardy!". -Chicagoist celebrated the election news......

Cameras Receive Mixed Reviews: Over the weekend the first four of 48 planned surveillance cameras went live in the District, promising to help police handle an on-going crime emergency. But how useful might they be? Not very, according to the Washington Times. Officials in other cities that implemented the cameras argue that they don't do much in helping stop crime, an experience that proven in our northern-most suburb, Baltimore: Baltimore, for example, set up......

Good morning, Washington. So... did you participate in Bike to Work Day? And wasn't it surprisingly pleasant? We hope the answer to both questions is yes. Here's one more reason to pick up the habit: yesterday WTOP reported that Metro will be replacing its old bike racks with ones that are more spacious and secure. Wilson Bridge Dedicated: The Post paints the scene at yesterday's Wilson Bridge Dedication ceremony. Governors! Giant flags! Woodrow Wilson's Rolls......

It's official -- winter is over. Today is the Vernal Equinox, the day that daytime and nighttime are of equal length. But Mother Nature isn't one to make things easy on us. Our friends at Capital Weather are reporting that tomorrow might be particularly winter-like -- the temperature won't break 40, and we may even get some snow. So, enjoy today's mild weather as long as you can. Man Killed at Shaw Metro Station:......

Hill rats, keep your eyes open: NBC 4 is reporting that Jessica Simpson, post-Nick Lachey, is over on the Hill today. The NBC story even has a supplemental "Jessica though the years" photo slideshow album. Simpson is in town representing Operation Smile, for which she serves as its International Youth Ambassador. The organization does good deeds in third-world countries by treating children and young adults with facial deformities like cleft lips and cleft palates. Three......

Thor Cheston is serious about beer. The manager of Birreria Paradiso, the new basement bar of Georgetown’s Pizza Paradiso featuring 16 taps and 80 bottled beers, can rattle off adjectives about brews that are usually reserved for fine wines. Here’s Thor on the Duchesse de Bourgogne, a Flanders red ale: “It's very complex. It would go well with desserts,” he told DCist. “There’s a palate-cleansing sourness.” Beer as a palate-cleanser? Maybe, but the Duchesse, a......

Part two of two. While conducting research for his book Pizza -- A Slice of Heaven: The Ultimate Pizza Guide and Companion, Ed Levine tried 1,000 slices of pizza in 20 cities. Some would love to follow in Levine's footsteps, travelling in search of excellent slices, but our day jobs confine us to the Washington metro area for our pizza-sampling expeditions. Though not traditionally a mecca for pizza connoisseurs, D.C. boasts some serious pie-makers. DCist......

When DCist was in college, the lure of free pizza was really the only inducement we needed to go somewhere. Introductory meeting for the Djibouti Club? Thursdays with Hegel? Piccolo Players for 17th Century Women? The support group for students who were madly in love with their T.A.'s? We went to them all. Now that we're all grown up, we have to pay for a pizza, and we don't get a discussion about dialectical reasoning......

We've all had those moments where we're shown a snapshot of ourselves, and we find ourselves looking at that snapshot and thinking, "Holy crap, do I look like that? I don't look like that. I don't know how you took this photo, but I totally don't look like that." Comes now the Post, and the photo it's waving is the 2005 version of its Best Bets Readers' Choice survey, put together from registered readers' nominations......

Aprilia, Motoguzzi, Ducati, Cagiva…..Italian Motorcycle manufacturers right? Well maybe if you’re in Italy, but if you venture to Mt. Pleasant’s new slice of New York you’ll find them to be the names of just a few new pies to grace this neighborhoods main drag. Red Bean is distant memory whose relics now grace Wonderland's décor like a fading ghost. In its place is Radius, a New York style pizzeria that is certain to get more......

Thanks to Rock Creek Rambler, we learn that Pizza Mart, home of 18th Street's original jumbo pizza slice (or something like that depending on what pizza entrepreneur you talk to) was shut down recently for health code violations including, according to the Post's culling of municipal reports, "debris, no certified food supervisor and unclean food contact surfaces and equipment." If we read the report correctly, the restaurant was closed two Fridays back and reopened that......

Ever tried D.C.-area lunch joint Perfect Pita? If not, that could change in the near future. The inexpensive takeout restaurant enjoys brisk lunchtime sales of its Greek-influenced sandwiches, pitas, and pizzas (most for under $5) at two Alexandria and one downtown D.C. location, but that could soon become many more. The Washington Business Journal reported in December that the owner of The Perfect Pita, Attila Kan, has decided to franchise his operation through Fransmart,......

D.C. foodies out there may notice that there's something missing from their dishes. Restaurants are cutting back on the use of tomatoes because of rising food costs -- a bad combination of flooding in California, all those hurricanes in Florida and insects coming across the border from Mexico is to blame. Though its doubtful Pizza Mart will start serving sauceless slices, suburbanites may notice that the Olive Garden and Red Lobster have done away with......

The Washington City Paper's cover story this week examines the Adams Morgan phenomenon the Jumbo Slice in laudable detail. The article ranges from the origins of the slice (Chris Chishti, owner of Pizza Mart, claims to be the first), their nutrition (the slices contain over 1,000 calories), their economics (nobody's getting rich), the volume (what does 900 pounds of a mozzarella-provolone mix look like?) and even, well, the culture ("You see people taking pictures of......

The Post's "You Haven't Lived Here If You Haven't ..." feature on Sunday traveled to Adams Morgan to enjoy a jumbo slice at Pizza Mart. By featuring just Pizza Mart, we aren't sure if the Post crowned the jumbo slices that can be found at 2445 18th St. NW as the best on the block, as there are others. (For atmosphere, we're partial to Pizza Napoli. There's nothing like post-last call revelry while chowing down......