Another Feb. 14, another snowstorm in Washington. If you’d prefer to stay in for Valentine’s Day, you are not alone, especially in this weather. For those hardy souls willing to don snowboots but who did not have the wherewithal to make dinner reservations in December, the upside may be that there are a few great tables going empty tonight in your favorite restaurants. Washingtonian’s Best Bites Blog tips us that OpenTable.com had some good tables…

D.C.’s lack of choice when it comes to gourmet grocery stores may be coming to an end, although not everything is panning out as planned. A long hoped-for Whole Foods Market on 14th Street in Columbia Heights seems all but dead. “We have no immediate plans for that location,” Sarah Kenney, Whole Foods Market, director of marketing for the mid-Atlantic Region tells DCist. Over a year ago, Whole Foods signed a Letter Of Intent (LOI)…

Restaurant Week is becoming the must have fashion accessory for the D.C. area this winter. Everyone’s got to have one. Case in point: Silver Spring, a long-suffering suburban “edge city” that has been on the upswing for the last few years is officially entering the fray to show off its shiny new dining scene February 5-11. THIS JUST IN: The price for a 2-course lunch will be just $12, while a 3-course dinner will be…

Every now and then, D.C.’s government inserts itself into the lives of ordinary citizens just out for a little nip with their lunch. Exhibit A: Our blogger friends over at Washingtonian are reporting the surprise and inconvenience many patrons of “better” dining establishments like 2Amys, Crème, Bistro du Coin, and Asia Nora felt upon seeing temporary liquor license suspension tags in these restaurants’ windows recently. We say it’s a good thing. Not good, as in…

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…

What’s a holiday celebration without a cheery, slightly cheesy themed cocktail? Not very jolly, we say. Even if you don’t normally go in for a frou-frou drink, who can resist a glass of something icy and decorated with a mini candy cane or gold sparkles at this time of year? Not us. Here are three spots for festive holiday drinks guaranteed to lift your spirits: Morton’s The Steakhouse is capitalizing on the martini madness among…

Walking into the hastily opened Bebo Trattoria in the revitalized and almost pedestrian friendly Crystal Drive area in Crystal City (aka close-in Arlington), I thought: “Hey, this looks just like Oyamel. It’s still vertical and orange, but they’re serving pasta.” When Roberto Donna realized he couldn’t stand to be without a kitchen for a few months while Galileo’s building is renovated, his pal Jose Andres came to the rescue. Andres wanted to move Oyamel to…

It’s nice to have a real bar in the midst of the chi-chi scene that Whole Foods spawned on 14th and P Street. That’s what many folks said when they walked into a decidedly cleaner, more modern and less packed version of Stoney’s on a recent weeknight. But biting into our first super grilled cheese (lightly grilled white bread, gooey American cheese, tomato, chopped raw onion, crispy bacon) after a 10-month hiatus reminded us, yes,…

Laura Graves loves chocolate and she has been eating and baking with it for as long as she can remember. The 33 year-old Arlington resident is a self-described chocoholic, so when she decided to quit her marketing job last fall to make gourmet chocolate truffles full time, no one who knew her was too surprised. But she craved something healthier to pair with her chocolate fix, and she sensed that consumers did, too. Graves started…

A dark horse Chilean sauvignon blanc won the most votes at the 11th annual International Wines for Oysters Competition at the Old Ebbitt Grill Monday night, but what many will remember most is that they witnessed one man save another man’s life. The victim, Ronald Kessler of Potomac, a best-selling nonfiction author and chief Washington correspondent for the right-of-center NewsMax.com, fell to the floor from his barstool with no apparent warning while chatting with the…