Allez Cuisine! From Jack Abramoff’s Signatures to his own restaurant, Farrah Olivia, Morou Ouattara plans to step into a new venue. His eye is on Kitchen Stadium as he competes for the title of the Next Iron Chef. The first episode airs Sunday, 9 p.m. on the Food Network. Eight chefs with the help of Lufthansa Airlines (yay product placement!) will be traveling through Europe and competing against each other to join Mario Batali, Cat…

Written by DCist Contributors Gayle S. Putrich and Mike Roscoe Awards season: long gone in Hollywood; just getting started for D.C.’s restaurants. If you don’t believe us, just ask Cathal Armstrong of Restaurant Eve, Eamonn’s, and the forthcoming Majestic. Armstrong has been named a contender for two awards in as many days: Best Mid-Atlantic Chef from the James Beard Foundation on Monday and now Chef of the Year by the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington….

Wasabi Wa-opens I have been searching for a good cafeteria-style Japanese place for a while. Since I’d be happy to go to Kotobuki every single day for lunch if it weren’t in Outer Mongolia, the opening of Wasabi gives me great joy. Conveniently located at 17th and I Streets, NW, for you downtowners, it’s a welcome addition to a scene dominated by places like the Park Place Gourmet. While my lunchtime map is roughly bordered…

Redskins-Cowboys. Ali-Frazier. Potter-Voldemort. Morimoto-Donna? Last night on the Food Network’s Iron Chef America, Galileo’s Roberto Donna avenged his very lopsided defeat in March 2005 at the hands of Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto by scoring a victory over his cooking rival in “Battle Squid.” Much as then-challenger and now-Iron Chef Bobby Flay surprisingly defeated Morimoto in a rematch on the original Iron Chef show after initially having been quietly humiliated by Morimoto, Donna — who did…

The 2005 RAMMYs aren’t the only culinary awards on the horizon. The nominees for the 2005 James Beard Foundation awards were announced yesterday (.pdf). The awards are separated into three general segments, cookbooks, journalism, and restaurants and chefs. In the journalism segment, Todd Kliman of the City Paper (who most recently “reviewed” Perdu) was nominated for Best Newspaper Column for his weekly “Young and Hungry” feature. Tom Sietsema of the Post has been nominated for…

If you’re looking for an entertaining (and appetizing) respite to the inevitable Inauguration hoopla we’ll be dealing with next week, DCist suggests venturing down to Northern Virginia to see culinary hero Alton Brown sign copies of his new book “I’m Just Here for More Food”. Brown, host of Food Network’s Good Eats, will be signing copies at Barnes & Noble in Arlington at noon Tuesday and at Borders in Tysons Corner at 7:30 p.m. For…