Mario Batali will be cooking for the dinner, which is in honor of the Italian prime minister.

Can you survive on $4.44 a day for food? Like D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton before him, star chef Mario Batali is having trouble.

In July, we reported that celebrity Chef Mario Batali’s Italian food-and-drink emporium Eataly would open in D.C. sometime in 2012, and it looks like real estate agents have identified three to four possible locations for it.

The collaborators behind mega Italian food-and-drink emporium Eataly are hoping to open an outpost in D.C. But our reaction to Eataly is perhaps more muted than most.

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…

The weekly Ist wrap-up is written by Seattlest editor Dan Gonsiorowski. DCist helps us make more sense of the world this week. Posts like this concert review are the reason for Scott Stapp. DCist also enumerates the reasons for playing ultimate frisbee, Condi’s tight buns, their love of a local convenience store, and their jealousy of a person in Seattle calling the city. LAist documented graf artist Banksy’s most recent visit to LA in one…

By DCist Food and Wine Writer Michael Mugmon. Before putting fork to mouth, DCist considers a restaurant’s prospects by examining the quality of its wine list. If it’s evident that a restaurant owner cares deeply about the wines served with the food, then it’s likely the owner also cares deeply about the ingredients going into the kitchen and the dishes coming out of it. Too often in Washington, a restaurant’s wine list reveals the owner’s…

Clicking on our television, we channel surfed our way over to the Food Network, where local chef Roberto Donna, proprietor of D.C. high-end Italian restaurant Galileo, would be taking up the Iron Chef America challenge against Masaharu Morimoto. Though we would have been psyched for an Iron Chef Mario Batali-Donna-all-Italian throwdown, we settled in for an evening of what we assumed would be a well-matched competition. Galileo is, after all, apparently one of the top…