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…

‘Tis two days before Christmas, when all through D.C., not a creature is stirring, except maybe Marion Barry. And who knows what he’s stirring anyway? Whatever it is, it’s probably not Splenda or non-dairy creamer. By the way, did you know that Marion Barry’s middle name is Shepilov? I read that Marion’s father Julian named his son after Dmitri Shepilov, the Soviet foreign minister under Khrushchev. But unless Julian Barry knew Shepilov personally, that can’t…

Well, it looks like the folks up at the James Beard foundation sobered up enough to call the office to have the intern hit the “publish” button late yesterday afternoon. The 2006 James Beard nominees are here! All 75,384 of them! Well almost. With 58 categories, the Foundation might be going a little overboard with its awards, but we digress. The D.C. area fares O.K. in terms of nominations this year, hopefully giving us…

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…

If honing your culinary skills—or at least reading how to– are among your New Year’s resolutions, we have two suggestions: 1) continue reading DCist’s “Eating In” and 2) buy this month’s Gourmet magazine. Why are we leading you to the high brow if you’re still working on your chiffonade? No, it’s not because editor Ruth […]

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…