They have a saying in Paris that describes the fast pace of life in that city: Métro, boulot, dodo, meaning that life consists only of an endless repetition of subway rides, work, and sleep. Life in Washington is harried, too, but sometimes you need to stop as you dash through the L’Enfant Plaza station at rush hour on a Friday in January. Who is playing the famous Chaconne from Bach’s D minor partita so well…

In Eating Your Words, former New York Times restaurant critic William Grimes discusses what’s in a sandwich name — be it hoagie, wedge, muffuletta, Cubano, rocket, garibaldi, zeppelin, or spuckie. Region seems to dictate names as much as anything. Grimes attributes the Philadelphia “hoagie” to flapper-era Philadelphia jazz musician Al De Palma — who apparently said, “you had to be a hog to eat it.” During the Great Depression in 1936, he opened up a…

Pam the Butcher has dropped the moniker for the moment. After a lifetime of working with meat, Pam Ginsberg has laid down her cleaver to set up camp as cheese maven at Bowers’ Fancy Dairy Products in Eastern Market. Despite a bumpy transition, Ginsberg is content in her new residency across from her father’s former butcher’s stall in South Hall. Pam’s status as one of Northwest’s best butchers was established long before press accolades in…

In last Sunday’s Post Magazine, the newspaper’s retiring rock critic David Segal described what he called the “great Live Concert moment.” He wrote: It’s about music, but it’s also about an experience that’s ephemeral and communal, that you share for a couple of hours with a bunch of strangers who, at some level, you feel like you know because they have the same idiotic glint in their eye when the lights come up. It’s…

Could Leopold’s Really Be That Bad? In his weekly chats for the last four weeks, Tom Sietsema has been hinting at having one of the worst service experiences ever at a local restaurant. Readers of the Sunday Post Magazine finally read about the experience in full when Sietsema reviewed Leopold’s Kafe & Konditorei this past Sunday. From the “clueless mannequin on duty” to “[t]he human peacocks supposedly hired to supervise,” this review was rough –…

Washington Post Magazine’s Photo Editor Keith Jenkins is an avid blogger and user of the community photo sharing website Flickr. After seeing lots of good photography produced by D.C. photobloggers and members of the D.C. area Flickr group, he decided to create a feature in the magazine highlighting some of the online community’s best work. He has invited anyone who “regularly posts photos to their own photoblog or flickr site” to submit photos to the…

There’s a minor controversy today on eGullet in reference to Tom Sietsema’s review of Pazo, which will appear in Sunday’s Post Magazine. This time, the controversy isn’t over the restaurant’s rating (three stars), but over its location: 1425 Aliceanna St., Baltimore. eGullet poster “lackadaisi” takes exception to Sietsema reviewing a restaurant an hour north of the District proper: “The Post needs a reviewer that is dedicated to its city, and Tom Sietsema is most certainly…

Good morning, Washington. We start with this photo on Flickr of L Street posted by Burnt Pixel, aka Keith Jenkins, the photo editor of The Washington Post Magazine. From the streetscape, we think that it was taken outside the Post’s main office. Speaking of the Post, congrats to Steve Coll, who was the only person from the news organization to score a Pulitzer yesterday. As FishbowlDC puts it, the Post “got shut out” although Coll’s…

Are the standards of Post food reviewer Tom Sietsema declining? Some local diners seem to think so. Sunday’s Post Magazine saw Sietsema give three stars to Etrusco, the five-year-old Italian restaurant in Dupont Circle. The three-star rating ranks Etrusco among the best restaurants in D.C., including CityZen, Le Paradou, Cashion’s Eat Place, and Palena. eGullet member “BilRus” was surprised by the rating: “A restaurant broke out of the two-star parade and we haven’t picked up…

Although D.C. has a growing group of dedicated photobloggers (see our list on the bottom left) there are many photographers who would like to share their photos online but who don’t have the technical skills — or the time — to run a full time photoblog. For them there is the Washington DC/Metro Area photo sharing group on the popular photography website Flickr. Flickr can best be described as a super-charged Friendster (or TheFacebook) for…