Last week, Top Chef returned to the Bravo network for a second season, complete with a new host and a fresh-faced group of hungry culinary hopefuls. And one of this season’s contestants on the excellent cooking competition — which pits aspiring cooks against one another in immunity and elimination battles to win $100,000 in prize money, a feature in Food & Wine magazine, an appearance at the Aspen Food & Wine Classic, Kenmore PRO appliances,…

Theatre Alliance’s Haroun and the Sea Of Stories takes us on a diverting trip where the imagination of a young girl and her father are our guide. The result is an overly whimsical and inconsistent treatment of a lyrical but sometimes impeneterable script. The setup for the play, now being staged at H Street Playhouse, is simple enough – storyteller Rashid’s wife Soraya leaves him for a more practical suitor, rendering him too sad to…

Cheaters…women’s sex lives…Salman Rushdie…during March in the D.C. theater world, looks like anything goes; even Anything Goes. Starting off the month is George Bernard Shaw’s Fanny’s First Play, produced by Washington Stage Guild (March 2). This “comedy within a comedy” should prove witty enough, as Shaw always has a way with words. Speaking of renowned male authors, Haroun And The Sea Of Stories, a Salman Rushdie D.C. premiere, begins at the H Street playhouse this…

As the Hot Ticket turns into the pleasantly, autumnally cool ticket, there are certain hot items that will go without saying from now on, so don’t ask why we haven’t mentioned them. These are: 1) You should all be ashamed for not going to Nats games while there are a few left in this inaugural season, but we’re not going to mention this anymore. 2) There is, apparently, a professional football team in the area,…