Dishes We Dug: Maine-style lobster roll (pictured) at Luke’s Lobster; baked beans with burnt ends at Hill Country; chapulines (sautéed grasshoppers) at Oyamel; fried zeppoles with rum crème anglaise at Policy.

Dishes We Didn’t: Slow cooked beef brisket on a potato roll at The Diner—dry enough to qualify as jerky.

Venues Notably Missing From City Paper‘s List of D.C.’s 44 Most Powerful Restaurants to the Chagrin of Various Readers: Tune Inn, Tabard Inn, Ris, Restaurant Nora, The Palm, Elizabeth’s Gone Raw, Cafe Milano, Meridian Pint, Palena.

Most Dissenting Reader Opinion About City Paper‘s Top-Ranked Most Powerful Eatery: “How powerful is Minibar really? Isn’t it just because it’s so small? Very few people go or can even afford to go, and it’s unheard of among politicos. Less than one tenth of one percent of people in the city have been.”

Photo by Chris Shott