Chop’t owners Colin McCabe and Tony Shure closed their brand-new Penn Quarter salad shop for a few hours yesterday afternoon to entertain media with samples of their signature greens and wrap sandwiches. A dressing tasting offered a buffet of carrot and celery sticks to dip into any of the 28 flavors. We especially liked the carrot ginger, General Tso’s chipotle, spa balsamic, and smoky bacon Russian—but don’t kid yourself that you’re eating a healthy lunch if you opt for that last one on your lettuce. It’s amped up with lots of smoked bacon and is so thick that it could double as a dip.

For Francophiles, it wouldn’t be Christmas without bûche de Noël, the festive, marzipan-decorated log of chocolate, cream, and sponge cake. At the Willard hotel’s year-old Parisian bistro, Café du Parc, the bûche pays homage not only to the holidays but also to local arts and culture. To kick off what will be an annual tradition of honoring a DC cultural leader with cake, this year’s log was inspired and created by Spanish-born Plácido Domingo, the celebrated tenor and director of the Washington National Opera.

We were skeptical as to how Domingo and pastry chef Morgan Bomboy would translate opera into dessert. Sure, there’s the opera cake—a coffee-and-almond-flavored gâteau that a French pastry shop named after the Paris Opera more than a century ago—but that dessert never claimed to “elegantly evoke operatic motifs,” as Café du Parc promises.

Many things were memorable about the restaurants Duke Zeibert ran at the corner of Connecticut Avenue and L Street in DC between 1950 and 1994. He had to close the first one for several years, beginning in 1980, while a new building went up on top of the Farragut North Metro station. When he reopened, Duke’s had moved from a street-level cavern to a light-filled location on the second floor.

The Redskins’ Super Bowl trophies always went on display first in Duke’s lobby. Inside, a good table put you close to Washington’s movers and shakers—and to some of the city’s oddities. I remember one day looking up from my brisket and seeing a knee go by. I kept looking up, but it seemed like forever before I got to the head. Manute Bol—all seven-foot-seven of him—had just signed with the Bullets, as the Wizards were then called. This was a coming-out luncheon for him, and Duke’s was the only place to hold it.

Hotel restaurants may have once had a reputation for being cheesy, but not anymore. Domaso Trattoria Moderna, inside Rosslyn’s new Hotel Palomar, wants to be as much a destination as the guest rooms.

Set on the fourth floor of a high-rise that overlooks Georgetown University’s Gothic spires across the Potomac, Domaso highlights northern-Italian cuisine—and that doesn’t mean just Tuscany. “I’m sick of people coming back from Italy who only rave about Tuscany, or think that Northern Italian food only means the Tuscan kind,” says Italian-born chef Massimo Fedozzi. Though he pays homage to the region with his panzanella (a traditional Tuscan bread salad with tomatoes, cucumbers, red onion, and basil), much of the menu is inspired by the restaurant’s namesake, a fishing village in the Lombardy region. Urgiada soup, a Lake Como specialty made from barley and borlotti beans, is something you’re not likely to find on the menu at other haute Italian restaurants in the area.

With Thanksgiving approaching, we asked some of the area’s best chefs if they could jazz up the Thanksgiving-dinner staples—not by using gourmet foods but by including the cans and mixes that many cooks use but rarely fess up to. At first they balked. “Use a can opener?” one asked. “No crayfish tails in the stuffing?” another pouted. But off to their kitchens they went—and came up with a few tricks for turning Turkey Day warhorses into something memorable. Each recipe serves eight.

Looking for more Thanksgiving ideas? Check out our complete Thanksgiving Dining Guide, with dozens of recipes from great local chefs, wine pairings, and how to roast the perfect turkey.

Ardeo, 3311 Connecticut Ave., NW; 202-244-6750. Starters on chef Trent Conry’s three-course menu include fall organic greens with grilled nectarines, goat cheese, and pecan dressing; butternut-squash risotto with chestnuts, currants, pepitas, and sage-chili butter; and watercress and endive with caramelized pears, fallen Gorgonzola soufflé, and walnut vinaigrette. Main courses are roast turkey with sausage stuffing, sweet-potato purée, apple-cranberry compote, and Calvados pan gravy; Arctic char with fava beans, crisp shiitakes, golden raisins, and caper brown-butter sauce; and roast prime rib with Yukon Gold potato purée, asparagus, and tarragon stone-ground mustard. Desserts include pumpkin cheesecake with caramel sauce, upside-down pear cake, and pecan cake with butter-pecan ice cream. Noon to 8; $37.50.

Bastille, 1201 N. Royal St., Alexandria; 703-519-3776. Chefs Christophe and Michelle Poteaux offer a three-course menu at their French bistro. Choices include roasted-parsnip bisque with crispy onions and pancetta; frisée-and-endive salad with goat-cheese cromesqui; baby spinach with foie gras on brioche toast; roasted pheasant breast with foie-gras rub, chestnut stuffing, cranberry chutney, sweet-potato-and-root purée, and sautéed greens; prime-rib au poivre with Cognac sauce, black-truffle gratin dauphinois, and wild mushrooms; and pan-roasted halibut filet with tarragon béarnaise sauce and Belgian-endive marmalade. For dessert, there’s pumpkin cheesecake with maple-pecan streusel, apple crumble, and Valrhona truffle cake. For an additional $4, you can try a selection of artisanal cheeses. 5 to 9 PM; $45.

Blue Duck Tavern, 1201 24th St., NW; 202-419-6755. Chef Brian McBride’s all-American feast features roast turkey breast and chestnut-stuffed leg with giblet gravy, made with organic turkey from Eberly Farm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. There’s also suckling pig with bourbon peaches, Maine-lobster pot pie, chanterelle cornbread stuffing, baby yams, braised fall greens, pickled beets, and sweet-dumpling-squash purée. Desserts from pastry chef Laurent Merdy include classic apple pie with hand-cranked vanilla-bean ice cream. 10 to 3 for brunch, 6 to 10 for dinner; $80 for adults, $40 for children ages 6 to 12; under 6 free.

Are you scared of wine on Thanksgiving? If not, you probably haven’t been reading enough wine columns.

One of the biggest canards about wine writing is the annual Thanksgiving article. For some reason, bland, boring turkey is viewed as a difficult food for wine. Then, of course, there’s the tart or sickly-sweet cranberry sauce, the lumpy gravy, and the oysters in the stuffing. And everyone knows those tiny marshmallows on top of the sweet-potato casserole are just murder on your palate.

The Keepers of the Keys to the Kingdom (a.k.a. wine columnists) waste their ink and our time every November reinforcing this supposed fear of wine on Turkey Day with their dicta of what not to drink with this or that item on the menu.

Come off it, folks. With so many different flavors on the table, any wine is going to pair well with something. We may need to be careful about what we eat just before taking a sip, but if there’s a theme to wine with Thanksgiving dinner, it should be “Open one of everything!”