Former 'Top Chef' Contender Unpacks His Knives in D.C.

His latest challenge is to deal with a health inspector who has arrived four hours early.

Wearing orange Crocs, a reddish brambly beard on his face, the signature fedora forsaken for a more work-appropriate bandanna, Spike Mendelsohn, a not-quite-finalist from the recently completed season of Bravo's "Top Chef," is frazzled. He springs into a white Acura sport-utility vehicle on Pennsylvania Avenue and heads to his new home on Capitol Hill to pick up a permit and photo ID.

It's a gorgeous mid-June day. Contractors shoot the breeze outside his soon-to-open restaurant, Good Stuff Eatery (303 Pennsylvania at Second Street SE, 202-543-8222, http://www.goodstuffeatery.com). A woman from a food-service equipment company sucks on a cigarette by her truck.

"If he doesn't sign a release before he leaves, Spike's rear end is going down to city hall," she rasps.

This challenge is not being filmed by a TV camera crew. Mendelsohn, 27, is not throwing together a dish. He's throwing together a franchise. Or so he hopes.

Season four of "Top Chef" is over. Mendelsohn made the top five before he was booted. (Let's not mention the waterlogged scallops that doomed him.) Sweet, apple-pie-faced Stephanie Izard won the title. Fine. She has several years of experience on Mendelsohn. But she also won the title of fan favorite on the "Top Chef" reunion show two weeks ago. That distinction maybe should've been Mendelsohn's. After all, he played the game cunningly and humorously. Is he annoyed?

"A little bit," says Mendelsohn, who moved from New York earlier this month. Then the spin: "I've gotten such great reaction from the public no matter where I go."

Including Washingtonians?

"They love that I've decided to come to D.C. From everyone I meet here, I hear, 'We need more good food here on the Hill. We need more good food in the city. We loved you on the show.' "

Nothing but plaudits, then?

"I'm sure I've shook a couple hands with people who're thinking, 'Boy, this guy's an [expletive].' "

[Expletive] or not, he's the frontman for Good Stuff, a burger-and-fries joint that will be the flagship location upon which the Mendelsohn family chefs build their restaurant business. The plan is to do a burger better than anyone, applying classical training to America's signature dish, and then expand Good Stuff to, say, Adams Morgan or Arlington. Then go national. Then Mendelsohn wants to return to gourmet fare, to do his Vietnamese tapas place, his French bistro, his trattoria.