Image: James Cagney and Joan Leslie, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942).
Dearest Gentle Reader, we hope you are warm and safe. We a have a pretty solid recap of dining news and activity on our site for you to read as you wrap your toes in the blanket on the couch. So shall we proceed?
Updates to D.C. Recommended Restaurant List
Added:
Ceibo – An upstart serving some creative and great dishes that mostly reference the cuisine of Uruguay and Argentina deserves more attention.
Revisited:
Comet Ping Pong – Ping pong and pizza. Still doing right by the neighborhood.
Comings & Goings:
Tom broke a bit of news on his weekly chat. Chef Epie has left L’Avante Garde and the restaurant is dark pending a reboot.
We did a bunch of housekeeping on the site, mostly to note the many closings that we had been in denial over. But, there was some good news, like 2fifty adding a spot, Andy’s Pizza’s march toward world domination, Seven Reasons moving, Equinox moving, Ambar’s third spot in Shaw, Baker’s Daughter’s added spot in Georgetown, Taqueria Xochi’s second spot in The Square. And Moon Rabbit reopening at a new location! Many of these we had noted in weekly reviews, but we had fallen behind on the entries.
D.C. Dining News
Esquire does a profile of Kevin Tien as he launches the next iteration of Moon Rabbit.
WSJ opinion piece argues that no one goes out to eat in D.C. anymore. Could have fooled us.
Sure fees are kinda annoying in the moment, but is it really the most important thing?
The bar back story on the non-alcoholic cocktail spot on H Street.
A take-out kitchen out of a Silver Spring home doing food from Liberia.
(Local) Food Sources:
The long journey back for oysters in the Chesapeake gets some good news. “The annual Fall Oyster Survey showed a ‘remarkable number’ of juvenile oysters and found them widely distributed through many regions of the Chesapeake, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources announced Tuesday. It found 86.8 spat, or juvenile oysters, per bushel, which is nearly four times the 39-year median. That marks the fourth consecutive year the survey showed results exceeding the median number.”
Media:
Carman decides to turn over the reins of the Casual Diner column. A rotating crew will backfill. He remains at the Post and will continue writing. An end of an era to be certain, but we are frankly excited by the prospect. As good as he is delving into specific cuisines, it is the long-form stories that stick. We hope this opens the door for more.
Aubrey Kingsbury, the goalkeeper for the Washington Spirit did a baking internship. People showed up. In case you haven’t been following, the Spirit are the most exciting team in D.C. right now. Fingers crossed their big draft day moves pay off.
Around the Blogs:
Lori of Been There Eaten That makes a return with some thoughtful insights on coping with serious illness and the role of food as a consolation and a necessity. Wishing her nothing but goodness this year, and it is great to be reading her posts again. As an aside, if you want to know the consensus among the culinary cognoscenti of the best places in D.C. right now, her list of Anju, Centrolina, Daru, Lutèce, Oyster Oyster, and Perry’s is darn close to authoritative.
Rick does some catching up, including nice words about Ceibo.
We also missed that DCFüd had a slew of posts at the end of last year and seems to be picking up steam. Also thanks for including this site on your blogroll! You can follow on twitter here.
Hungry Lobbyist looking to reboot? Last review was as Covid was breaking in 2020. They are looking for a site designer (as of a few days ago) and maybe contributors.
Drink
Wine:
A wine shop grows in Harlem. “Besides filling in a market gap identified by Pascal, the business also identifies the need to give voice and platform to diverse winemakers as well as educate consumers on various selections available on the market.” (h/t to @soulPhoodie).
Jancis Robinson on the man who made Italian wine modern and his 35,000 bottle legacy.
A plug for Levi Dalton’s podcast, a favorite of ours too. Glad to have him putting out regular content again.
Asimov on the generation of women wine leaders in Chianti.
Beer:
The less-told tale of women and beer history.
Spirits:
For a country where corn is central to the cuisine, eventually somebody would start making whiskey. “Like almost all of Mexico’s indigenous corn varieties, nal t’eel in recent decades has faced a seemingly unbeatable threat: high-yield hybrids, developed primarily in the United States and favored for their efficiency, though rarely their flavor. Fields once dotted with a rainbow of heirloom ears are now awash in wan yellows and whites. But in 2020 nal t’eel was thrown a lifeline of sorts by Gran Maizal, a distillery outside the Yucatán city of Merida. Working with local farmers, the company uses nal t’eel and two other indigenous varieties of corn to make whiskey.”
Other News
The Emerging Economy:
This take argues the price of a Snickers is what drives consumer sentiment: “So we’re much more likely to remember the price of the Snickers bar and forget the price of the television we bought last year. Consumers tend to think only about the prices of high-frequency purchases — food for the family and fuel for the S.U.V.” Guy must be eating a lot of Snickers to have it match gas prices in his mind. Krugman argues using food is not a good example of prices sticking at a higher point, because inflation fell fast in that sector. But this point seemed particularly off: “All of this may help explain why the same consumers who believe inflation is higher than it really is aren’t aggressively cutting their own spending. Whatever consumers may feel about the damage of inflation, they will still spend the money that they have. The mantra ‘never underestimate the hedonism of the U.S. consumer’ continues to hold good.” It was consumers who viewed inflation as a short-term problem (so dipped into savings) rather than a long-term threat (requiring big personal budget adjustments) that was one of the biggest tip-offs that inflation was transitory, because it is the expectation of inflation lasting longer that feeds long-term inflation.
Adam Reiner on the class of restaurants that become the preserve of the rich. “These developments collectively portend a sad reality where average people are losing access to their favorite restaurants.”
Soleil Ho breaks down the challenges of modern restaurant economics (paywall), and focuses on leases as a central problem.
Related, Virginia restaurant owner defends his $16 BLT (that was $13 pre-covid). “My revenue per operation has dropped about $350,000 per store while my rent has gone up, labor is up 30%, insurance is up 40%, rents up 10%,”
Industry:
I’m sorry, were you complaining about having to tip? “A report by the city published in November 2022 said that the fatality rate among food delivery workers who don’t use a car was 36 deaths per 100,000 thousand workers from January 2021 to June 2022. That rate surpassed that of workers in construction (seven deaths per 100,000), which had historically been the deadliest industry.”
Uber acquired Drizly, now it is shutting it down. “After three years of Drizly operating independently within the Uber family, we’ve decided to close the business and focus on our core Uber Eats strategy of helping consumers get almost anything — from food to groceries to alcohol — all on a single app.” Was this a failure to make the acquisition work or a successful suppression of competition by acquisition?
Food Sources:
Could lentils be the next big thing?
One world: Plastics! “It’s long been known that microplastics can be found in the digestive tracts of fish and shellfish, but the new research sheds light on the likely presence of the plastic pieces in parts of seafood that are typically eaten, such as fish fillets, as well as popular land-based proteins like beef, chicken and pork.”
Vittles on government cuisine, picking up what was also a theme of National Dish. Cuisines are not often centuries old, and sometimes they are manufactured. Then sold: “However, with Western political and economic hegemony receding, there are increasing cases of gastrodiplomacy targeting new centres of gravity in Asia; for instance, Malaysian gastrodiplomacy targets the UK, the US and New Zealand, but also China. Taiwanese gastrodiplomacy is similar, but with an added emphasis on Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. The diplomatic tool often becomes a way to command recognition and status abroad; utilising cuisine to leverage what influence already exists.”
Food & Culture:
Bon Appétit on Palestinian chefs at this moment in history, including two from the D.C. area. “I was conditioned to think that the moment I say I’m Palestinian, I’ll be associated with violence—and therefore invite violence into my space. But that’s not true. Food is my nonviolent protest. I want people to feel the joy of what it means to connect to Palestinians outside of what others say. At the core it is about sharing and exchanging the pleasures of food and nourishment—if that remains the same, then it’s all Palestinian. Let’s focus on who we are: loving people who have a lot of joy to offer.”
Health & Nutrition:
Is the Ozempic/weight loss fixation about health or aesthetics?
Stories about the health risks of gas stoves make us wonder about all those industry kitchens with tight space and multiple burners going for hours a day.
Media:
Hanna Raskin’s The Food Section is leaving Substack. “The Food Section is making a move. By the end of this month, The Food Section will be an independent publication, without any ties to a big social media company.” She lists several reasons, but the good news is that it allows her to grow.
Odds & Ends:
“A meaty burger glistens with dripping ketchup. Curly fries look crispy out of the fryer. A glass of Coca-Cola effervesces with bubbles. But watch that first bite. Miller’s diner food is made out of glass.”
“It started with the gorditas de masa. In a Jan. 1 post on X, formerly Twitter, a user pointed out that a supposed picture of the dish shared by a former Republican congresswoman was actually beef stew with sada roti — and had first appeared on a Guyanese tourism Facebook page.”
Don’t have a wedding in a business establishment without checking with management: “Mr. Barrow said that he and Ana Lezama had been too ‘shocked’ to intervene. ‘We just kind of let it happen,’ he said. ‘What am I going to do, break up a wedding?’”
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Thanks for reading, hope your new year is going well. And if you are thinking about where to go on Valentine’s Day, we happen to have a large dining guide for D.C. that might help you out. We have 300+ recommended restaurants, sortable by cuisine or neighborhood in either LIST or MAP format.
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Stay warm. Don’t whine. Tip big.