Image: Errol Flynn and Greer Garson in That Forsyte Woman (1949).
There was little activity on our website this week because of the holidays. So no updates to our recommended restaurant list for D.C. We did do a scrub of the D.C. Restaurant Gift Card List. The page was initially created as a list of places doing gift cards, selling merchandise, and/or doing take-out during in the teeth of the pandemic in summer 2020. It got a second wind as we entered the gift-giving season last December. So, we gave it a refresh as it starts to see traffic this year. There was some dining news though, so keep reading for our round-up of that!
D.C. Dining News
Eat DC reports that local casual Filipino spot Pogiboy is getting backing to expand to the west coast.
The rumors of DBGB DC’s return get some support this week when they host an open call for talent. The good news is they are coming back. The bad news is that they appear to be starting from scratch and probably let all their staff go. So it will be interesting to see how quickly and how well they get up and running.
A Tuscan wine producer was at Fiola Mare the night the Bidens dined there and got a chance to present a bottle to the first couple by virtue of Megumi Awaya, who is the talented (and apparently opportunistic) senior sommelier there. Then they got the story written up!
On the twitters, someone pinged Barred in DC about a three percent surcharge that Doi Moi adds to bills. They apparently lifted the language blaming the government from Joe’s. The spots do not specify what government mandates they are trying to offset. It is a reminder that the D.C. customer base is less inclined to fall for generic blame shifting – in part because many of them are the ones being blamed.
Local TV chef Pati Jinich is promoting her new cookbook and Washingtonian headline writers focus on politics.
Other Dining News
We have been tracking the shifts in the economy that affect the food and wine world. This story from a couple weeks ago hits on how those in the wine world dropped out of certain kinds of jobs, even if they did not give up on wine. It re-affirms the idea that the U.S. does not a have a labor shortage problem writ large. It has a sectoral problem.
Laura Hayes suggested that people should read this story about the connection between Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church and sushi. D.C. people will know Moon because of his backing of the Washington Times. It is indeed fascinating.
Longtime N.Y. Times foreign correspondent Roger Cohen is currently based in Paris. He (probably willingly) falls for the publicist pitch about a restaurant in Paris from the lesser-known Adria and failed D.C. restaurateur Alain Ducasse. The restaurant appears to be named in honor of Adams Morgan (or maybe not).
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That’s it for this week. Next week will be back with some updates to the D.C. restaurant list and look for an art post on Saturday. If you don’t want to miss any of it, then be sure to follow up on social media. We are on FB, Insta, and Twitter. Click on the icons at the top or bottom of this page to stay up to date.
And if you are getting tired of leftovers and want to get out of the house, our dining guide to D.C. is there for you with 300 recommended restaurants in our dining guide that you can sort by cuisine, neighborhood, and current operating status (dine-in and/or take-out, etc.) in either LIST or MAP format.