Image: Clifton R. Adams, Man looks out on the Eiffel Tower (1920).
Dearest Gentle Reader, welcome back to the weekly recap of dining news and activity on our site. This week’s stories seem like additional data points to larger trends, but there was little bad news so let’s call it a win. Shall we proceed? Let’s…
Updates to D.C. Recommended Restaurant List
Revisited:
Oyamel – The Mexican spot in the Chinatown archipelago still holds up.
Comings & Goings:
Chef Kessig moves on from Dauphine’s. It was a great gift to D.C. when she came from New Orleans to open it. For the last year she has been supervising in an remote capacity. She now is going to do non-profit work full time. “I’m moving into a space, full time, where I can focus my energy and talent on improving our farming system, focus on food recovery and play a small part in a home-grown global initiative to battle food insecurity.” We wish her the best.
The last Beefsteak closed? The shrinking healthy veggie sector is odd. At the other end of the spectrum, PoPville also flags that Steak & Egg is looking vulnerable.
BKK is closing at the end of the month when their lease ends. The two Beau Thai sister restaurants continue.
Restaurants continue to fiddle with format. Bresca brings back a la carte, but not Friday and Saturday. Meanwhile, did Tail Up Goat drop Prix Fixe (with options for each course) and go to straight tasting menu?
D.C. Dining News
The collapse of local media’s attention on food means few local stories this week.
Jessica Sidman, in the Washingtonian, covers the closure of One Eight Distilling, which is partly a story about the future of Ivy City. “The closure is just the latest piece of bad news for Ivy City’s distilling scene. In early 2020, New Columbia Distillers was acquired by mega-spirit company MGP Ingredients, which shut down the DC facility in 2022 (but continues to sell the Green Hat Gin brand). Two weeks ago, another Ivy City distillery and tasting room, Bo & Ivy, announced that it will be closing at the end of March. The military veteran owners had taken over the stills of Jos. A Magnus just a few years ago after that distillery moved operations from DC to Michigan in late 2020. One silver lining: rum distiller Cotton & Reed will be moving into Bo & Ivy’s facility to expand its production.”
Eater does a map of the places in D.C. that Somebody Feed Phil featured. (Is this news?)
Drink
Wine:
Younger folks continue to veer from alcohol. Wine and spirits sales were down in 2023, but down-market pre-mixed did ok. Related, the Silicon Valley Bank report notes, “58% of wine consumers are over the age of 65, with all other demographics registering almost 30 points lower. The bottom line is that younger drinkers just aren’t interested in wine as much as they used to be – not by a long shot.” The larger trend is that volume products are down, though premium seems to be holding its own. Are rich old people propping up premium, or is there a trend to treat wine as a special occasion more than everyday? Tasting rooms are down in visitors as wineries keep pushing up prices and narrowing the experience, though the bank report says it was because 2022 was abnormally high.
The ongoing discourse about wine discourse, which may be related to failure to connect with younger consumers. Or as writer Ryan Opaz explains, “Today, we don’t have an issue with people wanting to taste, drink, and explore. We have a problem with the industry letting go of what once worked well in marketing their bottles in place of a new style of communication for these bottles. As you can see from the ballooning N/A drinks category, curiosity for flavor is not lacking.”
Speaking which, the push to make the world more inclusive continues to gain steam. Imbibe magazine profiles Tahiirah Habibi and flags D.C, “In terms of looking ahead, she’s excited about July’s The Hue Society Wine + Culture Fest, which moved from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., this year. ‘I feel like D.C. is more accessible for what I’m trying to do and the demographic that I service,’ she explains, ‘because it’s a lot easier for people to hop on a train …. I wanted to make it easier for those people to get there especially since we’re in a recession and everything is so expensive. And I just wanted to continue to dismantle the barriers of access.’” Habibi walked away from the Somm complex. Vincent Morrow is breaking through. “Morrow said the committee began partnering with different hospitality programs in colleges and universities, targeting young, underrepresented people who might not know a career in the wine industry exists.” (nod to Vinography for flagging many of the stories above).
One sign of a shift in how wine is framed is the push to end big, heavy bottles. “On Jan. 15, Karen MacNeil — influential reviewer, writer, and author of touchstone opus “The Wine Bible” — announced that she and her popular digital newsletter WineSpeed would no longer write about wines packaged in heavy, thick glass.”
Health:
Covid took a toll greater than just the obvious. “Alcohol-related deaths surged in the United States by nearly 30 percent in recent years, with roughly 500 Americans dying each day in 2021, according to a new study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study chronicled a sustained spike in drinking during the Covid pandemic that continued to rise after the shock of the lockdowns of 2020. The incidence of alcohol-related deaths was higher in men, but among women the death rate shot up at a quicker pace.”
Alternatives:
When lack of regulation is a hindrance not an opening: “Just below rows of energy and kombucha drinks at Westside Market, a deli in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, sit a few glass bottles of Vybes. The drink, which comes in flavors like strawberry lavender and blood orange lime, is made with cannabidiol, more commonly known as CBD. But a lack of federal rules and a mishmash of state regulations have made it impossible for Vybes to be distributed by a national retailer, like Target or Walmart.”
Other News
The Emerging Economy:
The other inflation metric also ticked up, but did not set off alarms. “Inflation rose in line with expectations in January, according to an important gauge the Federal Reserve uses as it deliberates cutting interest rates. The personal consumption expenditures price index excluding food and energy costs increased 0.4% for the month and 2.8% from a year ago, as expected according to the Dow Jones consensus estimates. The monthly gain was just 0.1% in December and 2.9% from the year prior. Headline PCE, including the volatile food and energy categories, increased 0.3% monthly and 2.4% on a 12-month basis, also as forecast, according to the numbers released Thursday by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. The respective December numbers were 0.1% and 2.6%.”
Industry:
The Times talked to a range of young chefs about the industry and heard some hard truths.
Food & Culture:
Unearthing the history of George Washington’s enslaved cook. “Posey’s journey to freedom began in the summer of 1796, when Washington left the cook at Mount Vernon, fearing his chef had plans to escape from the capital city by using its vast abolitionist network. By autumn of that year, Posey was no longer decorating elegant platters for high profile guests but digging gravel for roads. After his escape, Posey headed to Philadelphia where he remained for a while before settling in Manhattan to work as a laborer and cook until his death in 1812.”
What we lose with competitive cooking shows. “In their ubiquity, cooking competitions have become a sort of background cultural noise, something family-safe to play in the background while you do other things. I was on my third episode before I realized I’d fallen into a sort of trance, passively absorbing the action from my couch. Flay and his competitor were cooking to see who made the best dish of pita kofta. I was in the midst of a binge, a food and drink term that once referred to eating or drinking too much, but now also applies to whole nights lost to watching television. I can’t remember for the life of me who cooked the best kofta that night. The show rolled on, segueing seamlessly into a new episode, a new challenge, a fresh battle. Nobody in the room bothered to change the channel. On this night, at least, Bobby Flay had won again.” Interestingly, in the piece cited above about Hercules Posey, author Ramin Ganeshram reaches for a modern analogy for how celebrated the chef became in Philadelphia and cites Gordon Ramsay rather than Pepin or Child or even Garten.
Food Policy:
Vittles on how to improve food in UK, with a lot of policy prescriptions.
Is focusing food aid on healthy items good policy or patronizing? “Barring some other twist, the SNAP pilots seem unlikely to make it into the final deal for fiscal 2024, though we’ll know for sure when the negotiations wrap up (you know, if they ever do). Then it’ll be time for the ag appropriations subcommittee to start writing the fiscal 2025 spending bill for these same programs, with Harris still as chairman.”
Odds & Ends
Seinfeld dinner? “Pilnick touted a marketing campaign that his company launched urging people to give “chicken the night off” and instead consume bowls of Frosted Flakes and Frosted Mini-Wheats.”
Wendy’s to spend millions on developing a menu board that offers value meals. “As early as 2025, we plan to test a number of features such as AI-enabled menu changes and suggestive selling based on factors such as weather that we think will provide great value and an improved customer and crew experience.”
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Thanks for checking in! Have a great week. And heed the pleas of the chefs in the Times story. Be kind, be patient, don’t whine, tip big.
