Capital Spice

There is a tiny island in the Chesapeake Bay where the accents still reflect those of the first Cornish settlers who settled there in 1620, where you have no choice but to unplug and let the mellow pace of the place guide you, and where a bustling Main street and quiet, pristine strip of beach are a five minute bike ride away from each other. Welcome to Tangier Island.

Directions to Tangier Island are simple: drive to Virginia’s Eastern Shore and get on a boat for an hour until the island appears. Rising and falling with the waves of the Chesapeake Bay, the first thing you’ll spot is the water tower, which pumps fresh water from  thousands of feet below the bay floor. It is potable with an iron tinge, but knowing where it comes from soothes any frustration about weak water pressure in the shower. Next you’ll see the gleaming white church steeple. Religion is prevalent here and two churches serve the population of about 700 people. Soon you’ll be able to pick out clapboard houses, stand-alone crab shanties, and watermen’s boats. The last thing you’ll see is the ground of the island itself. At its highest point, Tangier Island is only 5 feet above sea level, swept with marshes and seagrass.

Our B&B host met us at the ferry dock, zipping us down Main Street in a four-seater golf cart with our bags tucked in the back. Tangier Island, three miles long and one mile wide, does not allow cars beyond a few that serve official functions. Residents and tourists (pronounced “tuhrrists” by the locals) alike rely on electric golf carts, bicycles, and their own two feet to traverse the island.   Bicycle rentals are cheap and simple: $2 an hour or $7 per day. Payment and return is on the honor system. No locks necessary. Theft on the island is as common as oversized SUVs. 

Lunch was our first order of business after an early morning drive to catch the ferry at Onancock. We took a cue from our ferry captain and made a beeline for the Waterfront Restaurant. Located outside on the dock, we sat on weather-beaten picnic benches in the shade as locals caught up with prodigal daughters returning from “the shore” for a weekend visit with the grandparents. To Tangier natives, anything not on Tangier is “the shore,” from coastal towns on the Bay to America’s heartland.

The Waterfront Restaurant is a definitive no-frills-no-fuss establishment. Efficient middle-aged women man the kitchen, calling out orders and dishing out food on paper plates. Menu offerings include American staples, but the ultra-local seafood is the star. I ordered a softshell crab sandwich, enchanted with the idea that the crab I was about to consume was brought in by one of the dozens of boats just behind me.  The presentation was an amusing but charming surprise. My crispy softshell crab sandwich featured two lightly sauteed crabs served on, no joke, Wonderbread. Mike’s double order of clam fritters and Tangier Island crab soup was more impressive. The fritters were little morsels of fried goodness on the outside with a briny bite in the middle. I found myself stealing one last bite over and over. The crab soup is a distant cousin to Manhattan clam chowder, made with a bright tomato base mixed with fresh vegetables and local blue crabmeat. The soup was light with just the right amount of seasoning to balance the crunch of veggies and small chunks of crabmeat.

Waterfront Restaurant
Tangier, VA 23240

With full bellies, we had a warm afternoon of fresh breezes and gentle sunshine ahead of us. We pedaled beach cruisers with squeaky seats across the briny marshes, rolling up and down wooden footbridges and among quiet clapboard houses and white picket fences. Soon we found ourselves at the public beach, a long stretch of sand reclining against the lapping waves of the Chesapeake.  We had it to ourselves for hours, our own private beach in all pastels of beige sand, grey-green water and proud seagrass. 

A Tangier-style family dinner, a personal tour of a softshell crab shanty and puffy fish (!) after the jump.

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Enjoy some old school Swedish Chef in honor of this week’s Top Chef Masters.

Volt celebrates its three year anniversary this week with a new six-course tasting menu. (Check out that website. Are they capitalizing on the Top Chef casting already or has it always been this way?)

Please welcome DC Plate to the DC foodie blogosphere! 
 
Can’t make it to the LA Korean taco truck? Try Korean short rib tacos at home! 
 
Turn your Sunday morning into something to sing about with Banana Upside Down Muffins 
 
24 hours of eating with Chef Jose Andres.

Enjoy this very awesome photo essay of Fojol Bros, courtesy of Brighest Young Things.

Passengers on the plane with the emergency landing in West Virginia received a pizza bonus.  

Z Burger founder tweets under competitors names. 

Gradually Greener enjoys a succotash zucchini hash. 
 
Christina Aguilera has signed on to be the global spokesperson for Yum! Brands World Hunger Relief effort. Yum! Brands owns KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.  

So Good does not support putting bacon on a burger.  

Check out crepe making for kids in Old Town. 
 
Starbucks is testing a rebranded store that also serves beer and wine.

San Francisco is allowing food vendors into Golden Gate Park on the condition that the food is healthy.

A little while back, our friends at Endless Simmer let on that they had received a sample of pomegranate juice from the folks at POM Wonderful.  Intrigued, I reached out to them to let them know that we, too, are food bloggers who appreciate the healthful properties of pomegranates and their juice.  Even though I was a bit hesitant to do so, I was really hoping to hear back.

Lo and behold, POM responded with an offer to send us some of their juice so we could see what we could do with it.  I first experienced pomegranate juice while I was working at Trader Joe’s, so I definitely had some ideas.  It was one of those products that would frequently find its way to the demonstration stand in an effort to introduce it to customers who had never tasted it before. 

Between the taste and the health benefits, pomegranate juice has definitely made its presence known in the juice aisle since then.  When I first tried it, I remember finding the juice bracingly tart.  These days, I’d describe the flavor as something akin to cranberry juice (the juice, not the sugary ‘cranberry juice cocktail’).  And the folks at POM are quick to boast about studies that have linked their pomegranate juice to heart health, prostate health and erectile function (they’re especially eager to point out the fact that it is their specific pomegranate juice that has been tested in these studies).

All of this combined to mean one thing for us – we needed to use this normally somewhat expensive beverage to the fullest of our foodie abilities to figure out just what the fuss is about.  Like Endless Simmer’s BS, our first thought was to find a way to boost the nutritional value of our drinking habit.  But we also took advantage of the opportunity to use the juice far more liberally than we might if we had paid for it.  Suddenly, juice-intensive reductions and glazes seemed well within reach…so we went for it.

Recipes for a POManhattan cocktail and a pomegranate-shallot reduction (with some photos) after the jump. (more…)

Photo by Bob Bielk, Asbury Park Press

I know this is a DC food blog, and as such there are certain topics you expect us to talk about on a regular basis (DC restaurants, cooking, food-related news and gossip from around the region, etc.).

But I wanted to take a second and brag about something.  The fact that it’s kinda related to food is a help, sure, but I’d probably brag about it anyway.

Yesterday, the twenty-third annual New Jersey Sandcastle Contest (warning: the site automatically plays a video set to some rockin’ guitar as soon as it opens…keep it classy, Jersey) was held on the beach in Belmar, New Jersey.  Over the course of four hours, competing teams sculpt elaborate displays ranging from a shark eating a diver (a pair of flippers coming out of Jaws’ mouth complete the effect) to a fishing boat shaped out of sand and manned by a toddler (appropriately titled “Little Man and the Sea”).  All told, there were more than three hundred entries this year and 12,000 people attended the event, according to this report from NJ.com and an article in the local Asbury Park Press.

Every year, this contest draws some serious sculpting talent and some disturbingly creative minds.

This year, I’m proud to say, the most disturbed creative of those minds belonged to my brother.  With a team that included my sister, my brother-in-law and a few of my cousins, he put together a display they called “Shell’s Kitchen.”  It featured a cook-off between Rachael Ray (a giant manta ray with drizzled sand for her frizzy hair) and Bobby Fillet (a big fish).  With dry ice to represent steam and smoke in the cooking utensils, the overall effect was undeniable:

They won Best on the Beach! 

How cool is that?

When it comes to Vietnamese cooking, we’re certainly not experts by any means.  We’re lucky enough to live in an area where pho, Vietnamese noodle soup, is widely available, so we’ve had our share and can definitely make comparisons from one offering to another.  But when it comes to banh mi, those sandwiches on crusty bread that represent the best impact of French colonialism on Vietnamese culture, we were virgins before visiting Pho 14.

But a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, so we decided to take our first step toward banh mi enlightenment on a recent evening in Columbia Heights.  We had read several reviews of the recently-opened Pho 14 that spoke favorably of its sandwiches and their authenticity, so we stopped in for a bite. 

What we found was an amusing combination of flash and simplicity inside.  Shimmering translucent tabletops combined with a tiki-style bar in the back of the space to create a very scene-y vibe, but that was countered by decorations on the walls that seemed right out of World Market.  We certainly didn’t know what to expect as we looked at the menu and found a spare listing of appetizers, soups, rice and noodle dishes, and sandwiches.  We knew we wanted to try the sandwiches, but that was pretty much all we knew.  With no preconceptions about what a banh mi should be, we put ourselves in our waiter’s hands.

“Which of these is the most traditional?” we asked when he arrived to take our order.  We took it as a good sign that our server immediately identified the ‘Combination Sandwich’ but quickly qualified it by warning us that some people don’t like the combination of flavors and textures in it because they are unfamiliar.  We assured him that was what we were looking for, and he smiled.

More of our experience after the jump. (more…)

For the first five years of my life, I grew up in Bloomfield, New Jersey.  There aren’t a lot of things I remember about living there (I was five when we moved, after all), but you know how it is.  There are some things that just make an indelible mark on your memory and stick with you.

Holsten’s Confectionery is one of those things for me.  Growing up, I remember taking walks to Holsten’s for ice cream, or old-fashioned rope licorice, or even for some homemade chocolates.  I remember visits with my father, picking up candied fruit slices to bring back to my mother (her favorite).

And now I remember the Sopranos.

If you’re from New Jersey, every episode of the Sopranos was another game of “Been there!”  Christopher comes back from a trip ‘down the shore,’ and he mentions the town where I spent the rest of my childhood.  Tony talks about Bloomfield Avenue as a shorthand for how far his family has come.  Paulie Walnuts shoots at a fleeing Russian among the Pine Barrens.  And throughout the run of the series, they made frequent use of real diners and other businesses to make sure they got the local flavor just right.  As a transplant in Washington, it always made me smile…even when the scenes that were taking place were less than idyllic.

Then the finale came, and the final scene played out (or at least cut to black) in a booth at Holsten’s.  My jaw dropped.  I practically shouted at Elizabeth and everyone watching with us, “That’s Holsten’s!  It’s right around the corner from where I grew up!”  I described the old candy shop and ice cream parlor from my memory, and Elizabeth made me promise that I would take her there the next time we were in North Jersey.

That next time finally came earlier this year, and we stopped in so that she could see for herself how the real thing matched up to the TV version. (more…)

Quick!  Name the top five restaurants in DC.  And I mean in DC…not just inside the Beltway (Sorry, Restaurant Eve…we still love you, we promise!).

Got ‘em?  Good.  Now take a look at your list.  There’s a pretty good chance that most of them can be found in Northwest, clustered around Penn Quarter, Georgetown, and maybe Dupont or Logan Circle.

But there’s likely to be one outlier, all by itself in Southwest.  Maybe you’ve heard of it…a little place in the Mandarin Oriental called CityZen.  There it is, front and center at #4 on Washingtonian’s Top 100 list for 2009 (and at #2 the year before).  And there it is in Tom Sietsema’s Fall Dining Guide in the Washington Post last year.  There’s Executive Chef Eric Ziebold, winning the James Beard Foundation’s award for Best Chef, Mid-Atlantic last year – he’s also a Food & Wine Magazine Best New Chef from 2005.  After Citronelle, Ben’s Chili Bowl - and possibly Minibar – this is probably the DC restaurant most known to non-Washingtonians.

We finally experienced CityZen for ourselves this weekend, as Elizabeth brought me to celebrate my birthday.   Right away, we were impressed.  After walking in the front door, we were immediately greeted and ushered past the bar and lounge into the main dining room.  With the high, vaulted ceilings, the oversized chandeliers, and the lighting fixtures along the walls that looked like enormous tablelamps, it was easy to imagine ourselves in a giant’s castle.

Our waitress immediately arrived to take our drink orders, but we definitely wanted to take the time to read through the numerous offerings before commiting to something right off the bat.  So we took a few minutes to review the wine and cocktail lists before settling on a sparkling wine (Elizabeth) and a big California Zinfandel (me) to start off.  That just left us to decide what to eat.

At CityZen, they take the concept of the chef’s tasting menu to its natural conclusion: each menu is hand-signed by Chef Ziebold, indicating that he has, in fact, approved the six-course menu that is being offered to you.  We had never seen anything quite like that, and if we hadn’t already been planning on the tasting menu we would almost certainly have been drawn to it as a result.

So what did the chef recommend?  And how was everything?  More descriptions and photos after the jump! (more…)

DC continues to impress at Top Chef. The cast for the upcoming season (starting in August) features two DC-based chefs. Bryan Voltaggio of Volt and Mike Isabella of Zaytinya. I wonder if this means we finally need to truck out to Frederick, MD to try Volt?
 
The trend of secret restaurants continues in London and Hong Kong. 
 
Check out these buttermilk pork chops from The Bitten Word. 
 
The J&G Steakhouse opens in the new W hotel downtown.  
 
The battle over the organic label continues.  
 
So Good reviews the new McDonald’s Angus burger and gives readers a chance to try them for free.  
 
DC’s Cheese + Champagne is doing a summer cheese tour in New York.  Lucky duck.

9 phrases to ban from restaurant menus.  

Beets and Bonbons checks out DC’s food trucks, including the Sweet Green fro-yo truck.  
 
This Slate writer hates outdoor film festivals and their picnic accoutrements.   
 
The Oceanaire chain has filed for bankruptcy. 
 
Going blueberry picking soon? Try Arugula Files’ homemade blueberry jam recipe. 
 
Cheerwine spareribs with a cherry glaze? I know some Carolinians who will thank you. 
 
Michelin star chefs try their hand at baby food. 
 
Gut Check is excited about new restaurants hitting the NoVa dining scene, especially Trummers on Main in Clifton. 
 
BBQ in the Bible? Amen.  Thanks to Bacon Terrorist for the link. 
 
Pizza on the grill from Pete Bakes.  
 
Sour beers gain popularity.  

Celebrate Hemingway’s 110th birthday on July 15 with special cocktail tasting events! (Although for the record – a drinking event at the Museum of the American Indian? Wow.)
 
Young & Hungry discovers the joys of Todd Thrasher’s tomato water Bloody Mary.  

North Korea debuts a state-run beer commercial for Taedonggang beer, billed as “The Pride of Pyongyang.” The commercial promises the locally brewed beer will “relieve stress.”
 
BBQ burgers, grilled eggplant (and Schlitz!) from 18th and Swine. 
 
We’re sad to report that Nicaro’s in Silver Spring has closed.
 
Year round Peep jousting is now available in DC! Just Born Co, which makes marshmallow Peeps, just announced they will open a store in the Washington Harbor this fall. (Thanks to Jocko for the tip!)
 
Are butchers the new culinary rock stars? 
 
How does a restaurant make a regular? 
 
The 42 Bus checks out Absolute Thai.

Here it is – the moment you’ve all been waiting for!  With this recipe from Fresh from the Farmers’ Market, we have officially posted each and every one of our culinary efforts over the past month.  This is the final recipe from our June Cookbook Challenge.

How fitting, then, that we end with a recipe from a cookbook that purports to offer “year-round recipes for the pick of the crop” as we transition from a month of concentrated cooking to a year-round relationship with the books we’re holding onto. 

We’ll post a recap with some of our biggest surprises and some final thoughts soon, but for now enjoy this recipe for a quick and easy salad that has a decidedly upscale feel.  It works great on its own (and it could easily support a poached egg if you wanted to make a real meal out of it), but it would certainly stand up as a tasty first course for a dinner party.

The first step for any dish that involves fava beans is to double-peel the beans by removing them from their outer shells and then boiling them briefly until their whitish skins can be pinched and slipped off.  Remember, these are the legumes Elizabeth refers to as “the beans of diminishing returns” so it takes a lot to get a decent volume of edible beans together.  In this case, you’ll need two pounds of fava beans still in their shells (or 1 to 1 1/2 cups shelled beans).

Meanwhile, chop up two ounces pancetta (bacon will do in a pinch) into 1/4″ pieces and sautee it in one tablespoon extra virgin olive oil for five to ten minutes over moderately low heat.  This will allow some of the fat to melt away from the meat and the meat to crisp up a bit.  When that happens, add one minced shallot and sautee it for an additional minute or two until softened.

Take 1/4 pound young frisee lettuce and tear it into small pieces in a serving bowl.  Pour the pancetta, oil and shallots over the lettuce and add two tablespoons minced fresh parsley and 1 tablespoon sherry vinegar.  Toss everything together until well mixed and then add in the shelled fava beans from before.  Season with salt and pepper to taste and serve while still warm.

The recipe was delicious (with these ingredients how could it be otherwise), but we’re still a bit torn on the future of the book.  One strike: it was surprisingly hard to find a recipe in this book that really jumped out at us, despite the abundance of produce at our local farmers’ markets.  Two strike: it’s written from a California perspective, so the growing seasons and the variety of available fruits and veggies are a bit different from ours.  As a result, the book is less and intuitive resource and more another trove of fresh recipes to be tried as the spirit moves us.  We’re just not sure if we think enough of this book to keep it around for just that purpose.

As a twirtysomething, I’ve noticed brunch has become the new Saturday night. Raucous girls’ nights in Adams Morgan are replaced with cozy dates or -for some – hanging with the kids. Naturally the next best thing to a boozy Saturday night is a stiff Bloody Mary on a Sunday morning.  And what better Bloody Mary to sip than a Jill Zimorski version of the classic Bloody Mary with tomato water and celery foam? 

The Cafe Atlantico Latino Dim Sum brunch has been on our must-try list for far too long. The weather was warm, our weekend was open and it was time to do something about it. We were joined at brunch by Los Alemanes and their adorable boy Lucas.  

We’d been lucky repeat visitors at Andres’ MiniBar upstairs and couldn’t wait to try his unique take on dim sum, a traditional Chinese breakfast. We were not disappointed.  Brunch at Atlantico is offered a la carte, with a selection of roughly 25 small plates that can be mixed and matched to create your ideal meal.  But they also offer a pair of tasting menus that put your choices in the hands of the chefs for $35 (14 dishes) or $25 (12 vegetarian dishes) and allow you to experience a broader range of tastes in one sitting.  We couldn’t help ourselves – we went for the tasting.

The chefs wasted no time getting us started.  Out came one of the most intensely flavorful bites I have ever enjoyed at a brunch: a small, silky kushi oyster topped with a sweet mango puree and a few snippets of chive.  We exchanged looks around the table and knew that we were all thinking the same thing: Wow.  With an opening salvo like that, we couldn’t wait to see what would follow.

A play-by-play of the other thirteen dishes (and a detour for some tableside guacamole) after the jump. (more…)