Viridian Crosses Starting Line
Engines thumping, and pumping in time. Everyone, including Daily Candy, Don Rockwell, aunts and uncles, etc. have been telling us that Viridian is opening this weekend. Looks like it’s true, despite the dose of snark in last week’s Feed.
According to the owners, Rebecca Byrnes (formerly of The Reef) will be head chef at the 14th Street NW joint, and Kenan Forman will be in charge of the adult grape juice. For our vegan and vegetarian friends, they promise the menu will be “extremely friendly,” and will have “lots of choices.” (No one is forcing you to eat the burgers, veggies, calm down. DCist loves you).
They say the name is in reference to the shade of green (pictured), as well as to the place’s earth-friendly vibe. Here’s hoping the food is fit for a pope-emperor.
Need a Menu?
Unless you plan to swat a fly with it or use it to balance the table, collecting (and keeping track of) take out menus can be a bit of an annoyance. You’re in luck; MenuPix has launched its D.C. site. Hopefully they stay on the ball and update their menus in sync with the restaurants, thus solving the problem of most restaurants’ websites being more archive and less information. Not that we’ll stop complaining about restaurants with ancient sites. Maybe they’re just web-monuments for our alabaster city.
The site’s not the snazziest but it has the good sense to be searchable by map, cuisine and neighborhood. It certainly gets the job done. We will not abide, however, the spelling of our neighborhood as “Capital Hill.” While it is capital in many ways, it’s named for the Capitol. What if we misspelled your website and called it MenuPox? What if we styled it ManPix? Allrighty then.
Oye Oya
Class, Oya wants you to listen: they have new chefs. Amanda at Metrocurean is her usual food junkie self and has the dope. We’re glad to see it, as the place has been floundering with less-than-inspired food ever since its opening. D.C. newcomer James Stouffer and Le Paradou vet Jonathan Seningen are pairing up to revamp the menu to match the swank locale. Oya is located at 777 9th Street NW in Penn Quarter and has a late night menu available from 10:30 p.m. until 1 a.m. Monday through Saturday.
Free Pastry!
Heads up pâte choux fans. L’Academie de Cuisine in Gaithersburg is holding an open house on Saturday for its culinary and pastry arts programs. Here’s the kicker: it’s followed by a free buffet. I bet there won’t even be any busloads of retirees there filling up on the salad bar then forcing themselves to eat prime rib just out of principle. The open house itself is also free, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Please RSVP to 301-670-8670 if you’re interested.
Free[ish] Sandwich
Do you like Potbelly? Did you know that on Tuesday you can get a free sandwich from them for donating canned goods? Potbelly Sandwich Works and the Capital Area Food Bank have joined to fight hunger two ways at once. If you bring at least three non-perishable food items to a D.C. area Potbelly on Nov. 15, you’ll get a sandwich for free. We urge you not be cheapskates about it though. Don’t rummage through your cabinet to find the creamed corn or she-crab soup from 1986. Would you want to eat that? Go all out and donate something good. Christmas isn’t far away and Santa is watching. Now, if only we can find one of the rare Potbellys…
Bird Flu Cured
DCist wants to tip you off to a BBC report that tells us we have nothing to worry about in the avian flu department. Why? Apparently fermented cabbage has a vaccine beat hands down. And here we spent all this time fretting over how to distribute millions of shots for our citizens when we should have just been looking at Korea. Korea’s not worried!
Duck photo taken by a flickr user quip and used under a Creative Commons license.
