Category Archives: food and drink

"Sound Bites"

If you want to hear great DJs at the 9:30 Club and eat lots of tasty food at a benefit for the DC Central Kitchen, you’re in luck because “Sound Bites” is exactly that, and it’s happening this Sunday (the 23rd).

Benefiting the D.C. Central Kitchen, a community kitchen focused on solving the interconnected problems of poverty, hunger, and homelessness, SoundBites is a half-outdoor feast, half-indoor concert full of tasty eats and hot jams. Starting the event is a tented food bazaar outside of 9:30 Club, chock-full of free samples from lots of the area’s finest cuisine-purveyors.

After getting your nosh on, we’ll open the Club’s doors, where you can work off all of that deliciousness by grooving with five of the scene’s best DJs and bands.

This May, help a D.C. establishment that truly deserves it, while having some of the best food-fueled fun of your life. With free samples from area restaurants including: BGR the Burger Joint • Busboys and Poets • ChurchKey • CommonWealth Gastropub • Cork EatBar • Fresh Start Catering • Harry’s Tap Room • Indique • Jaleo • Maddy’s Bar & Grill • Marvin • Masa 14 • Mie N Yu • Radius Pizza • Sâuçá • Taylor Gourmet • Zola Kitchen and Wine Bar

DC Central Kitchen is a worthy organization, and I’m not just saying that because their Chief Development Officer is one of our cool neighbors. You can buy tickets here

Scott Jurek

We have a number of friends who are ultramarathoners, a sport I find more interesting than triathalons, for reasons I can’t really explain. I think I like the idea of having one task to focus on for 24 hours. (Can you tell I’m already exhausted and overwhelmed this week?)

New York Times columnist Mark Bittman recently went for a run & then had a meal with ultra-runner Scott Jurek.

If last year was a wash, this year he is fit and psyched for the 24-Hour Run world championship in Brive-la-Gaillarde, France, on Thursday and Friday. It is a grueling race to determine how many miles runners can complete on a 1.4-kilometer road loop (about nine-tenths of a mile) in a 24-hour period.

Jurek says he can break the American record, 162 miles, held by Mark Godale. (The world record, 178 miles, and just about every ultramarathoning record from 100 to 1,000 miles, and from 24 hours to 10 days, are, Jurek said, “unassailably” held by Yiannis Kouros of Greece, who no longer competes.)

To win Brive, Jurek said, he must: “Get on it, crank around it, and get it done. It’s all in a day’s work.”

It’s a long day, and one that raises a particular aspect of Jurek’s training that makes him an especially interesting athlete: he is a vegan, consuming no animal products.

I thought it was a nice piece, Bittman talked about Jurek’s diet without passing and judgements or making any outlandish claims about the superiority of one diet over another.

Incidentally, Jurek succeeded in breaking the American record later in the week:

Local runner Scott Jurek finished in second place at the IAU 24 Hour Run World Championship held in Brive, France. Jurek finished with 266.008 km or 165.284 miles in 24 hours. The American record was 162 miles in 24 hours, set by Mark Godale of Ohio in 1999. Jurek passed Godale’s mark with 30 minutes left to run.

First place winner was Shingo Ouene of Japan, completing 273.531 kilometers (169.96 mies) in 24 hours.

That’s seriously cool. Also a little crazy, maybe.

On a minor tangent, let me just say that I have no problem at all with Bittman’s mint juleps “the wrong way”. I’d write more, but I need to go check make sure the bourbon has been restocked….

Best restaurant reviews EVER. Or at least this month.

Wonkette: “Yuppies, Is There Anything They Won’t Overpay For?”

Do you like cereal? Do you like eating multiple cereals at once? Do you have any dignity? If you answered yes to the first two and no to the last, then The Cereal Bowl in the now semi-revived Cleveland Park might just be for you! Even though there really is nothing more simple, nothing that connects man more with his roots, than his ability to put cereal in a bowl, add milk, fruit, whatever, and eat it, for breakfast, in his home, this task can now be completed for $4 at a place of business. This is either the stupidest concept ever, or… nope, nope. This is the stupidest concept ever.

The whole review (with excellent pictures) is hilarious.

My favorite part: “Some say having a place like this makes us as cool as New York. These people have not been to New York.”

Husband highlighted: “To add insult to injury, the employees all wear a “uniform” of pajamas. This is why the terrorists hate us.”

Washington City Paper restaurant reviewer Tim Carman has also posted a very funny review, “The Embarrassment of the Cereal Bowl.”

Carman bravely ordered, among other things, an item called “The Sweetest Thing.”

The Sweetest Thing, by contrast, is a dentist’s wet dream: a bowl filled with Lucky Charms, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Fruity Pebbles, Nilla Wafers, and for a garnish, rainbow sprinkles. You feel dizzy just looking at it….the Sweetest Thing ($3.29 for a small) looked like someone had melted down a circus clown and tasted like cinnamon bun soup. I couldn’t finish it.

Carman posted a follow-up, Readers Cry Over Spilled Milk at the Cereal Bowl” based on email comments he solicited in his first post.

My memory is a bit mushy, but I recall both Georgetown and AU having a large variety of cereals available for mixing and matching in the cafeteria, although I don’t recall any sort of additional-toppings extravaganza being available.

The Cereal Bowl has other locations: in Miami (at the University of Miami), New Brunswick, NJ (Rutgers), and Qatar (Education Center). Proximity to a college campus seems more logical to me, but Cleveland Park is full of our peers, many trying to stave off the realities of all that aging and breeding by being all nostalgic for the processed foods of the 70s and 80s, so perhaps it’s a genius location after all. I guess time will tell.

I was at least hoping for snacks shaped like internal organs

Husband and I were at the grocery store recently and I took a wrong-turn and ended up in the cereal & snacks aisle.

operation

Operation Fruit Snacks. This has to be one of the weirdest products I’ve ever seen. The most disappointing part is that the snacks aren’t even shaped like internal organs. Husband wouldn’t let me buy a box, but from the cover it appears that the corn-syrupy “fruit snacks” are shaped like frogs and birds and something that may or may not be intended to represent Gomer Pyle’s head. (Kids, ask your parents).

I really don’t get it.