Making a new home!
Making a new home!
How to let food settle you in when things just won’t f’ing chill
I foolishly made a goal to be less scheduled this year, but that apparently conflicts with manifesting travel and going out of your comfort zone. The result has been quite a few months of juggling a calendar with a few curveballs in the new apartment.
After I got back from my Vietnam work trip (read here), we made some significant strides on the new apartment. Our couch arrived after a month, art made it onto the walls, and the oven was even christened with food beyond chicken nuggets - two whole fish! The power of parents just coming in and making decisions for you goes a long way.
All this progress was met with one step back. We had some HVAC mainline blockages that caused a water leak under our floorboards… Nothing compared to The Great Flood (read the saga here) of December-January 2023, but the addition of four new roommates - read 3 industrial fans + 1 dehumidifier - hasn’t helped with making the space feel like a home.
Throw in some holiday weekends, birthdays, Barbenheimer showings, and much anticipated pop-ups, and the apartment has quickly turned into an Airbnb in a construction zone.
This newsletter is a roundup of assembly meals that helped ground me in said chaos during my first full month in DC in who knows how long, and the outings that re-sparked my love for this swamp in the summer.
breaking in the kitchen, kind of.
Aside from my parents swooping in, I have been embracing girl dinner ethos, and simply assembling and chopping away. The most action my stove has seen is the occasional fried egg in chili oil and seared TJ’s dumplings.
I’ve been leaning towards elevated-yet-lazy assemblies that blur the lines of what we call a salad. This involves rinsing and repeating a lot of different dressings.
Queue Hetty McKinnon’s genius dumpling tomato salad, which upgrades the beloved meat pockets with fresh tomatoes, basil and cilantro, and a tingly chili oil vinaigrette. I subbed the rice vinegar for black vinegar to punch up a more savory element.
That extra vinaigrette was then recycled for the base of a tofu cucumber salad inspired from Christy Wang’s recipe (@girlfromcalifornia). I cooked and cooled some soba noodles, boosted the vinaigrette with more rice vinegar and chili oil, and voila, another dinner or WFH lunch.
The week after, I needed briny, garlicky, and lemony flavors. I was on the same wavelength as NYT’s The Veggie newsletter (written by Tanya Sichynsky, a former DC dweller, who is a delight to read) which recommended Alex Weibel’s zucchini salad with pecorino, basil, and almonds. The recipe is an excellent way to use summer zukes, refine chopping skills, and bring something together in 30 minutes to last about a week.
That dressing with shallot, herbs, capers and lemon spurred a craving for a riffed shrimp salad. Splurging on a bag of frozen shrimp, I made a salad for the week with chopped artichokes, white beans, celery, and tossed in a dressing made with shallot, garlic, parsley, basil, capers, and lemon zest & juice.
To break up the light and lemony, I mixed up Eric Kim’s chickpea salad with gim. A loose mayo-based dressing with rice vinegar, sesame, a pinch of sugar, and salt paired with minced red onion, chickpeas and savory toasted seaweed (gim). I carefully packed the coated chickpeas with some arugula, partially boiled eggs, and halved cherry tomatoes. It’s giving picnic time in the office.
This was weekday fuel between weekend outings which was the best way to fall back in love with DMV summers. I am still delusional knowing what summer in Hanoi feels like, so I’m aware this might be a short-lived love affair.
maryland seafood outings
July 4th festivities started off with crab picking in Baltimore, to honor the annual tradition of cracking carcasses since 2020. Crab picking was a requisite childhood activity, so I usually provide a mini tutorial for the DC crowd. You can DM me for your crab picking questions, but please make sure to send a picture to my mom to inspect your pile of carcasses to determine whether you’ve gotten your money’s worth. We landed on Captain James Seafood Palace (maybe a tourist trap?) and sat right on the covered dock through a summer rain storm, sipped poorly stirred mojitos, inhaled hush puppies and old bay fries, and cracked a few crustaceans.
Later in July, we started Rhea’s birthday celebration on a Tuesday in Annapolis with a natural 10:40am Mission Impossible showing to 2:00pm seafood spread pipeline. We were seeking a “rootin tootin seafood time” which we certainly found at Boatyard Bar and Grill. The decor is filled with wild memorabilia like group photos with staff and Good Charlotte, live laugh love-core signs, and so many Navy flags. Great selection of local and northeast coast oysters and raw clams. Do not skip their burbling crab dip skillet that looks like it could eat you alive.
DC list housekeeping
My DC list keeps growing with all the new openings, and continues to unfairly bump a few spots that I still haven’t visited down to the bottom. Below are a few gems that I would continue to go back to every week if my wallet allowed.
Mariscos 1133 (Shaw) - We went a few months ago for a birthday dinner that was SO delicious I needed to come back for more. Will and I had our first date night as roomies here (cute!!). It’s the summer spot for frozen margs (topped off with Coronas, if you’d like). 16oz glasses were an excellent primer before our Asteroid City showing at the E Street Landmark Cinema. Start with fresh and generous portions of seafood like shrimp aguachiles and tuna tostadas. Will got the shrimp tacos and I ordered a massive Puerto Vallarta salad with crab. Thanks to said 16oz marg, the salad felt so big that I think I was stabbing at it for 20 minutes straight. Churros are a non-negotiable end to the meal.
Boogy and Peel (DuPont Circle) - Neapolitan-style pies with memorable combinations. The Macha Roni pie was on my agenda. Chewy crust covered in charred bubbles with lil pepperoni cups pooling with grease, house made salsa macha, and hot honey. This godsent of a pizza has gotten some much deserved love. We also ordered their watermelon shrub cocktails served with skewered watermelon sour patch candies. Fruity and vinegary from the shrub, these nostalgic concoctions cut right through the pepperoni slice. I need to return for their Caesar pizza, ideally during their weekend happy hour from 2:00-4:00pm.
Gemini (also DuPont Circle) - After crushing the aforementioned Macha Roni, we stopped by Gemini, which recently rebranded from the Happy Gyro/Happy Ice Cream group. They still use the adorable Happy Ice Cream branded ice cream cart outside the wine shop/pizza shop/carry out restaurant. One scoop of beautifully balanced currant leaf propelled me into a lucid coma for my walk home, which led to a second shower, and then an hour-long nap. The perfect summer Saturday.
pop-ups galore
Sometimes DC’s restaurant landscape can feel a bit saturated. It’s hard to sift through what’s actually good and what’s just nicely packaged in a Reel. Pop-ups can break that mold. Running on short time operating timelines, chef’s can curate a menu without focusing as much on long term revenue goals or crowd favorites. It's an opportunity to flex more creatively. July was a HUGE month for pop-ups, especially within the AAPI community.
Little Vietnam partnered with former Moon Rabbit owner, Chef Kevin Tien to bring us Little Himitsu, a throwback residency to when Tien ran the Himitsu kitchen out of the famously small location on Upshur in 2019. Since then, the 30-40-seat space has taken many identities: a South American inspired menu at Pom Pom, the illustrious and sadly short tenure of Magpie and the Tiger in 2022, and now Little Vietnam, which opened in December 2022. The Little Himitsu pop-up menu included tribute dishes like the iconic hamachi crudo and very familiar twice-fried chicken glazed in gochujang sauce. It seems that you can’t go to any spot run by Kevin Tien without being blown away by all the ways you can fry a bird. The menu also launched new favorites like the peking duck and mini biscuits, and the most dewy chicken dumplings in a beautiful chili soy vinaigrette. Little Vietnam also highlighted their own staples like the fried egg salad with fiery vegan nuoc cham dressing.
Hosted at now-closed Laotian restaurant, Hanumanh, Baan Mae is a project led by DC household name, Chef Seng, who owns Thip Khao and Padaek. Translating to “Mom’s house,” the menu is a roster of really exciting food. The menu was lean but mighty with four starters and main options each. We ordered the sakoo - tapioca dumpling stuffed with a caramelized peanut filling - a staple from Hanumanh’s old menu. The puu neem, a Vietnamese-inspired lotus stem salad tossed in a pickled plum and tamarind sauce with fried soft shell crab, was out of this world. The mains got richer in flavor with a massaman tofu, a southern Thai curry dish with a toasty aromatic sauce served with potato, onion, and rice. The finale, thom kem. Four absolutely decadent braised pork ribs. Chef Seng is planning to turn over the Hanumanh location into a brick and mortar for her Baan Mae concept. Seems like things will pick up once her second location of Padaek opens in Arlington (soon!). Any additional pop-up announcements will be posted on Chef Seng’s and/or Hanumanh’s Instagram accounts.
Kopi House held their first ever pop-up on the patio of Sun Cinema in Mount Pleasant! The menu included Indonesian rice boxes for dinner with three main options, rice crackers, and perfectly steamed rice. I ordered the rice box with fried tempe in tomato sambal and braised chicken in coconut curry. A ridiculously flavorful $15. The line went down the block and they sold out within the first hour and half! Very excited to hopefully see them pop-up somewhere else soon.
That’s all for this month! Send me any restaurants, pop-ups, or food projects you’re excited about in DC right now. See you at the end of this beautiful month for tomatoes <3
Enjoyed reading about asian food recipes and DC restaurants.
she’s putting in WORK in july!!! what a great roundup!