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brian

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Everything posted by brian

  1. brian
    the restaurants with the highest failure rate are the ones where the owner talks about expansion plans before the first is on its feet
  2. brian
    Daikaya's izakaya? (not so much of a guess, I remember looking for and ordering those concert posters off of ebay)
  3. brian
    This kind of development is viable in most of the world - but in the US, the combination of construction costs/building codes/health codes means the startup and ongoing costs to a tenant are much higher.
  4. brian
    The problem with the Reading Terminal Market concept (developing prime real estate in the center of a high density American city with vendors paying low rents) is that the key part of the concept is opening in 1893 - the math just doesn't work out in new projects.
  5. brian
    They're not enforcing a dress code, it's just something they can point to in order to have a plausible cover for discrimination at the door for their late night events. It's a depressingly common tactic across the country. "Dress Codes Are Often Terrible and Racist, as This One from a North River Bar Shows" by Stephen Gossett on chicagoist.com "Civil Rights Group Blasts Alleged Racist Tactics by Cordish at Fourth Street Live" by Joe Sonka on insiderlouisville.com "Yet Again, Allegations Arise That in Some Uptown Bars, 'Dress Code' Means No Minorities" by Robert Willonsky on dallasnews.com
  6. brian
    Absolutely no reason to view this as anything other than damage control after the same restaurant group did the same thing on the same block at Masa 14 two years ago, saying at the time "we are committed to our values of inclusiveness"
  7. brian
    The rate of DC's population growth has slightly decreased but the city had a net gain of over 10,000 residents last year.
  8. brian
    The patio's off the ground floor, but through a short corridor so not much light gets through.
  9. brian
    It won't make much of a difference, the ground floor is always pretty dark. The upstairs is brighter and has more windows.
  10. brian
    The franchisee is already a Leesburg restaurateur, so it makes sense that he'd open in Leesburg.
  11. brian
    Based on what the landlord was asking, Mirabelle is paying lower rent than some restaurants on H St NE and Rockville Town Center.
  12. brian
    there's aren't that many hot pot places in the area
  13. brian
    Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot
  14. brian
    Hiring a critic who published a screed against tasting menus review a chef/owner's first tasting menu restaurant within weeks of opening is a pretty brutal move.
  15. brian
    I got lucky as a solo walk in diner at Husk at lunch right at opening time, at least worth a shot at dinner. Husk's bar is located in a separate building next door - they serve some food there but I don't believe it's the full menu. For your 3-5pm meal I'd highly recommend Leon's - it's a bit up King St but they serve all day and everything I had there, particularly the fried chicken, was excellent.
  16. brian
    Thanks!
  17. brian
    Here's a thorough piece by Maura Reilly at ARTnews from 2015: TAKING THE MEASURE OF SEXISM: FACTS, FIGURES, AND FIXES
  18. brian
    Geoff Manaugh gets into pages and pages of the implications of this in his book "A Burglar's Guide to the City", published this year. An excerpt:
  19. brian
    I don't want to ruin the plot for you but you might enjoy Titanic.
  20. brian
    here's a good breakdown of his increased accuracy combined with increased number of shots this year, and just how extraordinary it is: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/stephen-curry-is-the-revolution/
  21. brian
    It makes sense that owning ten restaurants making a small profit would give better results than owning one restaurant making a small profit. Traditionally, on a national scale, restaurant profits tend to be slimmer as check average increases (the National Restaurant Association's annual reports have tons of data on this). Of course, some operators do a very good job of maximizing profit, and of course they open a lot more places. It's easy to look at rising ingredient costs, labor costs, construction costs, etc. as reasons menu prices are going up. But I haven't seen any industry-wide shift in ownership over the past five years that would indicate that "The restaurant industry has been taken over by suits (...) they've got their grubby hands in the till, and are squeezing customers." Profitability is fungible, but if this were the case I'd expect to have seen some major changes in the underlying numbers that traditionally drive restaurant operations, and at least so far I just haven't seen them (with the exception of recent changes in labor numbers, but that money is going to the opposite of "suits"). Sit down restaurants are, and have always been, a great vanity investment and a terrible financial one.
  22. brian
    This would imply that restaurants have become much more profitable in the past five years.
  23. brian
    of course I'm a Malevich fan - and Ellsworth Kelly's work is deeply indebted to him. He blazed a lot of paths that took another 50 years for others to explore. Here's a good piece from Smithsonian Magazine on Kelly's import and influence: 12/28/15 - "Why Ellsworth Kelly Was a Giant in the World of American Art" by Alex Palmer on smithsonian.com
  24. brian
    The Hirshhorn posted a great Ellsworth Kelly piece and quote this morning:
  25. brian
    Kelly had a sense of humor, a quality that allowed him to bridge the gap between abstract expressionism and pop art without being either one. This has always struck me as a hilarious juxtaposition - on the left is Kelly's "Yellow over Dark Blue" (1964-65), on the right is Rothko's "Yellow, Blue and Orange" (1955). Rothko was noted for the deeply spiritual aim of his work, he said "I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on." Kelly's painting was an homage, but also effectively declared Rothko full of shit, showing that painting a big yellow square over a blue rectangle is all about an aesthetic relationship of color and form. There's a great piece on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum - "Blue on White" (1961). It obviously recalls Matisse's cutouts, but all the tension is in the framing of the piece and the way it pushes against the edges, ballooning far too close to the frame and even touching it along the bottom edge. It purposefully takes away any sacred quality the piece may have gained with more breathing room and enlists the thin line of the frame as part of the drawn form, while most artists ignore the edges of the canvas and hope the frame isn't considered. Some of my favorite Kelly pieces are his shaped canvases. There's an irreducibility to them, and while other painters plumbed depth of color in monotone pieces, Kelly used flat color and captured movement with the shape of the canvas itself. Kelly also created amazing work for 60+ years - most great artists have a pretty short prime, but some of the work Kelly created in the past decade has been his best, continuing the themes he's developed for his whole career without being retreads. A couple years ago The Phillips has a show of Kelly's panel paintings from 2004-2009 and they were fantastic - tense and well considered, carrying a range of possibilities through some very basic geometry.
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