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

Daikaya's izakaya? (not so much of a guess, I remember looking for and ordering those concert posters off of ebay)

2 hours ago, iolaire said:

Auckland has "food courts" in high rise developments that were built in modern history. With small ethnic type food cooked in small spaces.   

But yes making something like Reading Terminal Market work would require either a developer/owner with a desire to make it happen. Or a local government who allowed it as a replacement for some sort of mandatory art space, setback or whatever.

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.

On 3/15/2018 at 12:20 PM, iolaire said:

Lots of the food halls mentioned in the linked story seem like they are started by big names with high costs and rules.  I guess what I'm saying is we need to try the Reading Terminal Market concept more.

On 3/15/2018 at 1:39 PM, Bob Wells said:

My family was very impressed with RTM during our December visit to Philly. Great mix of vendors.

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.

2 hours ago, DonRocks said:

I've been to Masa 14 probably ten times in jeans and sneakers - I thought sure this was some "late-night" thing. Is El Centro D.F. *really* enforcing a dress code for everyday meals ?!?! I mean, that's like Chipotle Grill enforcing a dress code  (or maybe a corner drug store in Mississippi circa 1950?)

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

18 minutes ago, DanielK said:

Click the link again for the story update - bouncer has been fired, policy changed, training ensues.

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"

45 minutes ago, Josh Radigan said:

Add to that the population at least within the city lines has started to decrease.

The rate of DC's population growth has slightly decreased but the city had a net gain of over 10,000 residents last year.

42 minutes ago, The Doctor said:

Ah, thanks! I didn't even know they had an upstairs. (Don's comment about windows makes more sense now.) Is that how you get to the patio or is that on the ground floor?

The patio's off the ground floor, but through a short corridor so not much light gets through.

19 hours ago, The Doctor said:

Has anyone been recently? I notice they have a back patio, and some of the pictures I've seen make it seem like the light shines through and brightens up the whole interior. I'm looking to take some people there but want it to be very dark inside. Should I wait til after sunset or does it not make that much of a difference?

It won't make much of a difference, the ground floor is always pretty dark. The upstairs is brighter and has more windows.

The franchisee is already a Leesburg restaurateur, so it makes sense that he'd open in Leesburg.

9 hours ago, Poivrot Farci said:

Ultimately, your gripe is with commercial landlords who are the scourge of humanity and deserve to collectively get syphilis.

Based on what the landlord was asking, Mirabelle is paying lower rent than some restaurants on H St NE and Rockville Town Center.

there's aren't that many hot pot places in the area

Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot

6 hours ago, Tweaked said:

Washingtonian 2 stars

"you get the uneasy sense that you’ve wandered into a cult when servers sincerely relate the story of the time Onwuachi discovered a dish of crabs prepared by a wise old Indian cook or practically brush back tears when describing the fisherman’s pie Onwuachi’s mother made for his birthday when money was tight and she couldn’t afford a gift."

The review is by Corby Kummer of The Atlantic.

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.

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.

2 hours ago, Simul Parikh said:

It's an awesome space, just look at the pictures. Beautiful design.

Thanks! 

33 minutes ago, DonRocks said:

Perhaps I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem to me that women artists are short-changed when it comes to contemporary work and exhibitions (I emphasize: Maybe I'm wrong, as I really don't know, and my assumption is entirely based on attending exhibitions at museums.) 

Here's a thorough piece by Maura Reilly at ARTnews from 2015: TAKING THE MEASURE OF SEXISM: FACTS, FIGURES, AND FIXES

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:

Quote

In California, burglary can be charged of anyone “who enters any house, room, apartment, tenement, shop, warehouse, store, mill, barn, outhouse or other building, tent, vessel … floating home … sealed cargo container … or mine or any underground portion thereof, with intent to commit grand or petit larceny or any felony.” Think about this: if you step into an abandoned mine “or any underground portion thereof” with no plans to steal anything, but instead simply intending to shoot an unlicensed handgun (a felony), you are legally guilty of burglary. Why? Because it took place inside a legally recognized artificial structure (the mine).

Hollywood is a mega-business, and a tragic ending would be bad for business (and it would have surely leaked out very early on). In an indie art film? Sure, but not here. No way. Just once, I'd love to see an ending like Tosca in a Hollywood nine-figure blockbuster, where the lead character drops dead right before the final curtain falls. It would make for better suspense going forward.

I don't want to ruin the plot for you but you might enjoy Titanic.

Think about this: the only thing Curry has done differently this year is shoot a *ton* more 3-pointers than before. He didn't magically get a lot better. Maybe this season, he discovered a weapon so lethal that the rest of the league is helpless to do anything about it, and will be unable to counteract it in the years going forward.

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/

I'm not sure why - that would seem to be the objective, but it certainly hasn't been achieved at all levels. Running restaurants seems like it's becoming like owning gas stations, dry cleaners, or fast food joints - if you own ten of them, you're probably doing pretty well; if you're an independent, you're probably barely scraping by. I'd guess that the pie has gotten bigger, but there are a lot more hands grabbing at it.

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.

I've never read this before, anywhere, but I think it's time to call a spade a spade: The restaurant industry has been taken over by suits, just like the medical profession has (HMOs, third parties, etc.) - they've got their grubby hands in the till, and are squeezing customers.

This would imply that restaurants have become much more profitable in the past five years.

I have a feeling you would *love* the Soviet (reluctantly Soviet) painter, Kazimir Malevich - talk about a sense of humor ... but he had to repress it out of political fear - 

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

The Hirshhorn posted a great Ellsworth Kelly piece and quote this morning:

"By removing the content from my work, I shifted the visual reality of painting to include the space around it."

Fascinating - you're the first person I've ever heard say this (not that this topic has presented itself very often in my life). How come? Why not Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, or Mark Rothko?

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.