Dog Waits in Vain, 20009

A 10-part series in which Justin Moyer, part-time musician, part-time journalist, and full-time USPS enthusiast visits a bunch of post offices in our nation's capital so you don't have to.

Location: 2300 18th St. NW
Date: 4/20/09
Time: 4:47 p.m.

18th Street is renowned for its loose women, looser men, well drinks, jumbo slices, and fine imported goods. But D.C.'s answer to Bourbon and Beale Sts. also has a post office! Is Kalorama Station as good at the porno-and-head shops amongst which it is nestled?

Read More "Post Office No. 9: Kalorama Station, 20009" »

The 1800 block of Columbia Road NW is presently cordoned off due to a manhole explosion earlier this afternoon. Police and Pepco workers are on the scene. Details to come.

These events have highly inconvenienced luncheoning workers in the neighborhood, at least one of whom had to go to Subway instead of So's Your Mom for a sandwich.

UPDATE, 3:10 P.M.: A Pepco spokesperson says one manhole started smoking around 1:15 p.m. No power outages have been reported, and there's no word yet on the cause.

ANC Commissioner Bryan Weaver knew Derrell "Willow" Goins for years. On December 10, the 21-year-old Goins was shot and killed in Adams Morgan.

Goins was different than most of the kids Weaver tracks. "The thing that messed up every community activist in Adams Morgan is that he was off your radar. All of us internally make a list of kids who are immediately of concern and on the border....Derrell was beyond that. He was a kid that when he wanted community goods, when he came to [us], it was light, things that are goodness."

Goins received community money for art classes, and an after-school photography program. He craved a normal suburban teenager's existence. The job at the Hilton swimming pool. The time and resources to do his pen-and-ink sketches.

But pen and ink sketches aren't enough to escape the old Adams Morgan, the Adams Morgan in which the teenage rite of passage is joining the 1-7. Teenage boys divide themselves based on whether or not they're part of 1-7, affiliated loosely with 1-7 or ignore the 1-7 altogether. Goins wasn't part of the gang at all. He had no criminal history. Police didn't know him.

Read More "The Life And Death Of Derrell ‘Willow’ Goins" »

Thus CNN projected it, thus people danced in the street. There was yelling. There was honking. There was photographing. And from someone somewhere, James Brown.

Read More "Obamans Dancing on 18th Street" »

It's 10:30 on Election Night and you know you are so shut out at Busboys & Poets. Well, there's plenty of room for you on the 18th Street strip! We here at City Desk are here to serve those looking for a beer and some blue-staters. (And also, these bars are close to our offices.) Here's a fairly complete rundown of what's happening:

Saki: Suck-i. Skip it.
Asylum: TV's on. So is the metal music. Don't come in if you don't have a tattoo.
Subway: Your sandwich artist is waiting with your six-inch meatball.
Bossa: TV's on, but the band's setting up. It's Mojai, "alternative funk." A manager says they're going on later than usual, about 11 p.m.
Madam's Organ: Election TVs on three floors, but you'll have to endure a cover and Old Man Brown, a blues band (well, duh). BONUS: Bill Duggan may be lurking angrily inside.
Tryst: TV's on but it's tiny. Everyone else is more interested in themselves. It's Tryst.
Diner: Ka-ching! People are cashing in their 10 percent off cards gleaned today at area precincts. TV's on, but so is the glam rock. It'll probably be Madonna or the Ramones by the time you get there.
GranDCentral: A good spot to see returns. TV's on Brokaw and turned up loud, $3 domestics all night.
Rumba: Rum-bad. Skip it.
Color Me Mine: Closed. Sorry, Cherkis. You'll have to paint pottery another night.
Toledo Lounge: My go to. Switching between the Caps game and election results, will switch over to all-election after hockey, in true Toledo style. Also, it's "Ladies Night." (Not really, the bartender was being ironic.)

Read More "Where to Watch Returns in Adams Morgan" »

I just stopped by Marie H. Reed, 2200 Champlain St. NW. A friend told me she waited a little over 30 minutes for her boyfriend to cast his vote there.

Read More "Photos: Voting at Marie H. Reed" »

What is with the strata of D.C. that must shower on a Sunday, first of all, and then top that off with some sort of put-together outfit that may or may not involve heels, sunglasses too big for your face, and possibly a shave? Why on earth do people want to sit for hours over breakfast? I must admit I don't get brunch. In fact, I loathe it. Whenever I am asked if I would like to go to brunch in D.C. on a Sunday I say no thank you, but what I am thinking is: Fuck no. I would not like to have eight cups of coffee just because it's there and then fight the jitters for the rest of the day, I do not want to listen to you and people I don't know gab on about politics because it bores me, I do not want to pay $20 for pancakes, and I prefer not to drink Champagne unless someone I know is celebrating something more significant than eggs, much less mix Champagne with orange juice, which is all together a stupid idea anyway. Don't get me started on bloody marys. They're gross.

So stay home, is what you might say. And, pretty much, that's what I do, or I grab a bagel and eat it in a park. But sometimes I actually do want someone else to make me a hot breakfast---not a "brunch" mind you, but a breakfast. Good luck getting that in my neighborhood. In Adams Morgan, my go-to is The Diner. But on Sunday, you can't even pull off the counter trick. Everyone and their cousin from Maryland and the cousin's four kids and their family dog are congregating outside. And they're dressed up. And it's the fucking Diner, people. This scene repeats itself all over 18th Street. What I'm saying is this: When there's a line at Asylum for food and the people in line look like they just spilled out of Chloe, you know something's wrong. And what is wrong is brunch culture in D.C. It's phony, it's stupid, it sucks.

Come early November, when Mixtec celebrates its 29th28th anniversary in Adams Morgan, owner Pepe Montesinos plans to officially unveil the long-awaited deli/grocery/take-out shop next to his landmark Mexican restaurant. The take-away menu will include, interestingly enough, pizza and pastas. Don’t ask Montesinos why—unless you have an hour to hear his life story.

Allow me to save you the time: The Oaxacan native immigrated to the United States in 1965, with the grand idea that he would enroll at the Air Force Academy and become a fighter pilot. That dream proved elusive for a Mexican with limited connections. Instead, Montesinos started working as a waiter at the now-shuttered A.V. Ristorante Italiano in 1970 while studying business and economics at Salisbury University on the Eastern Shore. Montesinos considered the late Augusto Vasaio, who founded A.V. in 1949, his mentor. “To me, AV. was one of the most important people in my life,” he says.

It was at A.V. that Montesinos realized the culinary connections between his native country and Italy. (Got another hour to spare? Ask Montesinos about the history of tomatoes.) It was then that Montesinos also realized he wanted a place of his own. “Every homework that I had [in college], I always wrote about the restaurant that I had in my mind,” Montesinos remembers.

His homework became reality in 1978, when Montesinos opened Enriqueta's on M Street NW in Georgetown. It was an immediate hit in a town that had choked down one too many enchiladas smothered in Velveeta. “Put aside any Tex-Mex preconceptions. Enriqueta's is an authentic Mexican restaurant with a menu listing a variety of styles of cooking, tastes and textures, only a few of them hot,” Phyllis Richman wrote in her 1979 Washington Post Dining Guide. “Enriqueta's will teach you something you are glad to know about Mexican food.”

Two years later, in 1980, Montesinos opened Mixtec, then only a grocery store designed to help the budding restaurateur import much-needed ingredients from Mexico. The grocery morphed into a taqueria in 1982, which became a problem when Montesinos decided to open a second Enriqueta’s just a few doors down on Columbia Road. Mixtec and Enriqueta’s ended up competing against each other for D.C.’s limited Mexican dining dollar, since locals apparently couldn’t distinguish between a taqueria and the more fully developed menu at Enriqueta’s. In the mid-1980s, Montesinos—and here’s the important part, finally—transformed the second Enriqueta’s into Trattoria Garibaldi, a short-lived Italian spot.

Montesinos, in other words, is not just adding Italian food to his take-out operation for the hell of it. He has experience with the cuisine, has affection for it, and even feels a connection between his mother’s cooking back in Oaxaca and the stuff turned out in rustic Italian kitchens.

The line of pizzas and pastas at the new take-out shop will be Montesinos’ own attempt to keep the spirit of A.V. alive—both the restaurant and his old friend. Montesinos has even hired Virginia Williams, a cook at A.V. for 40 years, to make his pies and pastas, which will, of course, include that mouthwatering white pizza that you just had to order every time you stepped foot into A.V.’s. But Montesinos has also developed a few of his own pies, which could make you forget all about A.V.’s most famous round. Personally, I’m looking forward to a pair of Montesinos’ creations: one pie with tomatillos and roasted pork and another with Oaxacan mole.

Montesinos says he might also sell meatloaf and some traditional sandwiches. It may sound like yet another oddball addition to his Mexican operation, but it all makes sense to Montesinos, a man with his feet planted in three distinct cultures: his native Mexico, his adapted America, and the Southern Italy of his old mentor. “Eventually, we’ll do the three cuisines,” Montesinos promises, “the Mexican, the American, and the Italian concept.”

Last night while the rest of you were foaming about the governor's mispronunciation of "nuclear," I was on Duke Ellington Bridge walking home. And for the third time in a year, I watched an owl fly over the bridge. The owl, a barred owl as it turns out (pictured above) is one of three species that inhabit Rock Creek Park (the great horned and the screech owl are the other two). By far, the barred owl is the cutest of our city's owl critters. It does not have pointy bat-like ears and has soft brown eyes, rather than the piercing pee-yellow ones of other owl varieties.

When I saw my brown-eyed owl friend land in a tree just on the other side of Walter Pierce Park, I stopped rushing home to turn on The Sexist's live blog (sorry, Sexist) and instead watched the owl. The owl twisted its small head around to look, I presume, for dinner: mice or chipmunks or, apparently, tasty grouse and doves. It sat there on a limb for a good two minutes (long enough for either veep candidate to say "Main Street" and "kitchen table" approximately 82 times) and then it flew off toward the zoo grounds with an audible flap of its wings.

Look, I know I'm supposed to be writing in this space about Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin. But you know what, Jason Cherkis, I really don't care. I am so sick to death of you and your ilk imploding all over yourself because you hate Sarah Palin. The way you all twitch with fear and loathing is exactly the way conservatives twitched with fear and loathing regarding Hillary Clinton, circa 1992-2008. She's just a politician, people.

Personally, I prefer owls.