Eater DC

Image courtesy of Amsterdam Falafelshop

I can think of a number of other great fry spots to commemorate the occasion: Granville Moore's (pictured), Amsterdam Falafelshop, Bourbon Steak, Thunder Burger....

What's your favorite fry or frite in town?

Photo by Samantha Le

The road to franchising your restaurant is paved with good intentions. Amsterdam Falafel proprietors Scott and Arianne Bennett would know: “To be honest, I was thinking about [franchising] from day one," says Scott. "We have a very franchisable model, so why not?”

But, four years ago, when the Bennetts set out to open up a second location on Capitol Hill, Scott broke his leg and plans were scrapped. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise, he says,  since the intricate machinations of setting up a second shop weren't really in place yet. "We were light years off." Now, after careful coaching from FranPoint Partners, a sister falafel store is closer than ever before.

The Bennetts even have a location in mind: Boston. Although the D.C. pita moguls don't know the area well, one promising franchise candidate was all it took to send them on a quick trip to Beantown. And the visit confirmed that Boston was a fit: "Lots of walking neighborhoods, kind of like our neighborhood," says Arianne. "Families, tourists, very much a community."

There are still issues to iron out, though. The would-be Bostonian owner is still looking for a property, meaning that other hopeful franchisees could very well be open before the store in Beantown. Still, at Amsterdam's original location in Adams Morgan, a small jar on the counter sits with the following message: "Are you from Boston? The next Amsterdam Falafelshop is making tracks for Boston. If you live in that area, drop in a card and we’ll call you when we open."

"Last time I checked, there were 31 cards," Arianne says with a smile.

Photo via Flickr user joelogon using a Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic Creative Commons License.

By now, you've undoubtedly heard about today's $1 lunch promotion offered by LivingSocial.com, honored at more than 100 eateries around town. The coupons entitle holders to upwards of $25 worth of food for just a buck, depending on the location. As of 11:30 a.m., more than 24,000 vouchers had been sold, according to the organizers.

Around noon at Amsterdam Falafelshop in Adams Morgan, the line was out the door with customers holding printed coupons. A manager was standing up on a stool, wrangling with a cellphone, trying to capture the fustercluck on camera. He began shouting, "Does anybody have an iPhone and know how to take a picture?"

"That place is gonna suck big time in about a half an hour," grumbled one customer heading out the door with falafel in hand.

Across town, at Sticky Rice on H Street NE, manager Joey Belcher reports that a considerable line of coupon-carrying customers had formed before the sushi spot even opened this morning. "At about 11 o'clock, we had a line down the block and we actually don't open until 11:30. A lot of people were waiting so we opened a little early," says Belcher. "It's chaos. It's really, really good stuff."

Good for cash-strapped diners, sure. But what's in it for the restaurant?

"It's mostly just exposure," says Belcher. "For us, we just did our new spring menus. So we want everybody to come in and try the new stuff. Generally, with these deals, you're not making money, you're not losing money—it's kind of a wash. But we just look at it as phenomenal exposure, bringing in new people that might not ordinarily come to our area and hopefully making some new fans."

Photo by Chris Shott

Or at least add this nifty flip-and-catch routine to Amsterdam's training manual as the falafel shop starts taking over America.

So the news broke this week that after years of working out the details, Amsterdam Falafelshop will finally start franchising its delicious fried chickpea concept. As Joe Spinelli told me on Monday, the Adams Morgan falafel operation could soon become a monster, with more than 100 shops within the next seven years.

"This is going to [be] a very hot concept," Spinelli e-mails me.

So who is Joe Spinelli and what does he have to do with Amsterdam Falafelshop?

Good question. Spinelli is the co-owner of FranPoint Partners, a restaurant franchise and development firm based in Annapolis. He and his business partner, Richard Sharoff, have been working with Scott and Arianne Bennett, owners of the Falafelshop, on setting up and running the company that will oversee the many future Amsterdam franchises.

They're also the guys responsible for the long delay in getting this project off the ground. It seems that Sharoff and Spinelli know a few things about franchises. They know that unless you have all your systems in place, the new franchise concept could fall flat on its face. So Sharoff and Spinelli examined every facet of the Amsterdam Falafelshop business, from ordering to accounting, and made sure that each procedure was as streamlined and efficient and profitable as possible.

"It was a process that we knew would take a long time," says Arianne Bennett. "But we didn't know it would take this long."

The most minute details are important in the franchise business, Bennett notes. Things that a typical small business would never notice, like a .2 percent rise in food costs, can apparently have a dramatic impact when you start dealing with the large orders involved with franchises. FranPoint helped the Bennetts develop a system to track even the tiniest changes in food costs.

But some things the Bennetts had to do on their own. Like break down every recipe, including those for the nearly 20 different salads on the toppings bar, to make sure that the proportions were exactly right and could be easily replicated, even by some high-school flunkie making minimum wage. They also had to write several different franchisee manuals, including an employee handbook and a recipe book.

"I just sat here and banged this out at night," Arianne Bennett says. Lawyers, of course, had to review everything.

Perhaps most interesting of all, the Bennetts paid for all these franchising costs without taking on partners or investors. "We've used the majority of the profits from the last three years to do it," Arianne Bennett says.

The Bennetts are going to start franchising with a focus on the East Coast, even though they have had interest from operators on both the West Coast and in the Midwest. "They don't have to be right here in D.C.," Arianne Bennett says, but for now, the company would like future franchisees to be within a short plane flight so the owners can visit quickly, if need be.

The FranPoint crew is currently vetting possible future franchisees, including some in D.C. and Virginia, to make sure they're the right fit and have the right experience. But there's also a hidden benefit for the Bennetts now that their franchise company is up and running: They can start working on opening another Amsterdam Falafelshop of their own.

It's Monday, which means it's time to dig into a big, heaping plate of food news. We start with an item close to home:

• Amsterdam Falafelshop is looking to franchise. Where and when? The guessing (begging?) game begins. (DCist)
• New Tex-Mex joint to replace AM PM Carryout at 14th and V: Liquor license and sidewalk cafe, oh my! (Prince of Petworth)

• The Culinary Ambassadors' guide to eating through a proper Oktoberfest. Wolfgang, pass the kraut. (Serious Eats)
• Metropolitan Cooking & Entertaining Show is coming back to the District in November. (Northern Virginia magazine)
• We have two words for you: Beer garden. This Saturday's 17th Street Festival will have live music and a beer garden. Did we mention a beer garden? (Borderstan)
• Get 'em while they're hot: Afro-Portuguese inspired Nando's Peri-Peri opens a new location in Silver Spring. (Thrillist)
• The guy seriously has no reservations.  TV bad boy Anthony Bourdain is writing a graphic novel about "ultraviolent food nerds." (MTV)
• Leave it to a group of Washington doctors to politically attack McDonald's.  Ba da ba ba ba, I'm lovin' it. (Treehugger)
• It hurts so good. Men's Health has named Five Guys one of the worst foods in America. (WeLoveDC)

Arianne Bennett and Greggory Hill

This week’s Young & Hungry column plumbs the depths of my despair over the pending closure of Ren’s Ramen in Bethesda. As part of the column, I asked a number of chefs, restaurateurs, and writers to share their own stories about beloved eateries that have bit the dust. Some of the stories, unfortunately, didn’t make it into print. Like this one from Amsterdam Falafelshop owner Arianne Bennett:

For Scott [Bennett, her husband] and myself, who have been married 19 years now, our early lives were populated with eating indulgences that were lesser-known spots in D.C...

Fio's (that was in the Woodner on 16th), with its amazing Italian food. It was a real gem that always served squid-ink pasta. It was a favorite for years of all the restaurant people we know. We spent many nights indulging in plates of pasta and great stories in a place that seemed like a trip to another country in the midst of this strange apartment monolith.

And, who can forget the amazing buffet at Gabrielle for all those years at the former Radisson Barcelo on P Street. We would go there every weekend for brunch, and avail ourselves of the sweet-cream polenta with strawberries, the succulent roasted pig at the end of the table, and chocolate bread pudding made from croissants,  followed by a nap each time! When it closed, we followed the chef and begged for his bread pudding every holiday for our family!

We heard about Fio's closing in a paper (don't remember which), and it was like the earth had fallen away from us — we were shocked, devastated.  There were rumors that their landlord didn't want to renew, and rumors that they were tired of it all, but we didn't care why — we just wanted them back. There was an instant hole in us because of it.

Gabrielle was a mixed bag — we heard about it from Greg Hill, the chef, but it was a celebration for him, because he was getting his own place. Moving on. And we were excited for him and had to celebrate his success, but then inside we were dying, devastated when we realized that the Sunday Brunch event was going to be gone. No more crispy pig skin. We tried to go there a few times after he left, but then they changed over the whole theme, and then renovated the rest of the hotel, and it was forever gone. Now we just don't go to brunch anymore. Nothing pulled us out to join the weekend crowds like that brunch. I can even taste the sweet-cream-polenta now... tears...

So what if you launched a D.C. Dish Hall of Fame contest to suss out the metro area's best bites and it turned into a coronation of the region's cheap eats? It would make sense, right? After all, as I noted early in the voting, the odds are stacked decidedly against the high-end restaurants.

Arianne Bennett, co-owner of the namesake dish and Hall of Fame inductee at the Amsterdam Falafelshop, said much the same thing in an e-mail to me after I announced the contest results on Monday:

I think that some of the high-end restaurants missed out, and the lower-price-point places excelled in the voting because of two reasons:

1.  more bodies move through our restaurants daily, resulting in more bodies that have tried the food and can vote, and
2. higher end restaurants have more diverse menus – everyone who goes to Blue Duck has not had the incredible pleasure of the marrow bone appetizer... but everyone who goes to the Falafelshop pretty much gets a falafel (same with Pollo or Ben's).

Bennett suggests a dual platform contest next year: one for high-end dishes and one for fast-food or fast-casual dishes. It's a good idea.

However, in the meantime, whether fair or not, I have decided to weigh in on the winners of our inaugural Hall of Fame contest. Did they deserve the honor or not? You can read my thoughts here.

Earlier today on the blog, Y&H announced the inaugural class of the D.C. Dish Hall of Fame, which culiminated weeks of online balloting from more than 1,200 voters. But as we've known from Day 1, only five dishes could enter the hall, which leaves another 25 nominees out in the cold.

Perhaps you're interested in how the other 25 fared? Say no more. After the jump, you can view the dishes that didn't make the cut and find out how close they were to the five inductees.

But before you do that, ask yourself this question and then fire up a comment below: How many chances should a dish get to try to make the D.C. Dish Hall of Fame?

The inaugural class of the D.C. Dish Hall of Fame:

Half-smoke with chili at Ben's Chili Bowl, 502 votes

Falafel at Amsterdam Falafelshop, 395

Hamburger at Five Guys, 259

Peruvian chicken at El Pollo Rico, 193

Margherita pizza at 2Amys, 186

The rest of the field:

Burger from Ray's Hell Burger, 164

Salty oat cookie at Teaism, 150

Pho at Pho 75, 135

Palak chaat at Rasika, 130

Fried whiting at Horace & Dickie's, 124

Atomica pizza at Pizzeria Paradiso, 102

Boudin blanc at Marcel's, 99

Chicken croquetas at Jaleo, 89

Cowboy-cut bone-in ribeye at Ray's the Steaks, 83

Lobster burger at Central Michel Richard, 79

Shrimp and grits at Vidalia, 70

Spit-roasted goat at Komi, 70

Peking duck at Mark's Duck House, 63

Michel's chocolate bar (aka the Kit-Kat bar) at Citronelle, 62

Dry-aged sirloin steak at Buck's Fishing & Camping, 56

Smoked branzino carpaccio at Teatro Goldoni, 53

Italian sandwich at A. Litteri's, 52

Roast chicken at Palena Café, 49

Parker House rolls at CityZen, 48

Butter chicken at Heritage India, 36

Charcuterie plate at L'Auberge Chez Francois, 35

Fried Ipswich clams at Kinkead's, 34

Floating market noodle soup at Nava Thai, 33

Roasted bone marrow at Blue Duck Tavern, 30

Deep-fried flounder at Duangrat's, 27