The newly renovated Tasting Room at Eve: No place for rookies. The first week I worked at Restaurant Eve, I felt like I was losing motor skills at the end of a double shift. I'm generally clumsy anyway, and I hadn't yet mastered the stops and starts of maneuvering a busy dining room, in which [...]
Welcome to the fourth installment of All About Eve, Young & Hungry’s behind-the-scenes glimpse of working at Restaurant Eve. You can read previous posts here In the three months I’ve worked at Eve, several times a week just before service is an announcement of a mysterious reservation at 5:30 with no notation of a birthday, anniversary, [...]
Welcome to the third installment of All About Eve, Young & Hungry’s behind-the-scenes glimpse of working at Restaurant Eve. You can read previous posts here. Ren and Stimpy. Felix and Oscar. Leonard and Guy. Leonard and Guy are two servers on the floor at Eve's Tasting Room. Leonard is 6-foot plus, wears terrific glasses, and [...]
This is my fridge. As a food lover and sometimes food writer, I have not bought groceries from a Harris Teeter or Whole Foods, let alone a farmers market, since late July. This empty shell reflects the sorry state of my kitchen. How did I get here? Having found myself at a work-life crossroads, I [...]
Yesterday afternoon, Y&H received an emergency e-mail from Meshelle Armstrong over at Restaurant Eve. Illusionist and endurance specialist David Blaine was in the house!, she wrote. And apparently not hanging upside down by wires. Meshelle and chef/husband Cathal Armstrong, the duo behind the four-star performer, are big fans of Blaine. Meshelle said the magician was going [...]
When Cocktail first hit theaters in 1988, I have to admit I had no interest in seeing it. Why would I want to watch a Tom Cruise vehicle in which bartending was made to look like dorked-out synchronized swimming with 750 ml bottles? I would have preferred being clocked by a broken whiskey bottle than watch Cruise twirl [...]
One of the truly defining characteristics of being a cocktail nerd is making your own ingredients–syrups, tinctures, cordials and–the granddaddy of them all–bitters. Bitters are essential to the cocktail, which, incidentally, was first defined in 1806 in a Hudson, New York newspaper called the Balance & Columbian Repository as containing spirits, water, sugar and bitters.
The drink looks like the kind of watered-down cocktail that bartenders prepare for wedding stumblebums who have already sucked down one too many from the free bar. Mixologist Todd Thrasher's Tomato Water Bloody Mary at Restaurant Eve is almost clear, save for a faint yellow-green tint to the liquid. Before even taking a sip, I'm [...]
Sometimes, if I've enjoyed way, way too many calories for breakfast, lunch, or whatever that meal is that I occasionally eat in the middle of the afternoon, I will partake of a liquid dinner. You know what I'm talking about. So where can one enjoy a little liquid refreshment and perhaps some snackage, should the urge [...]
The James Beard Foundation has released its massive list of semi-finalists [PDF] in the restaurant and chef categories, and the D.C. area has plenty of contenders. So far, at least. It's a bit early to get too pump over this list, which was whittled down from more than 15,000 entries. At present, many of the [...]
