Posts Tagged ‘Zora Neale Hurston’
Spot Check: Eatonville
Chef Rusty Holman, the chef at Eatonville
My tablemate and I are sitting at a two-top by the large picture window at Eatonville, which provides a semi-comfortable, climate-controlled view of the parade of mini-skirts and flesh that walks up and down the bustling 14th Street NW corridor. We’re half way through our appetizers when the food runner brings our entrees. She seems oblivious to the fact that we’re still eating our first course; she’s also a little slow on the basic laws of physics. Our tiny table barely contains all the plates she has just unceremoniously dropped off, her job here done.
Busboys & Poets’ Andy Shallal Has Been Saved!
A pre-saved Shallal chatting with Top Chef-er Carla Hall
For those who thought the protracted chef competition for Andy Shallal’s new Eatonville project was a sinful act of pride, you might be happy to learn that the Busboys & Poets owner was saved yesterday. Fittingly enough, Shallal’s salvation came in Eatonville, Fla., the town for which his forthcoming Southern eatery took its name.
Finale from the Eatonville Chef Contest: We Have a Winner
Note: Busboys & Poets owner Andy Shallal is taking an Iron Chef approach to hiring the chef for his forthcoming Eatonville, a Southern-oriented restaurant that pays homage to Zora Neale Hurston. This is the second in a series of blog posts chronicling the competition. This series will not announce the winner; it will be revealed later in the City Paper.
After four previous rounds and God knows how many tastings in CulinAerie’s smaller classroom, the competition for Eatonville’s chef had come down to two men. Both had grown up in the South, which no doubt helped them grasp the cuisine they were expected to prepare, but both chefs also had dramatically different personalities. One had the gift of gab, the other a gift for silence.
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Scene 3 from the Eatonville Chef Contest: Too Fancy for His Own Good
Note: Busboys & Poets owner Andy Shallal is taking an Iron Chef approach to hiring the chef for his forthcoming Eatonville, a Southern-oriented restaurant that pays homage to Zora Neale Hurston. This is the second in a series of blog posts chronicling the competition. This series will not announce the winner; it will be revealed later in the City Paper.
Christina Giallourakis, a former lawyer who now does health counseling, had nothing bad to say about the chef’s dishes. ”I think his whole array of food is like two notches above the others’ food,” the judge said, refering to the other two chefs competing last Friday in the semi-final round of Andy Shallal’s hunt for an Eatonville chef. Giallourakis could, without much doubt, see herself driving across town for this guy’s cooking.
Read More “Scene 3 from the Eatonville Chef Contest: Too Fancy for His Own Good” »
Scene 2 from Eatonville Chef Contest: Something for Vegetarians
Note: Busboys & Poets owner Andy Shallal is taking an Iron Chef approach to hiring the chef for his forthcoming Eatonville, a Southern-oriented restaurant that pays homage to Zora Neale Hurston. This is the second in a series of blog posts chronicling the competition. This series will not announce the winner; it will be revealed later in the City Paper.
The chef, one of five left standing in Andy Shallal’s unorthodox hiring process, didn’t waste a second letting the judges know that he had absorbed their criticisms from the previous round. He had taken the fuss out of his Southern-minded food. “The tutu came off,” he told the judges.
Read More “Scene 2 from Eatonville Chef Contest: Something for Vegetarians” »
Andy Shallal Takes a Reality Show Approach to Hiring Eatonville Chef
Andy Shallal, the man behind the concept-bending Busboys & Poets chain, loves food shows. It’s no surprise, then, that Shallal has taken a reality-show approach to hiring a chef for his forthcoming Eatonville, a southern-food restaurant located across V Street from the original Busboys & Poets location. The owner’s requiring his top candidates to compete in a week-long cook-off to land the gig.
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Andy Shallal’s Eatonville to Symbolically Reunite Hughes and Hurston
Restaurateur Andy Shallal was on the phone this afternoon, explaining to me how the 1930 play Mule Bone drove a wedge between its two creative collaborators, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Apparently, Hurston copyrighted the play in her name only, a slight that led to a falling out between the two Harlem Renaissance legends. “They never talked to each other for the rest of their lives,” Shallal says.
Shallal was telling me this story as background to his new southern-food eatery, Eatonville, which is an homage to Hurston and her D.C. connections, including her undergraduate studies at Howard University, where she co-founded The Hilltop. As others have already reported, Eatonville is named after Hurston’s hometown in Florida; the eatery is also a collaboration between Shallal (owner of the mini-Busboys and Poets chain) and Michael Babin of the Neighborhood Restaurant Group, which includes Rustico, Vermilion, and other operations.
But here’s the interesting thing: Eatonville, scheduled to open sometime early next year, will be located on 14th Street NW, just across V Street from the original Busboys and Poets, which itself is an homage to Hughes. So is the placement of the two restaurants a sort of symbolic healing to the historic rift between Hughes and Hurston?
“Absolutely,” says Shallal. “I want to put some artwork on the street that connects the two places.” The artwork, he adds, could be something as simple as footsteps between Eatonville and Busboys and Poets.
