After being laid off, I was not working for about, oh, 26 days or so I suppose. Yesterday, I started my new job selling shoes in Dupont Circle. I’m still in training, but come Saturday you will be able to find slingin’ shoes at one of Comfort One Shoes’ four locations on the 1600 block of Connecticut Ave. Please, if you come by, ask for Sam. I’m going to be in the store next to Melody Records that specializes in athletic shoes. I tried to get a job at the record store, but they weren’t hiring. Now I know about 20 classifications of women’s sandals.
Bierria Paradiso
I went to the original, and in my opinion much better, location of Pizzeria Paradiso and its basement bar Bierria Paradiso tonight in Georgetown.
Went with a couple of friends and we all got pizza. I got the special, which was a pie with buffalo mozzarella, prosciutto and basil. Awesome. Their pizza is always good, especially for around here, but the ingredients were great on this one. I can never really complain about the pizza there, it’s consistent. Not saying it’s spectacular and out of this world, but for DC it’s one of your better options. I haven’t yet ventured to one of “the” DC pizza places (2 Amys I hear is really great, among others) but in my five months here Paradiso has it down.
I coupled my pie with a New Holland Golden Cap, which is their seasonal saison. It definitely pulls it off, not too estery but enough, and spicy. It tasted like it was probably pretty simple as far as the ingredients, and it let the yeast do the work on the flavor. There wasn’t the uber compilation of tastes as much as there were a few very refined ones. I liked it is what I’m trying to say. It was my first New Holland beer and I will definitely be picking up some more.
I read in the most recent issue of Mid-Atlantic Brewing News that the Dupont Circle location of Paradiso will be moving up P Street to a larger space, a very good move as the current location is on the small side and doesn’t offer near as much beer. They are planning to expand the number of taps and bottles with the new space to (from memory) I think 10 and 300 respectively.
Three-day Vay Cay
The general lack of posting can be attributed to the fact that some good friends of mine paid me a visit over the weekend. We started off the festivities with the UNC/Maryland game in College Park on Saturday. It had been really hard to score the tickets, and apparently it wasn’t so hard to score on Carolina. In what for many of us was the first time we had gotten to see the Heels live this season, we watched a 16-point lead dwindle to force OT, and then saw our boys collapse in extra time.
Now there are a great many things that went wrong, a couple of debatable coaching decisions regarding some timeouts and our defensive effort and mindset, but c’mon guys, I came to see you! I wish we would have pulled out the win, but it was nice to see the team playing. When they actually were playing well, they looked good. There is a definite air of confidence that you can see in them when they’re rolling, but once that confidence gets broken, they look like any other team. Maybe it takes a dramatic situation, like the Duke rivalry (and hopefully the ACC and NCAA tourneys), that makes this team take on pressure and come back. It’s been these past few games against so-so ACC teams that have really been bothersome. Letting teams like N.C. State and Miami make runs on us isn’t good for our psyche. We need to develop a killer instinct and just put teams away down the stretch, not fall asleep and let them inch back into the game. Anyway, I’m over it. If I feel up to the task I might post up some pictures from the game as we scored some nice lower level seats in the Comcast Center.
The rest of the weekend was a success.
We effectively “raged” at Front Page in Dupont Saturday night, needing to drink away our sorrows from the afternoon. It’s typically not one of my favorite bars, actually it never is, but it was the best time I’ve had out in quite a few weeks. There was much dancing and merry making.
Sunday was more or less a recovery day. We ate brunch at Cafe Luna. The eggs benedict were outstanding and very affordable. This was my second brunch experience there and it pretty much cemented Luna as my go-to place for breakfast on the weekends. It helps that it’s two blocks from my house as well. Sunday afternoon we took a tour of the monuments around and between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Didn’t make it over to the Jefferson.
Sunday evening/night was fun because after we had some grub at RFD, we went back to my place and had a session until sometime close to 3 a.m. I felt Lew Bryson would have been proud. No drunks this night. Just friends staying up to the wee hours talking.
Monday I took off from work to spend time with my visitors and two of us made a trip to the newly renovated American History Museum. The rest of the night consisted of enjoying a few choice beers and a Mos Def concert at 9:30 Club.
I cracked that bomber of Stone Old Guardian that I mentioned in a previous post. Wow! A really hefty barleywine with a very mellowed bite. This is perhaps because the bottle has been aged a year on the shelves of Cairo Liquor.
We made it to the show in time for some approximately third row seats that were great – once Mos finally made it. We had to wait two hours for him to arrive, pushing the 7:30 start time to 9:30 p.m., guess that’s how the place got its name. Good thing they have Old Rasputin on tap at the club, one of the reasons it has to be the best place in the city to see a show.
For all the waiting we had to do, Mos didn’t disapoint the sold-out crowd. He was on from the start and played a great set list of some classics and some new stuff. He did a two-song Black Star medley in which he rapped the Talib Kweli verses, nice. My roommate attended the added late show, which didn’t start until 12:30 a.m., and said that it was just as much talking as singing and rapping. I really had a great time at our show (except for the wait), so I’m glad I went to the early show.
Annnnnnnnd back at work on Tuesday. Nice three-day vacation, though.
