Poplar makes use of a pizza oven to roast its vegetable-centric dishes. {Photograph} by Jessica Sidman.
Poplar. 701 Kennedy St., NW.
DC’s eating scene is more and more dominated by huge restaurant teams and out-of-town expansions. Poplar in Brightwood Park is the precise reverse. The neighborhood spot options simply 24 seats and a small weekly altering menu using native farms and foraged substances. Just about the whole lot is cooked out of a Marra Forni pizza oven.
“I wished a spot up right here that felt such as you have been going downtown with out having to go downtown,” says Cerrissa Fitz, a hospitality business veteran with a day job as an inside designer. She’s going to oversee your entire eating room, all the way down to bussing the tables. Her companion Sam Fitz, co-founder of Anxo Cider, manages the cider-centric bar. And chef/forager Iulian Fortu is the one-man kitchen.
“I hate to sound cliche and say farm-to-table, however we actually are going to be farm-to-table,” says Cerrissa. Fortu operates a foraging enterprise known as Arcadia Enterprise that provides native substances to a few of DC’s prime eating places, together with Oyster Oyster, Reverie, and Jont. Fortu will proceed to forage substances for his personal vegetable-centric menu, which is able to characteristic round half a dozen dishes plus Manifest Bakery’s sourdough with cultured butter that’s house-made each week with native cream. (A hungry desk of two may order the entire menu in the event that they wished.)
“I’m not going to do any kind of industrial commodity meats or fish. The whole lot’s going to be like clear sourcing,” says Fortu, a former intern at Noma in Copenhagen who works as a non-public chef. The restaurant prides itself on low waste, and Fortu plans to avoid wasting vegetable scraps to feed a buddy’s pigs.
The identify Poplar comes from Tulip Poplar bushes, that are among the many tallest in native forests and supply cover for mushrooms—and morels specifically—to thrive. Appropriately, the opening menu is heavy on mushrooms, together with a wild mushroom paella for 2 and a grilled lion’s mane mushroom “steak” that’s marinated in beet juice, purple wine, and spices. There’s additionally a sweet-savory, mushroom-shaped panna cotta—a part of which is infused with sweet caps and the opposite half with chocolate and porcinis. It’s garnished with chocolate-porcini crumble “soil” and cherries preserved with a syrup made with spicebush berries Fortu foraged.
Different opening menu highlights embrace a sunchoke soup with flippantly pickled Asian pear and crispy fried sunchokes. There’s additionally butterflied Virginia trout glazed with a fruity paw-paw barbecue sauce and served with smoked salsa verde and trout roe. The whole lot is roasted within the pizza oven that the homeowners inherited from a pizzeria that by no means opened within the area. (Fortu has a pair small induction burners too.)
The equally concise drink menu attracts closely from Anxo, which is understood for dry, naturally fermented ciders produced simply down the block. The homeowners even have a small importing firm and can usher in extra ciders and wines. Nonetheless to come back: cocktails on draft.
Cerrissa has added her inside designer’s contact to the nook area, combining the unique coffered ceilings and brick with new marbled porcelain wall tiles and heat wooden furnishings (together with a communal desk). There’s additionally a framed photograph of her grandfather, who got here to the US from China when he was 14 and labored his method up in New York’s Chinatown eating places.
“Since my grandfather spoke no English the one method I needed to talk with him was by means of meals… He would fastidiously craft dishes whereas someway discovering a approach to in damaged English educate life classes,” Cerrissa says. “This restaurant is a nod to him. I want he may have lived to see me personal a spot of my very own however I do know he can be proud.”
Reservations for every week will go stay on Tuesdays starting February 11.
Meals Editor
Jessica Sidman covers the individuals and tendencies behind D.C.’s foods and drinks scene. Earlier than becoming a member of Washingtonian in July 2016, she was Meals Editor and Younger & Hungry columnist at Washington Metropolis Paper. She is a Colorado native and College of Pennsylvania grad.
