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Jordan Wright
March 3, 2011
Special to The Washington Examiner
One French Fried Bucket To Go
 Bucket of Fried Chicken from Central Michel Richard - image courtesy of the restaurant We’re talking fried chicken with uber French chef Michel Richard, who may be on to something with his restaurant’s version of KFC. “I’ve always liked the crispy crunch of fried food and fried chicken was one of the first things I enjoyed when I came to this country,” he recalled.
His gourmet version, only at Central Michel Richard, comes in an un-trademarked bucket with six pieces and ten chicken “nuggets”, gussied up with his signature mashed potatoes and a Dijon dipping sauce for $29.95.
When the daffodils pop and lunch al fresco proves irresistible, it should make for the perfect date nosh at the nearby National Gallery’s Sculpture Garden. Available for lunch and dinner for takeout only he’s also offering lobster burgers, beef filet tartare, grilled sea bass and mac n’ cheese to boot. You can call ahead at 202 626-0015 or visit www.centralmichelrichard.com.
Mexico’s Newest Food Star
 Patricia Jinich at the Mexican Cultural Institute - photo courtesy of Jordan Wright Patricia Jinich, Executive Chef at DC’s Mexican Cultural Institute, spilled her big news last week at “The Molés of Oaxaca” dinner, announcing the launch next month of her brand new PBS television series, “Pati’s Mexican Table”. It puts her in pretty lofty culinary company with the likes of Martha Stewart, local chef Jose Andres, and the legendary Julia Childs. “The will show bring Mexican food and flavors into American kitchens,” she told me. “It focuses on traditional and modern takes on Mexican cuisine. The recipes aren’t too difficult or complex, but not like fast food either. They’re definitely oriented towards healthy family-friendly meals.”
During the wine-paired dinner, Pati hosted a lively demonstration alongside her friend Chef Alejandro Ruiz, one of Oaxaca’s hottest chefs and creator of Casa Oaxaca Restaurant which boasts a Five-Star Diamond Award. Before serving three different types of molés, the duo taught guests how to prepare the regional dishes, whose varieties number in the hundreds, by using a variety of chiles and other molé ingredients like almonds, raisins, pumpkin seeds, tomatillos, plantains, Mexican chocolate and the ubiquitous corn masa.
For info on upcoming dinners and demo evenings with Pati and other guest chefs at the Institute visit www.instituteofmexicodc.org
Bollywood on the Potomac – A Taste of Maximum India
Beginning March 5th The Kennedy Center promises a multi-sensory culinary journey hosted by twelve chefs, flown in from the four corners of India. The master chefs will lecture on and demonstrate their cooking techniques for the special Indian menus they have created for guests in the Rooftop Restaurant and KC Café during the “Maximum India” Festival. Continuing through March 20th . To learn more, visit http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/festivals/
The Green Report
To celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, noted chef Cathal Armstrong presents his annual seven-course Irish feast in his luxe Restaurant Eve Tasting Room. Known for his elegant interpretation of traditional Irish cuisine, the menu has his signature favorites such as Dublin Bay prawn bisque, braised lamb with baby root vegetables, corned beef and cabbage with Irish potatoes, of course! and bread and butter pudding with whiskey crème Anglaise. For the more adventurous there’s ‘Mac Black’, a dish of black mackerel with fried squid ink risotto and braised cuttle fish.
This year’s RAMMY award nominee for Mixologist of the Year, Todd Thrasher of Restaurant Eve and PX Lounge, has created what he calls an immunity boosting cocktail to usher in the Irish festivities. His healthful ‘Get it Right’ green drink is concocted of ingredients like spirulina, vitamin C powder, gin, vodka, coconut water and fresh herbs. Let’s see…drink Irish and get healthy…a festive prescription indeed.
For reservations at the Alexandria, VA restaurant visit www.restauranteve.com or call 703 706 -0450.
Jordan Wright
March 7th, 2011
Special to The Alexandria Times
 Emily Woods (Constance), Lars Klores (Mr. English), Elizabeth A. Keith (Mrs. English), and Elise Kolle (Felicity) Photo by Shane Canfield
When a Welsh family of four vanishes into thin air from their cozy country manse, leaving no other clue save a slip of paper handwritten with the word “widdershins”, we find two detectives hot on the trail to solve the mystery. In a complex and fascinatingly convoluted Victorian plot replete with Druids, faerie legends, French Impressionists and the occult, “Widdershins”, currently at The Little Theatre of Alexandria, connects these seemingly disparate elements with cohesive aplomb.
Underneath the quaint façade of this turn of the century upper crust family there are darker sides to each member that Inspector Ruffing, and his tippling cohort, McGonigle, aim to uncover. Between pours of the family’s finest scotch, McGonigle attempts to wrest the truth from a series of interviews with the family’s only remaining daughter, Annie, their lame servant girl, Jenny, and Betty, the village sorceress.
Mr. English, as the patriarch of the family, is a man in full who fancies himself a painter, writer and intellectual. Yet he is a dilettante holding his family firmly in his thrall. In a self-absorbed metaphysical quest – “To find the truth one must travel deeper and deeper into the abyss,” he declares – he dabbles dangerously in superstitions and Pagan legends. With the aid of a daft local seer and herbalist with a penchant for young boys, he is lured into the places where the “lost ones” dwell, as she goads him on to visit the spirits that have haunted him in his hallucinations.
“The sacred and the damned are the same,” English declares in a delusional dualist attempt to define God. With such a cavalier philosophy it should come as no surprise that he absolves himself of any responsibility towards his family, and we soon discover that everyone including his wife and children, Constance, Felicity, and their adopted daughter, Ann, has dark secrets and their own private demons. When English describes the world as a turf labyrinth or “mizmaze”, with the boundaries of a chessboard as its metaphor, we see his children, Constance and Felicity, toying with the pieces, in a symbolic reference to God toying with our destinies.
 Lars Klores (Mr. English), Rebecca Fischler (Jenny) Photo by Shane Canfield If you’re sensing a dash of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz meets the Addams Family, in a story written by Immanuel Kant and Edgar Allen Poe and directed by Fellini, then you’re on to something. Just remember to stage the fantasy in a comfortable Victorian drawing room with a fireplace.
In this carefully crafted whodunit, playwright Don Nigro reaches beyond a simple missing persons crime scene to explore intricate themes of religion, morality and sexuality in a mystery with cosmic mysteries. “God swims in a mysterious soup,” English divines.
To express that the characters’ reappearances are but visits from another realm as they waft in and out of the misty scenes in a time continuum, their visages are cleverly illuminated, by lighting and special effects designers, Ken and Patti Crowley.
The acting is smooth as a bolt of silk with Mike Baker, Jr. playing the bereaved McGonigle, J. Andrew Simmons as Ruffing the lead detective, Elizabeth A. Keith as the aggrieved Mrs. English, Kat Sanchez as the adopted daughter Ann, and Lars Klores as Mr. English. Gayle Nichols-Grimes plays the combo seer/witch in hoary and hilarious fashion (did I neglect to mention there was comedy here too?), while Elise Kolle and Emily Woods as the younger children exceed our expectations as the playful and mischievous foils whose innocence creates chaos.
Flawlessly directed by C. Evans Kirk, this production is highly recommended.
Through March 29th at The Little Theatre of Alexandria, 600 Wolfe Street, Alexandria, VA 22314. For tickets and information call 703 683-0496 or visit www.thelittletheatre.com.
WATCH Awards Reach Out and Touch
Alexandria’s Little Theatre
Jordan Wright
March 6, 2011
Sunday night and the crowd at the Birchmere was explosive. The WATCH Awards, which are to Washington area community theatres what the Tonys are to Broadway, were being presented and it was a pretty amped up crowd. Covering as far East as Annapolis, and south as Prince William County it included Alexandria’s own Little Theatre of Alexandria, which raked in four awards for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography for Amy Carson for her work on “Chicago”; Outstanding Achievement in Hair Design for Paul Morton for “Lady Windermere’s Fan”; Outstanding Achievement in Music Direction for Paul Nash for “Chicago; and Outstanding Achievement in Direction of a Musical for Susan Devine for “Chicago”.
By Jordan Wright
Posted on 21 February 2011
Special to Washington Life Magazine
 From "The Weir" - Kevin Adams (foreground) with Mike Tinder and Susan Marie Rhea - photo credit to Jim Coates The Weir, One Flea Spare and On The Razzle are on our radar for top theatre picks this week. Click HERE.
Jordan Wright
February 2011
Special to The Alexandria Times
 Marissa Moody as Joyce Cheeks, DeJeannette Horne as Rawl Cheeks, Aeshia Brown as Matoka Cheeks, Lolita-Marie as Mattie Cheeks Cal - photo credit Ari McSherry Before you “get all up in my family’s business,” as matriarch Mattie Cheeks is fond of telling Jewish traveling scholar and Holocaust survivor, Yaveni Aaronsohn, there is a perfectly plausible reason why this play uses the “N” word and why its usage, in any other context except historical, is so derogatory.
Brooklyn-born John Henry Redwood, an African-American actor and playwright, aimed to shock his audiences, shock them clear out of their complacency, in order to remind them of the invidiousness of the segregated South, not only for Blacks but for Jews as well.
In his play, “No Niggers, No Jews, No Dogs” presented by Alexandria’s Port City Playhouse, Redwood urges us not to forget the signs of racism, “Coloreds only”, “No niggers”, “Whites only”, and other hate-filled descriptors posted on restaurants, drinking fountains, rest rooms, hotels, gas stations and storefronts in the pre-civil rights South when fear-mongering, lynching, systematic rape and humiliation were promulgated and carried out by the Ku Klux Klan and their sympathetic followers.
The time was summer and the year was 1949 when Aaronsohn shows up in Halifax, North Carolina to study “the negative psychological effects of prejudice” on an African-American family. He finds the Cheeks’ home where husband, Rawl, played with a masterful subtleness by DeJeanette Horne, is a sharecropper and wife Mattie takes in laundry while raising their two girls, Joyce and Matoka during the days of Jim Crow law, and offers to pay them for their participation. Although initially suspicious the family comes to share their story with him and the complexities of their lives are revealed.
Beautifully paced and soulfully delivered this provocative yet tender and funny memory piece presents a cautionary tale…one that should never be forgotten.
In an unforgettably moving performance the beautiful and dulcet-voiced Lolita-Marie as the indomitable Mattie delivers an exquisite portrayal of a woman of grace and strong convictions whose canniness saves her family from certain doom. “You think life started when your life started?” she asks her children.
Also outstanding is ten-year old Aeshia Brown, playing the sweetly precocious daughter, Matoka, with the timing and delivery of a pro. “I’m studying you,” she informs Aaronsohn, as he records her explanation of the world. Her pivotal role, handled with sass and aplomb, providing the necessary comic relief.
The action takes place on or around the front porch – an iconic setting for Southern family life – where doors are slammed, peas are shelled, secrets are revealed and baskets of food are left for the mysterious Aunt Cora. Set Designer Erin Cumbo cleverly employs a clothesline hung with sheets as a projection screen for the opening photographs of racist signage from the South’s painful history.
“My father was an historian who taught me history could be sad,” recalls the playwright’s daughter, Rhonda Redwood-Ray, a federal prosecutor in Washington, DC. “Because he grew up around a lot of strong women, he was innately sensitive to women. Many of his characters were drawn from his own life.”
“Aunt Cora was a younger sister to my grandfather, and Mattie, my father’s mother is still alive at 90 and lives in Halifax, North Carolina,” she explains, acknowledging that her own father was probably the model for Rawl Cheeks.
Redwood-Ray remembers a childhood that included going to the homes of her father’s Jewish friends for supper where she was taught to be respectful of the customs of others and where she witnessed her father’s great sense of humor. “He had a laugh that would shake this whole set,” she told the audience recently in a talk after the show at the company’s newest location.
Weekends through March 6th at The Lab at Convergence, 1819 North Quaker Lane, Alexandria, VA 22302. For tickets and information call 703 838-2880 or visit www.PortCityPlayhouse.com.
Jordan Wright
February 2011
Special to The Washington Examiner
 La Naissance de VénusUffizi – Gallery in Florence,Italy Rosemary, figs, pine nuts, honey. Oysters, grapes, avocado, chiles. Strawberries, coffee, lavender, ginger. Of all the foods reputed to inspire romance, it is chocolate that is most closely associated with gift giving on Valentine’s Day.
Whether its powers for sexual desire are provable or not, has researchers in a conundrum. Since years of testing can’t confirm it as fact, current science holds that the two major chemicals found in chocolate, phenylethylamine (related to amphetamine) and seratonin, contain mood-lifting endorphins.
And what about all the other ingredients purported to enhance romance? Ancient cultures have their favorites, and if lavender works for the French and pine nuts for the Italians, well, who are we to say. As far as the term, “aphrodisiac” goes, credit goes to the Greek goddess of Love, Aphrodite, known around Rome as Venus, unquestionably one of the hottest babes in history, whose son was Cupid. You make the call.
If you could ingest a few sensual foods in one fell swoop delectably enrobed in chocolate, would your sweetheart be doubly or triply affectionate? Food for thought indeed.
Here are some exceptional local sources to explore.
At ACKC Chocolates Cocoa Bar Café in Downtown DC artisan chocolatier, Rob Kingsbury has been creating inspired sweets for a discriminating clientele since 2002, when he opened his first shop on King Street in Old Town Alexandria. Kingsbury comes from four generations of candy-makers who sold maple-flavored popcorn balls from their maple syrup farm in Vermont.
His highly original handmade chocolate confections boast dozens of unusual infusions and one of the most sought after is his “Strawberry Pink”, a dark chocolate bar with strawberries and pink peppercorns. Other striking flavor harmonics are a dark chocolate bar with pine nuts, Herbes de Provence, sunflower and pumpkin seeds and sea salt or the exotic “Chipotle 5-Spice Bar” infused with smoky jalapenos and a blend of cinnamon, anise, fennel, cloves and white pepper. Or get three aphrodisiacal ingredients in one ganache-filled bite with his Honey Ginger Truffles. ww.thecocoagallery.com
Another source is the kitchens of chocolatier Wilhelm Wanders of Chocolaterie Wanderings whose European-influenced stylings are reflected in his hand-crafted confections, well-known to crazed chocophiles. “I use honey for nearly all my confections,” he reveals. Biagio’s in DC, The Sugar Cube in Alexandria, VA and The Inn at Little Washington will all feature his heart-shaped truffles with hand-piped jasmine tea ganache, as well as a very pretty dark chocolate bergamot-scented Earl Grey tea truffle garnished with a lavender flower. www.chocolateriewanderings.com
By Jordan Wright
Feb. 14, 2011
Special to Washington Life Magazine
 (L-R) Domio of Ephesus (Darius Pierce) with his master, Antipholus of Ephesus (Bruce Nelson), in The Comedy of Errors, on stage at Folger Theatre through March 6, 2011. (Credit: Carol Pratt) Bring on the drama! Our top Washington-area theatre picks for the upcoming week. Click HERE.
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