LATEST DISH

BY LINDA ROTH

DINING 360: RETRO REVOLVING REPAST

No question what the best seat in the house is: all of them. Dine with a panoramic view –without having to move – giving new meaning to dining and cocktails with a view. Skydome has reopened atop the DoubleTree by Hilton Crystal City Hotel, with its unique 360-degree panoramic vantages of the D.C. skyline. The view is complemented by a new American fare through a Mediterranean lens menu, from newly-appointed Executive Chef Klaus Happel. The center of the restaurant is under a glass dome, with a space station feel. It’s the optimal spot to watch planets align.

Vera, a new Mexican / Lebanese restaurant (think blended cuisines) is slated to open in Q2 2023 in Ivy City at 2002 Fenwick St. NE where Big Chief used to be. Owners Nayef Issa and Nour Chaaban also own Residents Café & Bar in Dupont Circle. The first level is a bar and lounge plus private dining while the main restaurant will be on the second floor and will feature a retractable roof. Highlights: Colorful murals, carajillo (espresso martini with Licor 43) and late-night entertainment as Nayef also owns DJ-music-centric Nü Androids music production company. Vera is named after Veracruz, Mexico which historically has welcomed Lebanese immigrants.

CH-CH-Changes: Thompson Hospitality plans to open Maker’s Union instead of its

Christie, whose former room carries her name, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Greta Garbo, Sarah Bernhardt, Alfred Hitchcock, Mata Hari and Jacqueline Kennedy. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, resided in Suite 101, which is now a museum devoted to his legacy.

Ernest Hemingway was a resident after the First World War, when he was a reporter. He was, of course, a regular at the hotel’s Orient Bar. It has been said he spent many an hour nursing a whiskey there.

Visits to the Pera Palace and the Orient Bar are a must do when visiting the former Constantinople. The hotel and bar underwent an extensive renovation and reopened in 2010 fully restored to their old-world glory.

Last October, I found myself wandering Istanbul’s Taksim Square with a dear D.C. friend who had moved back to her home country. It was chilly moonlit night and the crowds surged through the bustling thoroughfare. We had spent our evening at the quaint tavernas, but as late night set in, we felt a longing for a place more refined and subdued from the growing crowds.

My friend, Sefika, knew just the place. We ventured a few blocks off the beaten path and

‘Midnight at the Pera Palace’ cocktail. Photo by Jody Kurash. came upon a gorgeous art-nouveau building that oozed old-world charm. As we neared the Belle-Époque façade, a vintage-looking sign glimmered “Orient Bar” from an ornate window.

As soon as we entered, I started daydreaming about the East-meets-West grandeur of the hotel. I tried to imagine how impressive these lofty surroundings were back in the day when it was the only hotel in the Ottoman empire with electricity and an elevator.

The Orient Bar is a den of crimson with rich carpeting and velvet chairs that laze under the mystic glow from the chandeliers above. It was like instantly stepping into a Christie murdermystery movie set. fast-casual Slice of Matchbox, at 664 Maine Ave. SW at The Wharf (Phase 2). This sports bar / coffee shop features local distillers and beers, with its own Makers IPA brewed in D.C. A Q3 opening is targeted.

As you’d imagine, service was impeccable and the cocktail list impressive. Classic tipples filled out the menu festooned with original creations.

I opted for the “Midnight at the Pera Palace” an inventive offering which shares the same name as a 2022 Netflix series filmed at the hotel about a cub reporter researching the Pera’s storied history who’s thrust into the past and must stop a plot that could change the fate of modern Turkey.

I was fascinated by the drink’s inclusion of both blended and single malt Scotch. A mixture of Caol Ila single malt, Johnny Walker black, lemon and smoked honey sounded like the perfect mix of sophistication and warmth I was seeking.

The cocktail arrived garnished with a candied fig speared through a sprig of thyme. The star was the smoky flavor of the single malt which was complimented by the honey which elevated rather than sweetened the cocktail. The JW smoothed out the peaty smack while the natural elements gave it a savory flair. The flavor was pure finesse.

Like Biden’s Ukraine visit, the exact details of this cocktail are classified. However, whether you arrive by rail, air or ship, the Pera Palace is ready to whisk you back in history whether it’s at midnight or any time you like.

Just Opened: Los Angeles-based Dave’s Hot Chicken Nashville-style hot chicken chain opened at 3301 14th Street NW in Columbia Heights, its anointed flagship location in D.C. It will be the first of many for this fast-growing, fast-casual chain known for its celebrity investors (Drake, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Strahan).

Trouble Bird, a late-night creative cocktail bar with elevated late-night carbs, has opened where Maxwell Park used to be in Navy Yard. Brought to you by Brent Kroll and his partners in creative cocktails (Columbia Room, Silver Lyan): Andrew Hurn and Justin Cara-Donna.

Bethany Beach-based Coastline Oyster Co. opens at 319 Pennsylvania Ave SE where Zoca (and before that, Stanton & Greene) used to be. Chef/owner Danio Somoza offers live music on Wednesdays and weekend bands at his modern Mexican restaurant and tequila bar.

Jesiree’s Chop House & Lounge is slated to open in Adams Morgan by the end of Q1 2023 at 2434 18th St NW, where Copacabana used to be.

Linda Roth is Founder & CEO of Linda Roth Associates (LRA), a D.C.-based public relations and marketing firm that specializes in the foodservice and hospitality industries. Follow her at: @LindaRothPR, #LindaRothPR, or www.lindarothpr.com.

Co-produced with Round House Theatre

‘Philip Guston Now’ at the National Gallery of Art

BY ARI POST

Philip Guston Now is one of those rare and remarkable exhibitions that manages to be all things at once. It’s a focused retrospective, a beautifully told story of a singular artist -- a window into our own history and a mirror onto our present moment. And it avoids ponderous didactics and cheap comparisons. A survey of Western art history in microcosm -from the Renaissance through postmodernism (and newspaper comics), it’s a love letter to the presence of art, to paint, to museums, and to preposterously huge canvases on even huger walls. Surprising, revealing, funny, sad, mesmerizing and relatable -- It’s awesome.

Maybe I should confess my bias. Philip Guston is one of my favorite painters, and I’ve been anticipating this exhibition for about a decade, and throughout the yearslong delays due to the pandemic and Black Lives Matter Revolution with its attendant challenges to exhibitions reserved exclusively for dead White men. Thankfully, however, the exhibition has arrived — in no small part because Guston’s own biography subsumes perfectly into the combustible sociopolitical ether our country now occupies.

Born in 1913 in Montreal to Jewish parents who had fled persecution in Ukraine, Guston was a self-taught artist and intellectual with a high school diploma. When his family moved to Los Angeles in 1922, he was surrounded by racism and antisemitism. Los Angeles was politically dominated by the Ku Klux Klan in the twenties and thirties — John Clinton Porter, the city’s Mayor from 1929-1933, was even a local Klan leader (seriously).

In 1935 — like many American Jews with ambition and aspiration (including my own grandfather) — he changed his name.

“Goldstein” became Guston.

Guston was politically radical, making socially conscious murals and antiwar paintings in a kaleidoscopic style that fused influences from Hellenism and the Venetian Renaissance to Cubism and great modern muralists like Thomas Hart Benton and Diego Rivera.

Interestingly, despite being intrinsic to Abstract Expressionism in retrospect, Guston wasn’t actually there during its genesis in 1940s New York City. While his high school classmate Jackson Pollock and all the other AbEx legends were inventing abstraction in Greenwich Village, Guston was teaching art in Iowa to support his family and making politically charged representational paintings. Only when he moved to New York in the late forties did he discover abstraction. But when he found it, he leaned in. His abstractions became a relief, a place where he was able to keep out the violence of the world.

Guston’s abstractions are pretty marvelous, happy, almost childlike — big, square canvases that bulge with color in the center and dissipate toward the edges. During this time, he found his color palette — pastel pinks, reds and blues, punctuated by acid green and soda-pop orange — which he held onto for the rest of his life.

But eventually the outside world crept back in.

From the 1950s until the mid-sixties his palette gradually darkened and he was increasingly plagued by the urgency to deal in his work with the stuff of the world: wars, assassinations, protests, human rights, history. He clearly felt guilty bearing witness to the torment of the world and then going back to his studio to play with colors.

During this period, Guston visibly oscillates between abstraction and representation. His work looks physically conflicted. Black lines struggling for clarity and form, scratched across sheets of paper like messages from a purgatoried ghost.

Ultimately, figuration won out, but the thing that was birthed was bizarre, crude, challenging and almost universally condemned by critics. And it’s not hard to see why.

His paintings became a kind of phantasmagorical comic strip series, featuring two central characters: a hooded Klansman and a disembodied, bloodshot eyeball with a five o’clock shadow. They smoke cigarettes, paint stupid paintings, suffer from insomnia and generally loaf about in a kind of Looney Tunes ghetto. Sometimes God makes an appearance, a giant hand descending from of the sky, just to screw around.

These paintings, among other weird things, are nihilistic allusions to the staggering atrocities of the 20th century. Guston also seems to reject the slick cool of postmodernism in exchange for a proletariat visual language, siphoning influence from comic artists like George Herriman and Robert Crumb more than anything else. (There is also an entire separate exhibition in an adjacent set of galleries devoted, essentially, to Guston’s obsessive hatred of Richard Nixon.)

Together these paintings create a uniquely American fever dream. They are not pleasant. You would not want them hanging in your home. But they also might be the most relevant, engaged, empathetic, important and human paintings of their time.

Philip Guston Now is at the National Gallery of Art through Aug. 27, 2023.