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Do Try These at Home

Nick Farrell, the spirits director for Neighborhood Restaurant Group (Rustico, Evening Star Café, Buzz Bakery), has conjured up a series of takehome cocktail kits for NRG Provisions, an online retail business created to serve customers during the pandemic. For the end of winter and into the spring, he’s devised two $38 mixology packs, each with supplies to make five cocktails. The Cran-Aperol Spritz Kit includes cranberry and rosemaryinfused Aperol, plus prosecco, Q club soda and garnishes of rosemary and dehydrated orange wheels. The Après-Ski Spritz Kit includes Amaro Pasubio (alpine blueberry amaro), Yzaguirre white vermouth, prosecco, Q club soda and dehydrated lemon wheels and blueberries for garnish. Orders must be placed a day ahead. nrgprovisions.com

The four-drink Mule Kit ($35) from William Jeffrey’s Tavern on Columbia Pike includes the spirit of your choice (say, for a Kentucky Mule, an Irish Mule, a Mexican Mule or a Dark and Stormy), plus house-made ginger syrup, club soda, lime garnish and even a copper Mule mug—while mug supplies last. williamjeffreystavern.com

At Falls Church Distillers, $40 gets you any of the seven craft cocktails on the menu as a 32-ounce kit in a mason jar (enough for four ample cocktails). My favorite is the Pepper Mary Kit, a riff on the bloody mary starring the distillery’s Frozen Falls Pepper Vodka—infused with pepperoncini and serrano peppers— plus a mixer containing horseradish, celery salt, black pepper, hot sauce and Worcestershire. The ensemble comes with four biodegradable/ compostable cups, a spice mix for the rims (chili powder, Old Bay and Tajin, a Mexican seasoning) and a bonanza of garnishes, including whole pepperoncini, cubes of cheese (such as havarti jalapeno), beef jerky, lime wedges and leafy celery stalks. Bacon bits can be added to the mixer upon request. fcdistillers.com

—David Hagedorn

Beet pierogies with ginger and lemon zest at Zofia’s Kitchen

Pierogies, Please

“I have a runaway hit on my hands!” chef Ed Hardy exclaimed soon after the December opening of Zofia’s Kitchen, a fast-casual restaurant specializing in both traditional and experimental variations on the Polish dumplings known as pierogies.

On a busy day, the Ballston Quarter eatery (housed in the former Cucina al Volo space) turns out 3,000 of them, and Hardy has had to staff up. “Pierogies are a humble, warming comfort food and underrepresented in the D.C. area,” he says. “We were in the right place at the right time.”

Hardy is from Richmond. He fesses up to having known little about pierogies until Arlington-based tech entrepreneur Nate Reynolds, a Chicago native, asked him to make them for a barbecue he was hosting. At that point, Hardy had recently been laid off from his instructor job at Cookology in Ballston and welcomed the challenge. The pierogies were a hit, and a restaurant concept—a 50-50 partnership between Hardy and Reynolds—was born.

Zofia’s began operating as a ghost kitchen out of the Cookology space in September, then moved to its permanent brick-and mortar location shortly before its official opening on Dec. 11. Dumplings come eight to an order ($11.99 - $13.99) and are stuffed with a variety of fillings, with options such as loaded baked potato (mashed potatoes, chives, cheddar, bacon); sauerkraut and bratwurst; braised beef brisket; house-cured pastrami with provolone; mushroom and herb; “everything bagel” with scallion cream cheese and lox; whitefish and apple; and Maryland crab Rangoon. Accompanying sauces include horseradish sour cream; lemon-anddill sour cream; mustard cream; and bacon-onion butter.

Hardy’s menu also includes a few sandwiches, soups, salads and side dishes—get the doughnut-shaped potato latke!—but pierogies are the main attraction.

The chef says he’s mindful of cultural appropriation and is treading carefully. “My cuisine is Southern, but I was exposed to Jewish diaspora cooking in New York City. I’m not Polish or Jewish, but I was a history major [at the University of Virginia]. I feel like I can be a student of it, do justice to it and introduce it to other people.” Then again, he and Reynolds weren’t beyond a bit of marketing. They picked the name “Zofia” (which they thought sounded vaguely grandmotherly) from a list of Polish monikers while sharing a bottle of potato vodka.

Zofia’s pierogies are also available uncooked and frozen in packs of eight, or in larger quantities, by request. zofiaskitchen.com

—David Hagedorn

The Brekkie (egg, cheese, tomato, pickled onions and your choice of meat) on a biscuit

Peace and Biscuits

During his second tour of duty in Iraq in 2007, Jon Coombs drove over a roadside IED and spent the next two months hospitalized, his body riddled with shrapnel, his bones bruised and his brain rattled from the explosion. He was awarded a Purple Heart and redeployed to Iraq a third time in 2010. Cooking was a passion he discovered only later in life, after 23 years of military service.

“I like to say that I put down the rifle and picked up a spatula,” says the combat infantry veteran, now executive chef and general manager of Preservation Biscuit Co., a Southern-influenced breakfast and lunch café that’s aiming to open in Falls Church City in late February.

After his last tour in Iraq, Coombs landed at Fort Myer in Arlington, where he trained soldiers for state funerals and memorial observances at Arlington National Cemetery. During that time he enrolled at the Art Institute of Washington (then based in Rosslyn), taking night classes to earn a two-year associate degree in culinary arts.

“I wanted to cook,” says the Detroit native, who developed an affinity for Southern cuisine during his five years at Georgia’s Fort Benning. He retired from the Army in 2013 and spent a few months “cooking for free” at various D.C. restaurants to gain experience.

By the time the pandemic arrived, Coombs was executive chef and general manager of Matchbox in Woodbridge. The restaurant closed in March and he was furloughed, as was his coworker, Tricia Barba, then marketing director for the corporate brand. (In August, Matchbox Food Group filed for bankruptcy. The company has since reorganized under new ownership, but the Woodbridge location remains permanently closed.)

Chef Jon Coombs

Barba, facing a precarious future, decided to chart her own course, and in August signed a lease on a Falls Church City storefront (102 E. Fairfax St.) previously occupied by a life coaching business. She called Coombs and asked how he felt about biscuits.

He spent the next three months perfecting his recipe—crispy on top, fluffy inside—and building a tight menu concept around the Southern staple. Together he and Barba arrived at a tagline for their new venture: flour butter love.

The house special, The PBC, stacks fried chicken, hot honey, candied bacon, cabbage, mustard and smoked-Gouda pimento cheese inside the eatery’s signature carb. “You almost need a knife and fork,” says the chef, 48, a married father of five who lives in Alexandria.

Other sandwiches feature sausage gravy, pulled pork, prime rib, and breakfast-y fillers like eggs, bacon and ham—which is funny in that Coombs personally follows a vegan diet for health reasons. “I have had to cheat just a tad to ensure the flavors are on point,” he confesses, though he does intend to introduce a few vegan dishes as the menu expands.

There are sides, including Caesar salad, yam tater tots, mac ’n’ cheese and coleslaw. And sweet concoctions too—shortcake-type desserts that layer biscuits with smothered apples or macerated strawberries and whipped cream. The shop will serve coffee from Swing’s Coffee Roasters in Alexandria.

Purists can also order biscuits straight up with a sampler of housemade jams. The current toppers include strawberry, blueberry and pineapple, but Coombs says he hopes to branch out with other seasonal flavors.

Ingredients-wise, everything is made from scratch, and “we plan to local source as much as possible from the DMV, local farmers markets and direct relationships with outlying farms,” he adds.

Could it be that the pandemic’s economic pain will give rise to a happier homespun venture? Barba is optimistic.

“Falls Church has such a lovely small-town feel,” says the entrepreneur/proprietor, whose café is in the same strip with Bakeshop and Audacious Aleworks. “We are in a great, well-located space and the community has been so welcoming.”

Coombs, meanwhile, is in his element. “Being in the kitchen is consistent with my nature,” he says. “It’s structured. There is order. Except with cooking, no one is shooting at you or trying to blow you up. You are in your own zone.” preservationbiscuit.com

—Jenny Sullivan