4 minute read
Home Plate
by David Hagedorn
What’s Nue?
My eyes nearly pop out of my head when I see the seafood tower ($127) at Nue, an elegant Vietnamese restaurant that opened in Founders Row in April. Artfully arranged on banana leaves, it’s teeming with whole Maine lobster, green-lipped mussels, Spanish octopus with Fresno chile emulsion, colossal shrimp with yuzu nuoc mam (fish sauce) and oysters with buttermilk vinaigrette.
The Falls Church restaurant, which seats 77 inside and 24 outside, is owned by Happy Endings Hospitality and shares its kitchen with two of the company’s other brands—Chasin’ Tails seafood and Roll Play, a fast-casual spot serving Viet street food.
Nue is the brainchild of Happy Endings partner and chief marketing officer Tuyêt Nhi Lê, who named the restaurant after a 1931 portrait of a nude (nue, in French) by her greatgreat-uncle, Vietnamese artist Lê Pho. (The painting sold for $1.4 million in 2019 at Christie’s in Hong Kong.)
D.C.-based architecture firm HapstakDemitriou+ designed the restaurant space, although Lê had a hand in it. Vivid and ethereal, it includes an Impressionist-style mural in hues of magenta, lilac, pink and teal that curves into a cascading display of three-dimensional flowers. “I love Indochine and modern Frenchish style,” says Lê, who lives in Founders Row.
Chef Daniel Lê (no relation) oversees Nue’s kitchen, but Tuyêt Nhi’s mother, Tuyêt Hoa Vuong, is responsible for many of the recipes. Don’t miss the seafood cha gio, crispy rice paper-wrapped spring rolls stuffed with crab, shrimp, pork and taro ($15); silken chicken liver mousse with Thai chilies and peanuts ($14); pappardelle with Vietnamese short rib ragu ($36); and coconut curry risotto with Hokkaido scallops ($42).
Cocktails ($16 to $18), such as the Cloudy Dreams (Empress gin, yellow Chartreuse, hibiscus and lemon) and the Tropical Kickoff (tequila, Cointreau, Aperol, coconut milk, lime juice), are excellent. The wine list features 14 bottles ($54 to $140), 11 of them available by the glass ($12 to $28). nuevietnamese.com
Oh, Shucks!
Corny? You bet I am, which is why I go crazy for The Shuck Shack, a Pentagon City mall food court kiosk that specializes in roasted corn on the cob coated with various slatherings (such as butter, chili-lime mayo, salsa or crema) and sprinkled with your choice of over two dozen seasonings, among them lemon-pepper, Creole spices or cinnamon sugar. My favorite offering is the World-Famous Mexican Street Corn ($7), a version of elote made with lime crema, chililime seasoning and Parmesan cheese. The corn is roasted to perfection and the combination of sweetness, saltiness, crunch, richness and tang adds up to a super-satisfying summertime (or anytime) snack. theshuckshack.com
Bean Boost
It’s early in the morning and the enticing aromas of lavender, cinnamon and vanilla dance in the air, thanks to the spoonful of Spice n’ Nice flavoring I added to my espresso beans before grinding them.
Entrepreneurs Mariya Cherk and Risa Lin met and became friends while working for the same tech company. In August 2022, they launched their line of herb and spice mixes, with options including cinnamon apple, cardamom rose, lavender vanilla and vanilla chai. Each 50-gram container ($19.99) flavors 50 cups of coffee. Lin serves as COO while Cherk’s title is CFO—chief flavor officer.
Like so many new businesses, their idea grew out of the pandemic. When Covid precautions meant that Cherk couldn’t hang out in her favorite coffee shops, she decided to become her own barista, ordering various syrups and flavorings online and making concoctions in her Falls Church home. “My health started declining,” she says. “My hair was falling out and I was gaining weight. I realized these creamers and syrups had lots of sugar, preservatives, gums and other additives in them. It was appalling.”
So Cherk, who comes from a family of medical professionals in Ukraine, decided to create her own flavorings, heeding advice from her grandmother, who asked, “Why not use cardamom and rose like we do? You grew up on that!”
Spice n’ Nice flavorings are free of preservatives, but do contain birch xylitol, a natural sugar alcohol. The mixes can be used with a drip coffee maker, French press, pourover dripper, Keurig, Nespresso or espresso machine. They can be added to other hot beverages, too.
Find them online, and at Junction Bakery & Bistro in Del Ray and Union Kitchen in Ballston. spice-n-nice.com
