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Author: Madisson Weyrich
Arlington’s first halal barbecue restaurant is up and running in Ballston.
Hal & Al’s BBQ in Quarter Market, the food hall in Ballston Quarter, opened in December. It is best known at this point for its beef brisket, though it also serves beef ribs and turkey sausage and sides such as chili and mac and cheese.
All of the meats follow Islamic food preparation laws — meaning customers will not find pork on the menu.
Owner Mohsin Rehman was born and raised in Baltimore and his parents immigrated to the U.S. from Pakistan. Rehman incorporates his upbringing in his dishes by merging Baltimore and Pakistani flavors to create Hal & Al’s popular brisket.
“Deep down, I have my love for Old Bay,” Rehman said. “So we use kind of a hybrid of Pakistani spices and Maryland crab seasoning mixed together to create our brisket. It creates this kind of ‘Bay-B-Q’ vibe, a Chesapeake Bay barbecue vibe.”
Rehman believes it’s important to highlight flavors from different regions as part of the varied Northern Virginia food scene.
“We live in a world — such a diverse world with such a diverse palette — and just black pepper and salt really keeps you from showcasing what you could do with brisket,” Rehman said. “You’re not going to go to a fancy restaurant where they’re like, ‘We only use black pepper.’ They’re going to use a multitude of spices from all over the world. I try staying to my roots.”
Rehman started his venture into the culinary world in college where he was lovingly titled the “Italian grandmother” by his friends due to his love of cooking.
“I get a lot of joy from feeding people,” he said. “I’ve always really gotten a lot of pleasure from seeing people nourished and happy from what I put my time into. The nice thing about barbecue is it’s a very family-oriented community, it sparks a lot of memories for folks.”
In 2010, Rehman started a food blog and, he says, was the only halal food blogger who traveled nationwide as part of his writing. He was inspired to open Hal & Al’s BBQ in Quarter Market (4328 Wilson Blvd) after noticing a lack of halal barbecue spots on the East Coast.
“I found halal Italian places, halal Chinese spots, but not once did I find a halal barbecue place,” he said. “When I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, what theme I wanted to go with for the restaurant, there’s nothing more quintessential to being American than barbecue. But there’s also nothing more quintessential to being human than barbecue.”
Rehman’s big goal? To put his “Bay-B-Q” spin on the map.
“You have Texas barbecue, you have Kansas City barbecue, there’s Memphis barbecue, you go to Carolina and they have that vinegar barbecue, and you go down to Alabama and they have the Alabama white sauce barbecue,” he said.
“I’m hoping 20 years from now we’re going to have Bay-B-Q, which is going to be barbecue using Chesapeake Bay seasonings or Old Bay,” Rehman continued. “And it’ll be barbecue all based here in the DMV, up and down the mid-Atlantic.”
Former Clarendon mainstay Mister Days appears to be opening in a new location, nearly five years after its closure.
An LLC associated with Mister Days, Celtic LB Group INC, recently applied for a liquor license for the currently vacant restaurant space at 1101 N. Highland Street.
Tiffany Lee, daughter of Mister Days founder Bobby Lee, said in an email to ARLnow that her father “is once again at the helm.” She noted that she is “not involved in the new one.”
The previous occupants of 1101 N. Highland Street include Clarendon Grill, which shuttered in 2018 after 22 years, and The Pinemoor, which closed its doors in July after three years. The Pinemoor was the last occupant of the large restaurant space, which features both an inside bar and an outside patio bar.
In late November, readers noted an old Mister Days sign in the space.
Mister Days first opened in an alleyway off Dupont Circle on Nov. 21, 1977 serving prime rib, ham sandwiches, a soup and a salad. In the years that followed, Mister Days moved to 18th Street NW between L and M Streets NW before opening in Arlington in 2000.
Mister Days grew a strong following and remained a local staple for over 40 years. The Arlington sports bar closed permanently in April 2019.
The original bar served famous guests like movie star and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, as well as former Washington football greats like Sonny Jurgensen and John Riggins. It also had live entertainment from singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter early in her career.
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Chip City Cookies has opened its doors in Clarendon.
According to the general manager, the grand opening Friday was successful with folks waiting in the snow to take a peek at the new sweets shop.
“We had a line out the door on Friday while it was snowing,” she said. “It was crazy.”
The Clarendon location at 2700 Clarendon Blvd is the cookie business’s first foray into Virginia, though Chip City is in the midst of a big expansion effort overall in the D.C. area and across the country.
Known for its large, gooey 5.5-ounce cookies, Chip City has a rotating weekly menu of 40 different flavors, including the classics, chocolate chip and triple chocolate, and more inventive flavors, from cannoli to horchata.
There are two dairy-free options: chocolate chip and a rotating flavor.
There’s no shortage of cookies in Arlington. Captain Cookie and the Milkman opened a location in Courthouse earlier this year while Crumbl Cookies is planning to open this spring at the Lee-Harrison Shopping Center. There’s also delivery-only local cookie purveyor MOLTN.
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Astro Beer Hall’s second location in Shirlington is thriving four months after its opening.
Peter Bayne and Elliot Spaisman, two of the beer hall’s owners, said they receive more patronage in Shirlington than in their downtown D.C. location at this point.
“We opened up and it was like pure madness,” Bayne said. “We had so many people coming through the door. We were just trying to keep our heads on, essentially. It was overwhelming, the amount of support and love we felt from the community. People were even more excited than we were to get open.”
The beer hall’s second location opened Sept. 19 and has seen consistent business. Bayne credits much of the Shirlington location’s success to the mix of ages and professions in the area.
“They all interact and they all are like regulars together,” Bayne said. “It’s nice to see these cross-generational friendships that happen in the neighborhood of Shirlington… I was just really happy because we clearly picked great real estate to be at and something that we know is going to be there for a long time, and just a wonderful community to be a part of.”
Spaisman and former Washington Capital Jeff Halpern were childhood friends. They opened the first Astro Doughnuts — which later became Astro Doughnuts & Fried Chicken — in 2013, inspired by the doughnut shop they visited after hockey practice when they were kids in Bethesda.
The pair quickly expanded the business by offering fried chicken, chicken sandwiches with airy doughnut buns.
Spaisman and Halpern later partnered with a hospitality development group, Tin Shop, and conceived the idea for a donut-shop-turned-beer-hall.
The 14,000-square-foot two-story beer hall features a game room, a 140-seat patio and a full-service coffee shop. The restaurant offers brunch, lunch, dinner, a variety of beer and cocktails, and of course coffee and doughnuts.
According to Spaisman, the most popular menu items across the board are the chicken fingers and the asteroid fried chicken sandwich. The most popular drink: the ‘Woke Up Sexy Again’ hazy IPA.
Following the Shirlington location’s successful launch, there are now plans in the works to revamp the basement area with pool tables, music and visiting DJs, giving the space more of a bar feel.
“We’ve been really happy with the level of business we’ve had and we’ve had a problem where we don’t have enough seats for everybody,” Bayne said. “It would be great for the basement to really have a nightlife activity, a spot that feels that it’s going to be a bar as opposed to a restaurant.”
Bayne and Spaisman are excited to add a level of nightlife to the beer hall and are hopeful this addition will open by the spring.
“It’s a busy operation and we’re having fun with it,” Bayne said. “Overall it’s been a great success.”
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A new butcher shop is set to open in Falls Church within the next few weeks, giving Arlingtonians more options for high-end, locally sourced meats.
Brick House Butcher, owned and operated by brothers Afsheen and Arash Tafakor, will be located just off of W. Broad Street, next to Dominion Wine & Beer, which they also own. They aim to open the shop by the end of January.
The shop at 109 Rowell Court will offer an array of beef, poultry, pork and seafood products and a variety of homemade items — like crabcakes and meatballs — that are ready to cook or eat. It will additionally feature different types of compound butter made and sold in-house and will serve OddFellows Ice Cream.
The two butchers working at Brick House, Mike and Emma Ferguson, have a combined 23 years in the hospitality industry, including fine dining and livestock management, according to the shop’s Instagram account.
Afsheen says Brick House Butcher has a “farm-to-butcher-to-table” concept and will source meat from Virginia farms. The butcher will also find ways to use the whole animal, rather than focus on specific cuts.
“We’re a whole-animal butcher shop, so we’ll break down a whole animal,” Afsheen said. “We don’t just get, like, loins of ribeye. We have a lot of the parts of the animal that we gotta use.”
The brothers decided to open Brick House Butcher after noticing a lack of “old-school American butchers” in Falls Church, Afsheen said. The closest option is The Organic Butcher in McLean, a perpetually busy shop that serves many Arlington clients.
Afsheen and Arash grew up working at Georgetown Square Wine and Beer, owned by their father. In addition to Dominion Wine and Beer, they own Downtown Crown Wine and Beer in Gaithersburg and have plans to open a restaurant called Stratford Gardens elsewhere in Falls Church.
The butcher will eventually provide meat to Dominion Wine and Beer’s in-house, second-floor restaurant, as well as to Stratford Gardens, according to the brothers.
A new restaurant is set to fill a decade-long vacancy in Crystal City.
Lantern Restaurant & Bar, owned by Shen Zhao and Bing Liu, is moving into a storefront at the base of an apartment building at 320 23rd Street S., last occupied by Matsutake Hibachi Steak and Sushi until its closure in 2014.
The property, next to a Virginia ABC store and across from a Hilton hotel, appears to have sat vacant since.
Window dressings on the property say Lantern Restaurant & Bar is “coming soon.” Neither the owners nor the leasing agents for the space responded to requests for comment before deadline.
The new bar-restaurant is moving into the base of an apartment building plagued by stubborn business vacancies. Around the corner, storefronts have been vacant since the departure of Bar Louie and Legal Sea Foods.
The main attraction on this block, which also formerly was home to a Chili’s, is now the bowling alley Bowlero — which, for a while, drew a rowdy crowd that rankled apartment residents living atop it.
Crystal City has seen several restaurant closures in the wake of Covid. Most recently, The Freshman closed earlier this month and San Antonio Bar & Grill shuttered its location in the underground Crystal City Shops in December.
Not far away, however, the neighborhood received an infusion of new dining options last October when developer JBG Smith opened a 1.6-acre outdoor food hall and park in the Crystal City Water Park. There, visitors can get everything from duck-fat fried chicken sandwiches to Indian-style crêpes filled with lentils and chutney to gelato.
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Screwtop Wine Bar in Clarendon is under new ownership.
The wine bar, owned and operated by Wendy Buckley since 2009, was recently purchased by Linda Urbanski and Ryan Gesinski. The sale was finalized Jan. 2.
Located at 1025 N. Fillmore Street, Screwtop offers a full wine bar, brunch, lunch, dinner and a retail wine shop with hundreds of wines. It also carries a variety of artisan cheeses, meats and gourmet goodies.
Buckley, the original owner and operator, opened the wine bar after noticing few Clarendon spots geared toward wine lovers and women.
“I wanted to create a casual place where you could enjoy a really great glass of wine without having to go to a fancy restaurant downtown, and thus the idea for Screwtop was born,” Buckley said in a newsletter to customers. “With Screwtop, I wanted to take the intimidation out of wine and turn the enjoyment of wine into a lighthearted and approachable experience.”
That approach is in the bar’s name, which plays with the stereotype that finer wines only come corked while lower-tier options have screw caps.
“My goal was to create a place where no matter your knowledge of wine you felt at home here,” Buckley said. “And that our team treated everyone that came through our doors like a regular. A regular ‘Cheers’ of the wine bar scene.”
Urbanski, one of the new co-owners, said she doesn’t plan on making significant changes, only to “make enhancements of what is already currently in place.”
“I love that Screwtop strives to be an affordable wine bar, has an absolutely delicious menu, and hosts numerous wine tasting events,” Urbanski said in a separate emailed newsletter. “I am truly thrilled to have the opportunity to have Screwtop continue on as a go-to wine bar for the Arlington community.”
Urbanski grew up in Vienna and has lived in Clarendon with her husband for over a decade, per the email. She has a background in managing large business operations.
“We will continue to be committed to delivering an exceptional experience to every visitor, by providing unique wines and continuing the tradition of creating a warm and inviting atmosphere,” Urbanski said. “I’ve already had the pleasure of meeting so many lovely customers over the past couple of months, but I am genuinely looking forward to meeting even more of the wonderful people that Wendy has been telling me about that contribute to the vibrant Screwtop community.”