Eating and doing in Washington, DC
Last week's museum visits, and how I fuelled them.
I’m on a three-week trip to Washington, DC; North Carolina, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. If you’re heading to DC soon, you might enjoy the exhibitions and eateries below. If you have no plans to go to DC, the exhibit websites are generous, compelling, and informative in their own right (links at the end of this essay).
The African American History and Culture Museum
Begin your visit in the History Galleries, a three-floor narrative, unfolding over a mile of galleries, of the story of African-descended people in what became known as the United States.
Note the magnificent photographic collage that unfolds before the giant elevator to the first gallery. This is not just a waiting area.
The museum integrates artefacts, visual sources, photographs, audio, video, and immersive spaces. Claustrophobic side-chambers in the Slavery and Freedom section remind visitors of how millions of Africans were transported to the Americas.
A segregated train carriage offers a chilling reminder of the daily, state-sanctioned indignities (and worse) of Jim Crow segregation.
The above-ground three floors - the Community and Culture Galleries - document art, music, literature, sport, activism, public life, and cuisine, and host changing exhibitions.
Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures opens this month. How I wish I had managed to be there for it! - but there are neat videos and exhibition resources on the website.
Thrilling art fills the top floor. American fibre artist Bisa Butler based her quilted portrait (above) of Harriet Tubman, abolitionist and underground railroad conductor, on a newly discovered photograph. The work is made from African-based fabric.
To see and read everything would take eight hours of concentration (but I take twice as long in museums as most people). The museum rewards multiple visits. Timed-entry tickets become available 30 days in advance. Hundreds of additional tickets are released each day around 8:15am. It’s much quieter earlier in the week than later.
The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
I Dream a World: Selections from Brian Lanker’s Portraits of Remarkable Black Women (Part II).
Photography exhibitions are perhaps my favourite thing to see in museums. As a medium that began in the mid-nineteenth century, it is centuries later than my academic training. That makes it easier to engage the creative brain rather than the analytic brain, and to let the photographs transport me wherever they want, revealing the rich tapestry of lives they document, however partially and fleetingly.
Photography exhibitions make me think (sometimes uncomfortably) about the lives, hopes, and dreams of their subjects, and of the challenges they faced.
Brian Lanker’s wonderful photographs bear witness to eventful, creative lives: those of determined Black women who changed the era in which they lived and, consequently, ours. His portrait of Angela Davis (above) is one example.
Within a year of her 1969 appointment as an assistant professor, Davis was fired from UCLA for her membership of the US Communist Party. In 1970, seeking justice for three Black Panther members indicted for the alleged murder of a prison guard, a related courthouse shootout saw her arrested and tried for murder, but later acquitted on all charges.
Davis became a professor at UC Santa Cruz (now emerita). She writes on race, class, and gender, and works to dismantle what she termed the “prison industrial complex”.
The National Gallery of Art (West Building)
This is Britain: Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s.
This exhibition takes you inside the struggling Britain of a few decades past: unrest, recession, and Margaret Thatcher.
An unexpected bonus was the hour-long documentary film Handsworth Songs. Directed by the artist John Akomfrah, and produced by the Black Audio Film Collective (a group of Black artists artists who drew attention to the experiences in Britain of people from African and Asian diasporas), the film documents civil disturbances and police violence in Tottenham and Brixton (both in London) and Handsworth (Birmingham). It cuts together interviews, street footage, and photographs to a soundtrack of reggae and post-punk.
Takes and recs: what to eat in DC
Four full days in DC were never going to be sufficient to re-visit the many places I’d loved when I lived in the city. The culinary highlight this trip was Zaytinya, one of chef José Andrés’s immensely successful eateries in museum-filled Penn Quarter.
You may think that eastern Mediterranean dishes hold no more surprises. Perhaps this is your default at-home dining - why go out to eat the stuff, you may wonder. But the alchemy of Zaytinya’s dishes is its own thing, injecting something celebratory into anything (including the next-day return with different diners for takeout).
Herbs, spice, aromatics, and olive oils lay the foundation of flavour. Smooth and cooling dips with yoghurt, soft cheeses or tahini and a botanical garden of fruit and vegetable superfoods make for a symphony in every mouthful.
Need a pick-me-up late afternoon? Head to Dolcezza on Palmer Alley (between 9th, 10th, H, and I streets NW) for mind-blowingly good (and terrifyingly priced) ice cream. It will boost your concentration for hours, enabling a visit to the nearby Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery. Dolcezza lists suppliers on a board, sell coffee and cookies, and has a light-filled interior with whirly stools and free water.
The store is twenty paces from CityCentreDC - a micro-neighbourhood laughingly called a mall. It is in fact a quiet courtyard with seats and tables. You can sit amidst ritzy mid-rise apartment buildings and ritzier stores, semi-discreetly patrolled by security, a reminder of the deep inequalities in this city.
My small (in name only) cup held Szechuan pepper-infused pistachio and dark chocolate. Neither tasted sweet, but rather slightly salty, inky, and RICH. This is the thickest ice cream ever. It felt like a protein hit, gently powering me for hours.
You could share this between two in lieu of a meal, balanced out with a handful of kale and carrot sticks (well, I could).
Other locations include Dupont Circle (near the Phillips Collection) and an ice cream trailer with a few flavours outside the Hirschhorn Museum (Thurs-Sun).
I could write a book on DC food and entertainment…. For now, here are a few places I’ve enjoyed over the years. For jazz and dining, check out Blues Alley in Georgetown; for iconic bookstores with dining, visit Kramers or Busboys and Poets.
For superfood lunches, check out Sweetgreen (founded by local Georgetown graduates), Seoul Spice, and the Boston import Tatte. Ambar offers Baltic banquets of small plates.
José Andrés’s contemporary twists on terrific cuisines include China Chilcano (Peruvian), Jaleo (Spanish), Oyamel (Mexican), and Zaytinya (eastern Mediterranean).
This summer you may need ice cream: start eating more lentils and greens now to balance out those visits to Dolcezza.
Museum links
The National Museum of African American History and Culture’s upcoming Afrofuturism show.
The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, I Dream a World: Selections from Brian Lanker’s Portraits of Remarkable Black Women (Part II).
The National Gallery, This is Britain: Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s.
You can also find me on www.surekhadavies.org,
BlueSky (@drsurekhadavies.bsky.social),
and Instagram/Threads (@surekhadavies).