Many museums are now free like The Hammer Museum. Is there a better private museum than (has always been free) The Getty?
Yes, there are a lot of cultural options in Washington.
Of course the three most popular ones for tourists—the Air and Space Museum, the Natural History Museum, and the American History Museum—are hardly museums at all but rather largely tasteless collections of pop-culture dreck. In particular, the American History Museum is a joke.
There are things to look at in the many smaller art museums, but compared to New York, London, Paris, or Florence, it’s collectively very second-rate. It’s a blessing that so many are free, because they would not be worth a cent.
Of course, at least one of the museums that isn’t free—the Newseum—costs something like $25 and is also a complete joke. And I say that as a journalist.
Now, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t things to do if you live here. People who live here don’t go to those four particular museums all that often, unless they’re entertaining out-of-town guests, of course.
A chain from Irvine has a opened a few locations in the area.
Holy moly! There was just one down homey type location in Old Town Alexandria when we lived there in the 1980s.
Is the food still good in the umpteen locations they have now?
There are several restaurant chains that began in the D.C. area. The most famous is probably Five Guys, which started in Arlington, Virginia. Another chain you might want to check out is Nando’s, which has locations all over the world, except in the U.S. In the U.S. the only ones currently are in the Washington/Baltimore metropolitan area. There are 18 of them here and more are being built in this area. Later this year it will be expanding into the Chicago area.
Five Guys is in Southern California; a much more expensive competitor of In N Out although they have some awesome spicy fries.
Baja Fresh fills the fast-food taqueria niche adequately.
Inexplicably, California Tortilla is the dominant chain taqueria, much outnumbering Baja Fresh. It manages to miss the mark entirely, and there is literally nothing good about it. Every day, it baffles me.
Why is there no California Tortilla in California??
Baja Fresh has gone way downhill. It’s inedible now.
I can actually see the fireworks downtown from my bedroom window. Unfortunately, my dog has PTSD from her time in Kabul and every 4th of July, we have to take her to my brothers place in the country. I haven’t been in DC for the fireworks in years.
Your best best for tacos are the taqueria trucks in gas station parking lots, like the one in Takoma Park.
There’s plenty of good, genuine Mexican food to be had; you just need to find where the Mexican people go.
There’s a tiny place near me called La Fondita (write-up in the Washington Post). It’s in a really random location in the middle of a neighborhood; you would never find it just driving around. It looks like someone converted their house into a restaurant, because that’s exactly what happened. Really good, authentic Mexican food. They’re associated with a couple of other restaurants nearby on Edmonston Road in Bladensburg, which are also packed all the time. You will have a difficult time getting a table at any of these places, and you will need to speak Spanish or bring someone who does, but it’s worth it.
Agreed, there was a time in the not too distant past where it was clearly the best Mexican food in DC. Now their fish tacos, once pretty good, just suck.
Mexican food has improved in and around DC, but you have to look for it. Casa Oaxaca in Adams Morgan is one example of a place that isn’t shitty enchiladas smothered in a velveeta-looking gel along with refried beans that are more limp than Hugh Hefner without Viagra.
As for the flagship three-story restaurant of Mexican food in DC, read it and weep.
And this is the real reason why Californians mourn Mexican food. In California, Mexican food is not something you’d go out of your way to go to. The idea would be like driving out a few towns because you crave a latte. Sure, you could do it, but it seems like a strange way to get coffee. You are used to it being on every street corner, woven in to the fabric of daily life.
Mexican food in California is just…food. Fast food, family restaurants, home cooking, upscale restaurants, diners…a good chunk of all of them are Mexican. It’s tied up inextricably with our sense of comfort and familiarity. To have that suddenly become “ethnic” food is strange, and I still haven’t lost the sense that something is missing.
True you have to make more of an effort to get good Mexican food in DC; it’s like potable water in California.
Exactly this. It is not possible to understand the importance of Mexican food to daily life in California because it is so ubiquitous that no one ever even talks about it being a thing. There is a really good Mexican place about 90 minutes north of Philly too. I can get three tacos and a horchata with rice and beans (that you pay extra for) for 15 bucks. They are really good that doesn’t mean it’s the same. I think Californians on the east coast mourn Mexican food the same way Brits mourn tea. Even when it’s good it isn’t right because you should not have to hunt down a good taco, they should just be there. Asimovian is getting warned about the lack because as a native Californian he doesn’t even understand how weird it is going to be. He can’t.
I miss stuff like El Pollo Loco, and they weren’t even very good. But I would kill for a drive through burrito. I love Dominican food, and Peruvian food, but just because they are Latin American cultures doesn’t mean they are equivalent.
Yes, but you probably don’t realize how bad it was before you got here. Burrito Brothers used to have lines out the door because it was way better than anything else you could get here. But objectively, Burrito Brothers makes Chipotle look like Oyamel.
So come live over here in Prince George’s County so that La Fondita and various other Mexican restaurants in the Little Mexico in Riverdale Park are nearby.
Being a Midwesterner, I don’t know what “authentic” Mexican food is. I grew up on Taco Bell, Chi-Chi’s, and Casa Lupita (and Pepito’s, but I think that was purely local).
We have tons of taco joints and burrito joints in the D.C. area. i’d call most of them Salvadorean-Mexican, but honestly I don’t know what the difference is between a Salvadorean taco and a Mexican taco. All I know is that they taste damn good to me, whichever one they are.
If you ask around, people from the Southwest will give you recommendations. Like I have been told that El Gran Palenque in Bailey’s Crossroads is authentically Mexican, but honestly it doesn’t seem all that different to me from any other decent taco/burrito place around here.
You know, it’s true about the ubiquity of Mexican food here. I live a block away from two very good small Mexican restaurant chains (El Cholo and El Compadre) and a really good taco truck. I also have numerous mediocre-to-good options within a mile. That doesn’t even count the Mexican and pseudo-Mexican fast food chains around (Baja Fresh, Chipotle, La Salsa, Del Taco, the Green Burrito portion of Carl’s Jr., even Taco Bell).
That being said, I eat enough different cuisines that I’m not too worried about it. Something else will likely replace the Mexican void in my east coast life. I’m a fan of a lot of other cuisines, so we’ll just wing it.
That’s the spirit! The key to adjusting to a new culture is to embrace what it has to offer, not mourn what you’re leaving behind. Tell yourself, “it’s not better or worse, just different.”
Also, as a native of the area, we don’t really care about how you did it where you came from :). DC is full of tansients and all we care about is that they stand to the right on the Metro escalator and go when the light turns green.