Non-Required Reading: “Strip-Mall Gourmet”

Here, at long last, is the first of the occasional “Non-Required Reading” postings I had mentioned several weeks ago.

In my line of work, I have to pay attention to trends in retail real estate. I was pleasantly surprised to come upon this delightful little essay in the January/February issue of the mostly political journal The American Interest, “Adventures of a Strip-Mall Gourmet,” by Brendan Conway.

(Sorry, the link only provides the opening paragraphs of the article – you’ll have either to fork over the $8.95 for the full issue or, if you’re desperately short of funds – and who isn’t these days? – find it at one of your finer area libraries that might stock this.)

Not that Conway, a Washington Times writer providing a tongue-in-cheek tour of out-of-the-way eateries in the Beltway area, doesn’t make the obligatory dig at the environment and design of open-air shopping centers (one Indian restaurant is found in a “semi-industrial and impossibly ugly strip mall”). Moreover—fair warning!—the lavish, even downright orgasmic descriptions of Ethiopian, Asian-American, and Middle Eastern cuisine are not only liable to break the most formidable intents to lose weight this year, but even add ten pounds simply by the act of reading.

But it’s good for a change to see someone out there allowing that at least some good (astonishingly good food, employment for emerging immigrant groups) can come from even the dingiest shopping center. And, on any day of the week, it’s fun (the prime criterion for this column on this blog, anyway) to read such cheeky coinages as the “strange décor/authentic fare rule": i.e., "the stranger the wall hangings, the better the food."

And beneath the cheerful appreciation for tasty food, Conway offers an astute assessment of the forces that have hastened this evolution in ethnic-restaurant location from the inner city to the suburbs. An iron law of economics governs this new site location preference as much as the old one – cheap rents and proximity to clientele—but now, the re-gentrification of the inner city has pushed emerging minority groups to the exurbs.

So, for instance, noting that the area around Manassas Park, Va., has seen an influx of Hispanic residents in the last few years, Conway reasoned that there would be a “spectacular Mexican restaurant nearby”—and found it in Taqueria el Michoacano.

I said that you’d have to fork over money to read the whole article. But every person is obliged to perform at least one good deed before they do, so mine—at least for today—will be to list the names and towns of the restaurants named in this article, for those traveling or living in the DC area. (I suspect that at least one faithful reader is so dying to know this that he or she’ll save a thousand prayers of gratitude and supplication after I’ve departed this vale of tears to spring me out of purgatory—or worse.) So, here they are:

Meaza (Falls Church, Va.)—Ethiopian
Bob’s 88 Shabu-Shabu (Rockville, Md.)—Chinese-Japanese
Taqueria el Michoacano (Manassas Park, Va.)—Mexican
Sam Woo (Rockville, Md.)—Korean
MemSahib (Rockville, Md.)--Indian