Dogwood Tavern: Where Everyone Knows Your Name

Whoever wrote that Cheers song was a sociological genius: “Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.” And it’s true. Sometimes you want to get out of the house and go to a place where you know you will be greeted warmly. But in the D.C.- area, with high-end prices and even higher-end attitudes from serving staff and bartenders, it’s not always easy to find.

That’s why we were struck when the first time we went to Dogwood Tavern in Falls Church, the bartender asked our names. Gave us his as he leaned over the long wooden bar to shake our hands. And then remembered our names for subsequent visits! One female bartender almost got me in trouble. I went in with my husband and she smiled genuinely at me and said, “We haven’t seen you in awhile.” My husband raised an eyebrow and wondered how often was I frequenting the local tavern without him.

Once a month for lunch! I’d order tea!

Photo from Dogwood Tavern website

That’s the thing about Dogwood, aptly named a tavern with its brick walls, large fireplace and beautiful wood-beam ceiling. Regardless whether you’re there for a Saturday night free-for-all or a Tuesday salad and tea, they make you feel welcome. They make you feel at home.

“We live in the community; our customers are part of us,” said Paul Taylor, beverage director for Vintage Restaurant Group, which owns Dogwood Tavern in Falls Church, Rhodeside Grill in Clarendon and two other Arlington neighborhood bars. “We want to give good meals, good drinks and make people happy. That’s something we can really excel at where sometimes other people fail.”

I called Paul to ask him what his organization emphasized in making a great neighborhood bar. Getting to know their customers is one thing. So bartenders will always ask your name; go in, you can test it.

Click to see menu

They also work hard to provide something that will appeal to all of their potential customers. Falls Church is a land of working singles, families and higher-end wage earners; Dogwood offers bands on the weekend and sports viewing on big screen TVs for the young, large and comfy indoor and outdoor dining spaces for families, and a great selection of craft beers, cocktails made with small batch ingredients, and interesting daily meal specials to appeal to those looking for a higher-end experience.

“We’ve definitely strived to create a place where we want to go eat and drink,” Paul said. “We love that our employees will stick around after a shift and have a beverage; they’ve worked really hard to create a welcoming environment so why not stick around to enjoy it. At the end of the day, the customers become family.”

For a long time, we were just once-every-two-to-three-weeks customers. But we were made to feel like family. We’re rabid University of Kansas basketball fans, and the bartenders would always chat us up about that season’s potential. We were even bigger fans of an appetizer called Potatoskinadilla (Potato. Skin. Adilla. All the deliciousness of a potato skin – the bacon, chives, sour cream, soft bits of potato – stuck in a cheesy quesadilla and grilled to a crisp char on the outside. Yum). We bemoaned its demise when they took it off the menu, but whenever it’s a special, the bartenders bring it to our attention.

With the opening of a rooftop outdoor bar this spring, we became once-a-week regulars, grabbing a drink on a happy hour Friday or a lazy Sunday afternoon. That’s when we got to know the bartenders: Rachel, Drew, Mike, Cassandra. If anything speaks to the embrace Dogwood provides, it’s the fact the many of these bartenders have been here since its opening in 2008. Restaurants have an incredibly high turnover rate of 62 percent, but Dogwood has created a place where both staff and customers want to stay.

"There are a lot of places around that you can go to for a meal or a drink," Paul said. "When there’s that many choices, you need to have a level of service that goes above and beyond. That’s sort of our mission."

Mission accomplished. Thanks for giving us a place where everyone knows our names.

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Dogwood Tavern

132 West Broad St., Falls Church, VA 22046

In-Between Tip: On Monday, Sept. 8, Dogwood is inviting its customers to enjoy a whiskey event with Catoctin Creek Distillery, a Virginia whiskey-maker from Loudon County's Purcellville. Paul said he was particularly excited about the Peanut Old Fashioned they will have available. "What's more Virginia than Virginia peanuts and Virginia honey?"

To check out some beautiful drinks I've enjoyed at Dogwood Tavern, check out my Instagram feed or my Pinterest page.

Out-of-the-Box Date Night at the Mosaic District

There are times when going out for dinner and a movie with your significant other can be as depressing as spending a Saturday night at home. It’s the predictability of the event, entering a boxy restaurant for food, then a boxy theater for entertainment. A late night yawn, a tired drive home, then bed.

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Strawberry Park at the Mosaic District

Dinner and a movie at the Mosaic District in Fairfax, Virginia is a wide-open, exploratory event with lots of opportunities for surprise, whimsy and fun. One of the biggest surprises is its location: this vibrant, architecturally interesting, walkable “urban district” is just outside the Beltway off Lee Highway, among one-story industrial parks and retail centers that need a facelift. The developers -- who also developed Union Market in D.C. -- had a vision when they pictured this place here.

Chock-full of distinctive restaurants, interesting retail stores and opportunities for fun – a piano on the sidewalk, a giant chessboard, an outdoor movie screen – the Mosaic District makes sure that once you’ve parked your car in their multi-story lot for your dinner-and-a-movie date, you won’t need it again until you’ve thoroughly enjoyed yourself.

Dinner

Romantic dining – Put on your fancy clothes and head to Four Sisters Vietnamese Restaurant or Sea Pearl for an elegant meal with a nice bottle of wine. Call for a reservation at Four Sisters if you intend to be on time for the movie; its 23 years in business and move from Seven Corners hasn’t detracted from its popularity. With ocean-blue walls and lovely seafood presentations, Sea Pearl is a pretty date spot.

A cocktail at Matchbox

Fun dining – Matchbox and Cyclone Anaya’s Mexican Kitchen offer a meal that’s a little more raucous and booze-oriented. While Matchbox restaurants are proliferating like bunnies all over the DMV, I have yet to find one that disappoints with their inventive cocktails, great beer selection, re-interpreted bar food and super-cool interiors. Cyclone Anaya’s have margaritas as big as your head.

Casual dining – The Mosaic offers lots of quick bites that are easy on the wallet: Cava Mezze Grill (referred to as the “Chipotle” of Mediterranean food on Yelp), Sweetgreen (salads), and Taylor Gourmet (subs) are all interesting grab, eat and go food options right across the street from the movie theater. If you want to go even more casual, have an impromptu picnic on the green in front of the theater. Go to Red Apron Butcher for truly astonishing sandwiches or to Le Pain Quotidien for a baguette and other picnic fixings.

Movie

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Indoors – The Angelika Film Center throws the tired idea of a boxy movie theater with sticky floors and insolent teen employees into the trash. A three-tiered cinema temple of glass and gleaming wood, the Angelika honors the fact that adults are shelling out big bucks to see a movie these days and makes it a true experience. The theater offers a coffee bar and pastries downstairs, beer and gourmet hotdogs on the theater level, and a bar – yes, a bar – on the top floor. You can buy an entire bottle of wine at the bar and take it into the theater with you. You select your seats ahead of time and take your time getting there, rather than fighting to snatch a seat like animals. And when you amble into your movie with your bottle of wine and your gourmet hot dog, the theater – generally filled with adults – is as quiet as a tomb. My love for this place knows no bounds.

Outdoors – Or maybe you’re not as crotchety as I am and would enjoy a little people watching and children laughing and summer breezing as you enjoy your movie. The Mosiac hosts summer movies every Friday night on its ginormous outdoor screen at Strawberry Park, the wide green space just outside the Angelika Film Center. Apollo 13 is playing tonight.

After the Movie

The fact that the Mosaic District has provided so many incentives to stroll, relax and wander is my favorite aspect of the place. Don't head to your car after the movie. Take a second to enjoy this area and the amazing partner at your side.

• Have a delicious drip coffee at the glass-enclosed coffee shop, Dolcezza in the Park.
• Stroll the wide sidewalks and window shop at stores like Anthropologie, South Moon Under and Paper Source. 
• Get you feet wet in the rainbow-colored fountain in Strawberry Park.
• Enjoy post-movie gelato at Dolcezza.
• Play the piano on District Avenue.
• Indulge in the cocktail you didn't have before the movie at Matchbox or Sea Pearl.
• Play a game of chess on the giant chessboard in Strawberry Park.
• Dance to the bands playing in Glass Alley every Saturday evening from 7/26-8/23 at the Summer Block Party, with food and drink provided by Red Apron Butcher.

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Take this handy map with you to explore all the fun of the MOSAIC DISTRICT

In-Between Tip: If you’re approaching the Mosiac District from the East, you’ll be tempted to turn left at Gallows Road and then right to enter the shopping area. Don’t! You’ll be snarled in pedestrian traffic that makes everyone testy. Instead, stay on Lee Highway until you hit the next light at Eskridge Road. This left and the next two lefts into the Market Garage are effortless and will prevent you from starting your night out in a bad mood.

Have favorite dinner-and-a-movie places? I would love to explore places that make this tired date night fun. Tell me about them on my Facebook page or in the comments below.

I Hate the 9:30 Club

Listen to my 9:30 Club Mix Tape while readiing this blog.

I do. I hate the 9:30 Club, that mecca to live music lovers in our nation's capital, that pantheon to mournful hipsters or shimmying sorority girls or aging dads in their Bad Brains t-shirts, depending on the night. I hate that large, still-divey venue where I've seen Kings of Leon and Lykke Li and Delta Rae and Cold War Kids and Ray Lamontagne and Old 97's and Bon Iver and Neil Finn and Rhett Miller and Mumford & Sons and Django Django and Timbaland and The Afghan Whigs. 

Okay. Maybe I don't hate the 9:30 Club. Maybe I just hate those two lumbering boy-men, those big boys with scraggly beards and fuzzy hair and heavy-rimmed glasses who were trying to get around me the last time I was at the 9:30 Club. I didn't know I was blocking their way. I didn't know until I heard a, "Umm...excuse me...ma'am."

Ma'am.

In one fell swoop, I went from feeling quite lively and chipper to feeling like someone's mom. And I AM someone's mom (more on that later). But no one wants their mom at a live music show. I knew the intrusion I used to feel when I was a high schooler at the Fillmore in San Francisco or a college student at the Bottleneck in Lawrence, Kan., and saw an "ADULT" in the crowd.

"Everything else is yours," was my sentiment. "Let this be ours."

Haim at the 9:30 Club

But just because a couple of decades separate me from that girl doesn't mean my true, passionate love for music and the musicians who create it has dimmed. My love for sold-out shows has dimmed -- I boogie by the bar to avoid the chest-to-back crowds and keep my drink filled. And my enthusiasm for waiting until 11 p.m. for the main act to go on has certainly waned. But I think I've found a solution to that, too.

The kid

I go to early shows with my kid!

We took our teenager to see the three-sister band Haim at 7 p.m. on a Wednesday (the 9:30 Club is an all-ages venue), and I've got to tell you, passing the torch was cool. He stood with his dad in the middle of the crowd -- he can do that, he's over six feet -- and catching glimpses of the look on his face while those three strong women rocked out seemed like the best reason ever to get pregnant. We took him for the whole night-out experience -- the stroll down U Street, half-smokes at Ben's -- and we were still home by 10!

I guess it's appropriate that the night of the "ma'am" was also the night of my son's first 9:30 Club show, even though I was standing nowhere near him when the boys politely asked me to move my ancient ass. I'm not going to stop doing something that makes me thrive just because it's more appropriate for my son to be enjoying it. I've figured out how to mitigate the annoyances -- go to early shows, stand by the bar, hide behind my six-foot kid. So, no, I guess I don't hate the 9:30 Club.

Unfortunately for a venue that I'm sure is not trying to attract the over-40 crowd, I kind of love the place.

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Recommended 9:30 Club Shows in June for In-Betweeners

(Some shows are sold out but try StubHub for tickets. Enjoy one aspect of being old - disposable income!)

• Tonight - Old 97's (great alt-country twang band with hawt lead singer Rhett Miller)
• 6/3 - Jamie Cullum (amazing jazz pianist turned pop crooner)
• 6/6 - Lady Gaga vs. Madonna vs. ALL the Divas - a dance party with DJ lil'e
• 6/7 - Jenny Lewis (incredible singer, songwriter. And she was in Troop Beverly Hills)
• 6/8 - La Roux (sang Bulletproof, made into a song-demon song in Pitch Perfect)
• 6/14 - Who's Bad: The Ultimate Michael Jackson tribute Band 
• 6/27 - Throwing Muses with Special Guest Tanya Donelly (90s awesomeness)
• 6/28 - No Scrubs: 90's Dance Party with DJs Will Eastman and Brian Billion

Check out my 9:30 Club Mix Tape for In-Betweeners to hear songs from the above bands.