It was hot this week… the kind of hot where we just wanted to sit in the studio drinking iced tea.  However duty called, and Bryan and Tomas spent the majority of a day over on H Street working with one of our clients – SMITH Commons.

A new restaurant coming to H Street in the near future, SMITH Commons is a fantastic concept that we can’t wait to see open.  We actually went the menu tasting awhile back, and SMITH’s chef, Frederik De Pue (who you might remember from our posts about 42° – his catering business), created some amazingly tasty dishes.  While we can’t really discuss all of the intricacies of the menu at this point, lets just say that we went home stuffed not only because that’s generally how one leaves a tasting (there’s always so much food!), but because we couldn’t stop ourselves from taking seconds and thirds.  Anyone who has ever been to a tasting will tell you this is foolish – after all, how can you expect to taste every single dish on the menu if you eat more than a bite of each – but we couldn’t help ourselves.  So good…

Anyway, Bryan and Tomas visited the restaurant which is still under construction and met up with Sheldon of SMITH Commons to consult on the environmental design.  They spent some time discussing the second floor patio…

and then chatted awhile about the interior…

It’s all a little rough around the edges at the moment and very much under construction, but it’s starting to come together which is always an exciting process.  To keep up to date on what’s happening with SMITH and for some more pictures, feel free to check out their temporary blog – smithcommonsdc.com.  We’ll have the full site up and running soon!

Later in the week we received an interesting email from the Washington Business Journal – it appears we were nominated for their Green Business Awards and were selected as a finalist!  We didn’t even know we’d been nominated in the first place!  They’ll be announcing the winners at a special breakfast at the Willard Intercontinental on the 24th of September, so keep your fingers crossed for us.  (Our name is down in the lower right hand corner… we apparently have to beat out the US General Services Administration which may be a bit tough )

In other news, it’s Friday the 13th which means a whole bunch of us will be watching horror movies tonight.  Some of the movies on our list: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (which you can watch for free here – oh Internet Archive, we love you), Rosemary’s Baby, 28 Days Later (one of the best zombie movies of all time), and, of course, Army of Darkness, which really isn’t a horror movie, but is awesome anyway.