The Complete Farragut North Lunch Guide

Every season, new hires and interns flood my office; when midday rolls around, they wander around like newborn ducklings without a mother, marveling at the plethora of lunch options with their mouths agape and eyes wide open. I worry about them, as they are in constant danger of being run over by a well-dressed lawyer double-fisting an iPhone and a blackberry and swinging a Chop’t salad around like a machete.

Now, nobody asked me for my opinion of the lunch scene in and around Farragut North. But never fear: I always come through. Here is Josh’s Complete Farragut North Lunch Guide. Use the map below, click to go to the full map, or look at the tables below for full reviews. Clicking on the circles reveals the restaurant review.

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The rating system is done on three metrics: qualitative assessment, price, and level of fullness. Tier One candidates are delicious, well-priced, and give you a ton of food. Tier Two candidates are good but not great, overpriced but not egregiously so, and give you a good amount of food. Tier Three candidates are mediocre, overpriced, and sometimes leave you wanting more food. Tier Four restaurants are not good. 

It is also important to note that Farragut Square, like other downtown corporate office neighborhoods in DC, faces a metastasizing blight: second-order food-gentrification, in which a variety of delicious and more “authentic” lunch restaurants that rich yuppies enjoy are being pushed out by chains of more expensive lunch restaurants that busier, less-interesting rich yuppies like. Sandwich chains are like an invasive plant species, eating up everything until all that’s left are overpriced sandwiches and it’s too late to turn back.

Comments and questions welcome. Responses not guaranteed. Thanks to Alex Holt for inspiring the map and adding reviews.

TIER ONE
Name Price Fullness Review
Greek Deli Not Too Overpriced Stuffed to the Gills The sound of Kostas plopping spoonfuls of artichoke special onto your plate is literally the sound of an Angel getting its wings, flying too close to the sun, and then falling back to earth into a tub of Avgolemono. Plus, you’re his friend. Kostas has so many friends. I’m jealous.
The Well-Dressed Burrito Not Too Overpriced Stuffed to the Gills DC has the worst Mexican food of any city I’ve ever been to. The burritos at Well Dressed are not very good, but everything else is outstanding. It’s the most food-per-dollar you can get anywhere. Go on Wednesdays and Fridays for the Empanadas. Don’t get the burritos. Go any day for the special salads or the chicken and cheese enchiladas. Still don’t get the burritos. Did I mention not to get the burritos?
Suki Asia Not Too Overpriced Full Nobody ever goes to Suki Asia with me, and frankly it’s very depressing. But the food is good. The Tofu-Don special with Miso Soup is one of my go-to lunches (it was better before they raised the price, but oh well) and the Udon is the best I’ve had around these parts. I like watching the sushi guy make sushi; I’ve never seen him smile. Frankly, it’s also depressing. My only complaint about Suki Asia is that the door opens the wrong way and makes entering and exiting awkward.
House of Kabob Not Too Overpriced Stuffed to the Gills Having to use a tray reminds me of high school, but in a good way. The buffet spread at House of Kabob is impressive, with staples like tandoori chicken (good), chickpeas and beans (good), and saag potato (passable). The samosas are excellent, but the weird fried orange things that come in the same tray are highly underwhelming. I think that “House of Kabob” is an overstatement. If anything, it’s much more of a studio apartment of Kabob.
Szechuan Pavilion Overpriced (but it’s fancier) Full Szechuan Pavilion has good Chinese food. That in and of itself is impressive in DC. This is more of a fancy place than other lunch spots, as it has white tablecloths (any form of tablecloth is usually too fancy for me). A good place to go to have a sit down meal, but it is always crowded. This is good for their business but immensely frustrating for me.

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University of Virginia: Proving Me Right Since 1819

You can read this post at the New America Foundation’s Higher Ed Watch blog. Or you can read it here. It’s the same. If you click both it will make me feel like more people are reading it, though.

The University of Virginia is no stranger to controversy. Just over a year ago, in June 2012, the school’s governing body, the Board of Visitors, voted to oust the president after less than two years at the helm.

The dethroned President Teresa Sullivan was popular among faculty and students; the ousters on the Board of Visitors, led by Virginia real estate mogul Helen Dragas, were less thrilled with her performance. Sullivan fell out of favor with the board, the Washington Post noted, “because of her perceived reluctance to approach the school with the bottom-line mentality of a corporate chief executive.” After students, faculty, and administrators turned out to defend Sullivan and criticize Dragas, the board reinstated Sullivan.

Flash forward to 2013. In April, Sullivan was at the forefront of the charge to increase the university’s tuition by 3.8 percent and 4.8 percent for in-state and out-of-state students respectively. Last week, Sullivan was one of the chief supporters of a plan to cut back on the AccessUVa program, the school’s financial aid commitment to low- and moderate-income students that began in 2004. Whereas previously the school covered all costs for students from families making up to twice the federal poverty line (about $47,000 per year for a family of four), the school will now only cover part of the cost, with the student needing to borrow the remaining amount.

The proposal to raise tuition eventually passed the Board of Visitors in a 14-2 vote, as did the proposal to scale back financial aid. The main dissenter in both cases? Helen Dragas. Continue reading →

What We Talk About When We Talk About Oregon’s Debt-Free Tuition Plan

There has been much to-do about the bill passed in Oregon to form a committee to look at the possibility of passing a future bill for student debt-free college tuition. If you remove the whole middle part of that last sentence and just kind of ignore it, the hubbub makes sense — with student debt causing both personal hardships and macroeconomic ripple effects, the option to offer public higher education and guarantee no debt could be a game-changer.

Some people on the left like this plan. Some people to their left hate it. Some people to the left of the people who are already on the left love it. And most people don’t care one way or another because they have jobs and families and still can’t get over the fact that Kim Kardashian and Kanye West managed to ruin their baby’s life at literally the very first possible moment by naming their kid a direction. A direction!

Now I want to weigh in even if it adds little to no value to the world, which is why Al Gore invented blogging in the first place.

Putting aside the policy nitty-gritty, what is at stake here is whether we think public higher education should be a universal program or an individual luxury good. Most progressives and advocates of increased college access favor the former — rather than pushing tuition onto individual students or groups of students, they prefer public subsidies to fund the majority of public higher ed.

The liberal blogger Matt Bruenig (with whom I have discussed this), however, lays out the case for a different strategy. In his view, only users of college should pay because the non-users are predominantly poor. The benefits of the Oregon plan, then, are that it narrows the group of people paying for college from society at large (in the form of tax revenues) to only users of college — but does not put the onus on any specific individual. Unlike simply increasing tuition for each student, a plan like the Oregon plan puts the cost on the entire group of students that have used the college’s services under the payment plan (any underpayments are covered by the buffer fund paid into by former students). Thus, students under the Oregon plan share the same risk pooling of wider tax-funded programs.

It is not ‘Pay It Yourself’ as much as it is ‘Pay It If You Also Attended College.’ The second acronym is less catchy, but they can hire a team to work on that.

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Hello World!

Hi, world! How are you?

I’m doing well, thanks. Just building this web site.

This post exists because posting a long higher education/philosophy essay as the first post seemed too aggressive.

Sincerely,
Josh