Mari Vanna to open early next year

From an email:

According to Slavic legend, Mari Vanna was a fairytale grandmother known to welcome hungry travelers into her house. She would feed her guests a home-cooked meal before sending them back out on their voyage. In mid January, Russian hospitality powerhouse Ginza Project will bring this legend to life with the opening of Mari Vanna's second US location in the heart of downtown D.C. With an established reputation of excellence in authentic Russian cuisine in New York, London, Moscow and beyond, the capital's 6,500 square-foot eatery will be Mari Vanna's largest location in the world. Located at 1141 Connecticut Ave., NW, the hotspot finds its home in one of the district's most upscale locales. Just five blocks from the White House and steps away from the historic Mayflower Hotel, the new restaurant nestles perfectly between K Street's bustling business district and D.C.'s trendy Dupont Circle neighborhood. 

Although the restaurant has plans to add various DC-centric menu items, a few Russian specialties won't change from the other Mari Vanna locations. Classic menu offerings range from cold appetizers such as pickled vegetables, salt-cured pork and black caviar to hot appetizers such as pirozhok, blinis and hand-made Russian dumplings. Delectable entree options will include Mari Vanna's world famous beef stroganoff, chicken kotletki and fishcakes.

 Apparently this space used to be leased by Randstad.

Uni, A Sushi Place

There are, in my mind, two basic types of sushi places. There's your hole-in-the-wall, cheap but low quality type of place, like Cafe Asia. And there's your high-end, expensive but it melts in your mouth type of place, like Kushi or Sushi Taro. What's there's not a lot of are places in the middle, cheap enough that it's not going to break the bank, but reasonably good in quality. Uni is one of those places.

I shared a Picante Escolar roll and a Spicy, Crunchy Crawfish roll with my wife, in addition to a Nigiri Niners platters. The rolls were good, perhaps a little heavy on the rice, and while the Escolar wasn't particularly spicy, the Crawfish definitely was! The Nigiri Niners came with a lot of the usual suspects, salmon, tuna, whitefish, that sort of thing, but it also included salmon roe and, of course, uni. The sushi was good, definitely a lot better than some of the low-end places I've been, but also not as tender or flavorful as Kushi. We got out pretty cheap, though -- together with a 750 ml bottle of junmai ginjo sake, we only spent around $80 for the two of us. This is definitely a place worth considering if you're in the mood for sushi, but don't want to spent an entire paycheck to get it.

Uni, A Sushi Place is located at 2122 P St NW, DC