dc meat free week

February 7, 2011

This week is no ordinary week in DC.  Today kicks off DC Meat-Free Week where you have a full 7 days of vegetarian and vegan heaven including great food specials and events.  Sweetflow mobile is participating too! Were giving herbivores $1 off meat-less salads and wraps.  Look for our truck and fulfill your veggie fantasy with the chic p, guac greens with black beans & corn (instead of chicken), and the seasonal February salad with tofu.

things we dig: all things go

January 25, 2011

Run by sweetgreen friend Will Suter of Honor Roll Records, All Things Go is a music, news, art, and MP3 website based in Washington, DC (their writing staff includes sweetgreen alum McKee Floyd). They not only have great posts, reviews, interviews and articles, ATG hosts events at venues across the city.  They are the ultimate source for the many great (inter)national music happenings, and we are pumped about collaborating with them in the coming months to bring you awesome music finds. You can catch their correspondents at Coachella, Lollapalooza, SXSW, CMJ, Art Basel, and Pop Montreal. Check them out!

photo courtesy of http://allthingsgomusic.com/

photo of the week: rally to restore sanity

November 2, 2010

dc vegfest recap

September 16, 2010

On Saturday an unassuming corner of GW was packed with vender tents and lines of hungry vegetarians for the DC VegFest.  The picture-perfect vegan pastries and the hemp burger tents attracted exceptional crowds.  I was curious about the hemp burgers, and as I got closer, I noticed the hype wasn’t about the burger; a man was cracking large green coconuts with a 2-foot machete.  Fresh coconut water is really refreshing, plus it looks pretty cool drinking out of a huge coconut.  Other highlights included a vegan bodybuilder, cooking demonstrations, and lots of yummy samples.  I’m already looking forward to next year’s festival!

-Bonnie

DC VegFest

September 7, 2010

This month veganism is taking over DC! On Saturday September 11th from 12-6 pm, DC VegFest will be held on the George Washington University campus. The organizations Compassion Over Killing and The Vegetarian Society of DC have put together an exciting array of speakers, over 50 exhibitors, and a variety of delicious vegan food vendors! In honor of this great event sweetgreen has put together a tasty vegan salad with awesome ingredients like fresh cilantro, sugar snap peas, golden delicious apples, roasted tofu, and spicy quinoa, topped with the zesty lime cilantro jalapeno vinaigrette! So, in celebration of veganism stop by sweetgreen to try our delicious September salad and check out DC VegFest!

sweetlife festival recap

April 26, 2010

What a day! Our sincerest thanks go out to everyone who joined us at the sweetlife festival in Dupont Circle on Saturday! Despite the cloudy skies, the rain held off and the crowd grew steadily throughout the afternoon and evening. Over 750 people stopped by to enjoy the energetic atmosphere. With the success of this first festival under our belts, we’re already dreaming big for next year. Until then, stay tuned for additional coverage and keep living the sweetlife!

Matthew Hemerlein

Will Eastman

Phil Ade

Phil Ade

The Love Language

The Love Language

Hot Chip

Hot Chip

Hot Chip w/ sweetgreen founders

U.S. Royalty

Hot Chip

Photos courtesy of Keaton Bedell

Destination DC: A Culinary Loft Event

January 28, 2010

Sweetgreen recently headed north to the Culinary Loft in SoHo for “Destination DC,” an awesome event that aimed at introducing some of DC’s hottest new culinary movements to the national media. We were honored to prepare the opening salad course (ingredients below!). To carry on our locavore mission, we decided to challenge ourselves and locally source the ingredients for the dinner. We hit up Satur Farms in Long Island for all of the produce and the renowned Catapano Farms, also in Long Island, for the cheese.

The salad that we tossed?  Baby Wild Arugula with thyme-roasted Sunchokes and Shallots, baby carrots, toasted hazelnuts, and goat cheese with a blood orange vinaigrette.

A quick shout out to everyone who prepared the meal…

Kyle Bailey, Executive Chef & Tiffany MacIsaac, Pastry Chef; Birch & Barley

Nicolas Jammet, Owner; sweetgreen

Jamie Leeds, Chef/Owner; Hank’s Oyster Bar & CommonWealth

Travis Timberlake, Executive Chef; Art & Soul

Wine Pairings from Loudoun, Virginia: DC’s Wine Country

…and a huge thanks to the Loft for having us!

Hot Chip – “One Life Stand”

January 26, 2010

With the release date of Hot Chip’s fourth album set for February 1^st, sweetgreen has really been feeling the British band’s newest single, “One Life Stand.”  If the song title alone doesn’t entice you to give it a listen, perhaps the band’s promise to “warm the cockles of your soul right in the middle of the bleak mid-winter” will do the trick.  We’re also excited for their already sold out 9:30 Club gig in April! Check out the official “One Life Stand” promo video below.

“the dynamic duo”

January 17, 2009

two of sweetgreen’s founders nic & nate were featured on the front page of the entertainment section of the dc examiner! check it out below:

to read the online version of the article go here, it includes the following insights about the dynamic duo:

Q&A with the Chefs

Do you cook at home?
Nicolas: Yes, and it’s classical French or Mediterranean. My mom is Lebanese. I watch the Food Network.
Nathaniel: Our day is long and spontaneous. I try to fix dinner two times a week. My family is Chinese, so dumplings and noodles and wok-cooking are a big thing.

What is your comfort food?
Nicolas: Foie gras and anything with truffles.
Nathaniel: Food from Chipotle or Chinese or Vietnamese food

Which are your favorite restaurants?
Nicolas: Central, Rays the Steaks, Blue Duck, Nora, Rasika and Oyamel.
Nathaniel: (Undecided)

What’s in your fridge?
Nicolas: A lot of Honest Tea, hummus, baby carrots. Lots of cheese and baguettes. I eat here twice a day.
Nathaniel: Not much. Green onions and a bottle of champagne, but I do have sesame oil in my pantry and rice and vinegar.

Cicada – Metropolis (The Twelves B-Live Rio Mix)

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Bonde Do Role – Geremia (Chewy Chocolate Cookies Remix

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Lykke Li – Little Bit ft. Drake & Mickey Factz

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white collar, blue collar, new color green collar

September 5, 2008

green collar:

“A green-collar job is in essence a blue-collar job that has been upgraded to address the environmental challenges of our country.”
-Lucy Blake, CEO of Apollo Alliance

“A green job has to do something useful for people, and it has to be helpful to, or at least not damaging to, the environment.”
-Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club

what are the perks of green collar jobs?

proponents say that green jobs are good because:

• growing this industry will create jobs that cannot be easily outsourced
• construction workers currently unemployed due to the housing collapse may easily transition into being green collar, for example building and maintaining wind turbines
• green collar jobs are not static in the way that blue collar factory jobs are – in fact they could be upwardly mobile, providing a path out of poverty (see NYT article)
• nor is “green collar” limited to manual labor – these jobs may require highly specialized technical and scientific knowledge, for example Ph.D. employees at Plextronics, which manufactures polymer inks used in solar panels, making it a diverse industry in terms of job opportunities

green collars in the news

• One of Barack Obama’s major policy proposals is sinking $150bn into creating 5 million new green collar jobs, aiming to bolster the economy while finding for new and better sources of renewable energy. This was also a major part of Senator Clinton’s platform; she emphasized the fact that green collar jobs do not lend themselves to being outsourced or exported and afford a relatively high degree of upward mobility.

• The Green Builder’s Association in DC and the Green-Collar Jobs Advisory Council of DC have recently partnered to create a job training curriculum for workers in the local construction industry. Participants will be trained to recognize the relationship between the life cycles of buildings and the environment, finding greener construction alternatives and identifying their pros and cons as well as understanding how a building may become LEED rated; completion of the curriculum will earn them credentials recognized in the construction industry that can give them an advantage in the job market. Nicely fulfills Pope’s criteria in that it not only promotes green building practices but directly benefits its human participants as well by expanding their skill set and improving their job prospects.

Metronomy – Heartbreaker (Kris Menace Remix)

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Earlier in the summer we had a post about how due to the energy crisis and rising fuel prices, biodegradable plastics suddenly became cheaper to produce and the companies that make them experienced enormous growth. In other words, in the area of bioplastics at least, the energy crisis forced us to expand into a greener alternative (which we knew we should have been doing all along) and it is turning out not to be as painful as we thought it would be.

Maybe this is a similar situation – we are quickly catching on to the fact that we’ve been lazy in coming up with alternative energy sources and that all our procrastination has set us back. There could be a silver lining. Now that we are finally getting around to it, it may end up helping one of the sectors of our economy that is hurting right now – construction. The housing crisis and subsequent decline in residential investment has left many unemployed, but if they can make the transition into the nation’s fifth largest market sector, there may be a green collar there waiting to be worn.

Vampire Weekend – Bryn

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