14th Street NW

The bustling 14th Street corridor is also adding some interesting food stores and my intrepid neighbors venture across the park to explore them.

Smucker Farms, located in the Amish country of Pennsylvania's Lancaster County, has opened an outlet at 2118 14th St. (at V), which carries meat, dairy and baked products from the Amish farms, and the usual assortment of jams, pickles and other farmer's market products. I got some uncured bacon, a slab of ham, and other goodies for a surprisingly high tab. I'm sure the quality is good, and I know you have to pay premium prices for these small-production foods. But I do have a bit the feeling, as I do at the Dupont Circle farmer's market, that the vendors are testing the upper limits of what they can charge. We'll see how prices develop here as time goes on.

There is also a nice little bakery, Le Caprice, at 3460, worth further exploration.

It is of course in these gentrifying neighborhoods that interesting new shops will spring up. It certainly bears monitoring.

I'm still waiting for a real butcher -- someone who displays the meat in the case and to whom you can talk about getting odd cuts. For instance, Molly Stevens has a porchetta recipe that calls for a boneless pork loin with the belly flap attached and the skin on. She readily concedes you can't get this from your normal supermarket butcher, and I'm betting that this is yet another test Wagshal's will flunk. Nor have I been impressed by the two "butcher shops" in Alexandria. There is a meat renaissance going on in the real food meccas but it looks like we still have to wait here in poor old DC.