When Crêpes Were Popular in Washington

Streets of Washington on Flickr

I visited Washington for the first time as part of a weekend trip organized by my high school’s French club in the 1970s. We ate at Maison des Crêpes. I enjoyed it. The restaurant is long gone but I remember it and my trip when I pass by its former location in Georgetown.

The Streets of Washington blog recently shared this photograph of the Maison des Crêpes on Flickr and explained its history:

Maison des Crepes originally opened as La Crepe in 1967 at 1305 Wisconsin Avenue NW in Georgetown. It was the creation of Paris-born Jacques Vivien (1925-2010), who began his Washington career as the maitre d’ at The Jockey Club. Vivien was riding a fashion craze for creperies when he opened Washington’s first. He decorated the restaurant in French provincial style and had his waitresses decked out in Breton costumes. Eventually two other locations would open, and all would remain popular, especially with tourists, despite sometimes poor reviews from local dining critics. The original restaurant in Georgetown closed in the early 1980s.

This brought back nice memories. That weekend trip was wonderful.

You can read more about the restaurant here.

Jean-Jacques Goldman

Jean-Jacques Goldman is very popular in the French-speaking world. Since the death of Johnny Hallyday in 2017, he has been the highest grossing living French pop rock act. He was born in 1951.

Goldman is the most popular male personality in France. He’s in good company. Sophie Marceau is the most popular female French personality.

Goldman also wrote successful albums and songs for many artists, including Céline Dion.

Goldman was born in Paris to an immigrant Polish Jewish father and a German Jewish mother.

Stacey Kent, A Lovely Jazz Singer

Stacey Kent is an American jazz singer with a glorious voice. She was born in 1965 in New Jersey and is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College. Her paternal grandfather was a Russian who grew up in France. He later moved to the United States where he taught Kent French. Once she learned French, it was the only language she spoke with her grandfather. Kent travelled to England after college to study music in London, where she met saxophonist Jim Tomlinson, whom she married in 1991.

Kent may be better known in France than in the United States. Her album Raconte-moi was recorded in French and became the second best selling French language album worldwide in 2010.

Kent has also faced serious health challenges. In a 2004 interview with Robert Kaiser of The Washington Post, Kent recounted that she’s been in comas three times caused by brainstem encephalitis:

Each time, baffled doctors were not certain they could bring her back. The last coma was in 1999, and Tomlinson nursed her through it. On doctors’ advice, he brought records to her hospital room. When she awoke he was playing Mildred Bailey, one of the great jazz singers of the ’30s. “There’s just so much emotion in that voice,” Kent says. “It’s a cry - even when she’s singing a happy song.”

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC – © David H. Enzel, 2021

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is the official memorial of the United States to the Holocaust. The Museum provides for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust history. It is dedicated to helping people confront hatred, prevent genocide, promote human dignity, and strengthen democracy.

Since its dedication in 1993, the Museum has welcomed more than 47 million visitors, including 100 heads of state and more than 11 million school-age children. The Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia is the world’s leading online authority on the Holocaust. It’s available in 19 languages and was visited in 2021 by more than 21 million people representing 238 countries and territories.

Washington Post columnist George Will said this of the museum on the occasion of its 25th anniversary in 2018:

[T]he museum presents human nature’s noblest as well as vilest manifestation. *** Located just off the Mall, one of the world’s most pleasant urban spaces and the epicenter of American politics, the museum inflicts an assaultive, excruciating knowing: Nothing — nothing — is unthinkable, and political institutions by themselves provide no permanent safety from barbarism, which permanently lurks beneath civilization’s thin, brittle crust. This is why the Holocaust is the dark sun into which this democracy should peer.

Admission to the museum is free. However, timed-entry tickets are required to enter the permanent exhibition. If you can’t book in advance, same-day tickets are available in limited quantity online each day at 7 a.m. ET. 

The Museum is open every day except on Yom Kippur and Christmas Day.

My father, Abram Enzel, survived the Holocaust. His oral history is available online through the Museum.

Film: ‘Steal the Sky’

Steal the Sky is a 1988 HBO movie directed by John D. Hancock and starring Mariel Hemingway and Ben Cross. The film is based on the true story of Iraqi fighter pilot Munir Redfa, who defected by flying a MiG-21 fighter jet to Israel in 1966. 

In the film, a beautiful American-born Israeli spy Helen Mason (Mariel Hemingway) is sent to Iraq to coerce an Iraqi pilot into hijacking a Soviet-made fighter jet for Israeli defense research. She seduces Munir Redfa (Ben Cross) in order to blackmail him. There are unexpected results when Helen finds herself falling in love with him, endangering the mission, while he is torn between his love for her and his loyalty to Iraq.

Sadly, Ben Cross, best known for playing a runner in the 1981 Academy Award-winning film Chariots of Fire, died in 2020 in Vienna, Austria. He was 72.

It’s available on YouTube

Vintage Images of Washington

The Streets of Washington blog and Flickr feed show many vintage and hard to find images from postcards and other ephemera about historic places in the Washington, D.C. area. It is fascinating to see how the nation’s capital has evolved.

The author, John DeFerrari, is a native Washingtonian with a lifelong passion for local history. He is also a trustee of the D.C. Preservation League.

This is a labor of love. These images are worth perusing and preserving.

St Thomas Episcopal Church

Stella Tennant (1970-2020)

Stella Tennant, a gorgeous iconic model and fashion designer, died in Scotland on December 22, 2020. She was 50 years old.

Culture and style critic Guy Trebay, writing for The New York Times, explains that Tennant had deep aristocratic roots but “wore her rarefied heritage lightly throughout her three-decade run in fashion.”

She was photographed by top photographers including Steven Meisel and Bruce Weber.

A sad end of an era, way too soon.

Remembering Lindy’s – ‘The Best Little Carry-Out in Washington’

The friendly people of Lindy’s in 2003. © David H. Enzel, 2003

I was born and raised in Pittsburgh. I attended the University of Pittsburgh, which is an urban campus. After moving to Washington, I always liked the George Washington University (GW) campus. I could relate to it as an urban campus in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington.

In 2004, Lindy’s celebrated its 30th anniversary. © David H. Enzel, 2004

For years I enjoyed the burgers and fries at Lindy’s Red Lion (“The Best Little Carry-Out in Washington”). It was an institution on the GW campus. It was rumored that President Gerald Ford liked Lindy’s burgers and as President would send Secret Service agents to pick up burgers for him from Lindy’s. In 2008, The GW Hatchet confirmed this rumor with the owner of Lindy’s. I sure hope it’s true. I have fond memories of Lindy’s and the friendly people who worked there.

Lindy’s closed in June of 2018 and was then vacant. It is now a barber shop.

Lindy’s is now a barber shop. © David H. Enzel, 2020


TV Series: ‘The Americans’

The Americans is an American television period drama series created and produced by former CIA officer Joe Weisberg. It premiered in the United States in 2013 on the FX network and concluded after six seasons and 75 wonderful episodes.

The Americans is about the marriage of two KGB spies posing as Americans in suburban Washington D.C. shortly after Ronald Reagan is elected President. The series centers around the arranged marriage of Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell), who have two children – 14-year-old Paige (Holly Taylor) and 12-year-old Henry (Keidrich Sellati). The children don’t know about the true identity of their parents. The spies live next door to Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), an FBI agent working in counterintelligence. From there it gets complicated.

This is one of the best TV shows I’ve ever seen. What makes it special is the interplay between the spying and what’s going in the family of the Russian spies and the family of the FBI agent next door. In the end, I was more interested in the personal relationships than I was the spying. I easily connected with the relationship issues.

The relationship between the more practical Philip and the rule-following Elizabeth makes for some fascinating issues. Keri Russell’s beauty enters the plot in many different ways. The spying was just plain fun to watch, partly because of the now dated technology of the the era (the 1980s) in which the series takes place.

The New York Times said “The Americans” is “one of those rare series that actually has gotten better every season.”

If you want insider information about the show, Slate has a podcast about the show featuring cast, crew and creators.

Film: ‘A Little Romance’

A Little Romance is a 1979 American romantic comedy film directed by George Roy Hill and starring Laurence Olivier, Thelonious Bernard, and Diane Lane in her film debut. 

The screenplay was written by Allan Burns and George Roy Hill, based on the 1977 novel E=mc2 Mon Amour by Patrick Cauvin. 

The film follows a French boy and an American girl who meet at the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte — 50 minutes south of Paris — and begin a romance that leads to a journey to Venice where they hope to seal their love forever with a kiss beneath the Bridge of Sighs at sunset.

Diane Lane portrays an affluent, intelligent and charming teenager living in Paris. The scenes of Paris are glorious. Thelonious Bernard does a great job portraying the street smart French boy Diane Lane falls in love with. And Laurence Olivier adds a lot to the film.