The announcement that native Cuban celebrity chef Alex Garcia plans to open a restaurant anchoring the Downtown Silver Spring complex set my mind to wondering about how big a splash he could make.
I reached out to the group behind the project yesterday and asked whether the eatery will have room enough for live music and dancing, the sort of nightlife that Montgomery County planners have been begging for to help reverse the aging of our tax base.
"With construction not yet under way, we have not finalized our entertainment offering," Garcia's partner, Spencer Rothschild, wrote back in an email that somehow got stuck in my junk file.
That's not much but it's enough to start speculating about the possibilities of enlivening Silver Spring and giving The Peterson Cos. a shot at improving the cool factor of their property.
Consider Garcia and Rothschild's other ventures. Never mind that Garcia starred on the Food Network. Never mind that the partners have a string of Latin fusion eateries in several boroughs of New York. Never mind that they launched their own brand of rum this summer. Never mind that their AG Kitchen could erase the bad taste of Romano's Macaroni Grill, which has been closed for almost a year.
The big news is that that Rothschild and Garcia also revived the Copacabana, in the latest incarnation of the storied nightclub known for its original Mafia backers, New York Yankee brawlers and Barry Manilow kitsch. The club was the setting for one of the most famous scenes in Martin Scorsese's "GoodFellas," when Ray Liotta walks Lorraine Bracco through the kitchen out to the front row and the nice Jewish girl falls in love with the Irish-Sicilian wiseguy.
Rothschild and Garcia reopened the Copa in 2011, and it has hosted top salsa musicians like Willie Colón and generations of sequined dancers.
The original Copacabana debuted in 1940 with mobster Frank Costello as a partner. Despite its name borrowed from the famous Brazilian beach, the club featured Chinese food and was segregated until Harry Belafonte broke the color line in 1950. Now, the Copa hosts live bands, Garcia's classic southern hemisphere dishes and a rooftop dance floor overlooking Times Square.
That's a bit much to pack into kid-friendly Downtown Silver Spring. But Macaroni Grill left a big hole, 7,700 square feet, to be exact, room enough for 180 diners. And here's the thing, that's even bigger than the original AG Kitchen on New York's Upper West Side, which has a 120-seat dining room and a 30-seat lounge.
So there is room enough for Garcia and Rothschild to include a stage and small dance floor that could feature some of the same hot Latin bands that show up at the Copa. I like to think they are planning something more ambitious than a Latin comfort food eatery. Something that will draw the crowds like the original Art Deco Silver Spring Shopping Center and the Silver Theatre did when they opened in 1938.
Perhaps they will create a spot where white, black and Hispanic (somebody has to come up with a way to write that where everyone or nobody is capitalized) revelers could mix more easily than they do as they pass each other strolling down Ellsworth Avenue without making eye contact.
It would be nice if Silver Spring could host the sort of all-colors venue that a small army of development lawyers and zoning functionaries earnestly tried to plan out in a report released last year by the Montgomery County Nighttime Economy Task Force.
Now would be a good time for the County Council to dust off that document and pass legislation that would give night life entrepreneurs some more flexibility to help mend Montgomery's fractured hipness.
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