Shilling Canning Company launches unique 7-course menu and locally sourced cocktails
The Chef's Counter will help showcase regional and sustainable food and drink purveyors
The Shilling Canning Company is set to debut a new seven-course menu exclusively for guests wanting a full direct view of the culinary action at the spacious, attractive restaurant in Navy Yard.
“We have this Chef’s Counter that I built to be an integral part of the restaurant,” says Executive Chef Reid Shilling. “I put myself in the center of that, so that I could have interaction with the guests that sit at the counter, but also be fully in my station.”
Named for the family business in Baltimore nearly a century ago, Reid Shilling opened the restaurant with his wife Sara Quinteros-Shilling after spending a decade working at Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Bistro in Napa Valley and helping Jeremiah Langhorne open his Michelin-starred Blagden Alley hotspot The Dabney. Launching Friday, July 23, the Chef’s Counter will help showcase the regional and sustainable food and drink purveyors the restaurant partners with.
“It’s important to me that we know where our food is coming from,” says Shilling. “And that it’s raised well — both for the animal and for the environment around it. That’s the whole ethos of what we do. We find the best product that we can, from as close as we can.” The overwhelming majority of the restaurant’s offerings come from small, local family farms.
The original $55 three-course experience has gained a reputation as being more filling, with larger portion sizes, than the average tasting menu around town. That now more than doubles for the new seven-course offering. Priced at $95 dollars, the new prix fixe menu “is something that’s really unique because the whole menu will flip every two to three weeks.”
For an extra $55, the hearty drinker could add inspired drink pairings from Jacob Weinstein, the restaurant’s general manager who made it his mission to boost partnerships with area breweries and distilleries when he joined the team as beverage director in the fall of 2019.
“They had a huge back bar full of really expensive liquors, not necessarily local,” says Weinstein, who previously worked at Ripple, Supra, Requin, and Taqueria del Barrio. “I took it from a space of just being a good cocktail program to something that speaks to the voice of Shilling, which is local, sustainable, supporting everything around us.
“There is literally not one cocktail on our menu that is not featuring local produce in some way, usually trim from the kitchen and a local spirit. I don’t know if there’s any other program in the city that can say that.”
The Shilling Canning Company is located at 360 Water St. SE. Call 202-554-7474 or visit www.shillingcanning.com.
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