ARLINGTON, VA — Signature Dish, the WETA public television series, kicks off the second half of its second season on Monday by highlighting two restaurants and one food truck that specialize in serving South American food.
“One of the goals is to include just as much variety as possible, so that we can see just how exciting and diverse the D.C. area food scene is,” host Seth Tillman told Patch on Thursday. “Sometimes we’ve focused on foods from a specific country. We’ve done Korean food, French food, several others. Sometimes we do more of a region, like we’ve done the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and obviously, in this case, South American.”
In the episode entitled “Savoring South America,” Tillman first visits the Fire Pit Brazilian BBQ, a Rockville, Maryland-based food truck that serves up Brazilian steakhouse cuisine. He then travels across Montgomery County to Kantutas Bar & Grill in Wheaton to enjoy a big “meat and potatoes-type dish” that is emblematic of a city in Bolivia called Cochabamba.
“It’s important to me within that episode to try to showcase the full range of South American cuisine, which also includes, the coast and seafood,” he said.
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One of the big parts of Peruvian food, which has become well known across the world in recent years, is ceviche.
“You can get it all over the D.C. area,” Tillman said. “But there are some places that have a lot of interesting spins on it, where it’s not just the one traditional type of ceviche. Inca Social is very much a place that came to mind and we were very excited to showcase their Ceviche Nikkei.”
Despite the fact that WETA calls Arlington its home, Inca Social, which is located in Rosslyn, is only the second Arlington restaurant to appear on Signature Dish.
“We do go all over the entire DMV,” Tillman said. “We’ve been to Alexandria. We’ve been to a Falls Church. We featured Ruthie’s All-Day in our first season, which was also a great restaurant. Hopefully, in season three, we’ll get back to Arlington one or two more times.”
A native of the D.C. area, Tillman does not consider himself a food reporter by trade. When he first came to WETA in 2016, the first program he produced was a half-hour digest featuring 3-minute vignettes about 12 local restaurants.
“The big shift happened about four years ago,” he said. “We kind of made, within the organization, a real commitment to double down on local programming and not just sort of one-off local programming, where you weren’t sure on any given week, what you could expect to find on our air.”
With the shift in focus on series-based programming, WETA began producing more real estate and neighborhood-focused shows.
“We have a show now called Get Out of Town, which is a weekend getaway type show and we have Signature Dish,” Tillman said. “All of these shows, even though they touch on food or travel or real estate, the goal is to learn more about our own local communities and other communities within the DMV.”
When asked what were some his favorite restaurants from the first two seasons of Signature Dish, Tillman couldn’t just pick one or two.
“I do have very fond memories of our first episode of the series from season one, where we went to Maydan, which is a spectacular restaurant in downtown D.C., where everything’s cooked on a giant hearth in the center of the restaurant,” he said. “We had a lamb shoulder. It was just spectacular.
“In that same episode, we went to 2fifty Barbecue, which has kind of established itself as sort of the best barbecue spot not only in this region, but really for quite a large radius around us as well.”
Signature Dish’s “Savoring South America” episode debuts on Monday, March 11, at 9 p.m. on WETA. Host Seth Tillman visits Fire Pit Brazilian BBQ, 804 Rockville Pike in Rockville, Maryland; Kantutas Bar & Grill in Wheaton, Maryland; and Inca Social, 1776 Wilson Blvd. in Arlington, Virginia.
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