Enjoy Locally Foraged Items with Dinner at Poplar!

Join us for a foraged, local menu in Brightwood Park's snug Poplar restaurant!

Note from restaurant: For a group of 8 people, there is a $75 minimum per person. There is a $150 deposit that can be applied to your tab.

Separate checks will always be requested in advance. All diners should be prepared to split tabs in the event the restaurant is unable to honor our request.

The Washingtonian:

Looking over the menu at Poplar in DC’s Brightwood Park is like reading a report card on what’s popping up in the area’s forests and fields. Chef Iulian Fortu changes the offerings every week based on what he forages and what farmers deliver. “It’s hyper-seasonal and very dynamic,” he says.

The set menus for two begin with sourdough and housemade butter, followed by a handful of savory dishes that lean into European traditions, especially Spanish, with lots of plant-based options. Fortu embraces fruit-forward desserts, such as wild-persimmon bread pudding, vinously sweet black-walnut cake, or a tart brimming with Virginia strawberries.

Poplar seems like an unconventional proposition until you learn Fortu’s backstory. Born in Romania, he grew up in Fairfax and began cooking at an early age. He ended up attending the Culinary Institute of America, which led to an internship at Noma in Copenhagen. In between grueling pre-sunup-to-past-midnight shifts at the restaurant, he got his first taste of foraging in the Danish countryside. When Fortu returned home, he began foraging professionally for restaurants—including Oyster Oyster, the Dabney, and Jônt—before turning most of his attention to Poplar, which opened early last year.

DC’s dining scene is increasingly dominated by big restaurant groups and out-of-town expansions. Poplar in Brightwood Park is the exact opposite. The neighborhood spot features just 24 seats and a small weekly changing menu utilizing local farms and foraged ingredients. Pretty much everything is cooked out of a Marra Forni pizza oven.

“I wanted a place up here that felt like you were going downtown without having to go downtown,” says Cerrissa Fitz, a hospitality industry veteran with a day job as an interior designer. She will oversee the entire dining room, down to bussing the tables. Her partner Sam Fitz, co-founder of Anxo Cider, manages the cider-centric bar. And chef/forager Iulian Fortu is the one-man kitchen.

“I hate to sound cliche and say farm-to-table, but we really are going to be farm-to-table,” says Cerrissa. Fortu operates a foraging business called Arcadia Venture that supplies local ingredients to some of DC’s top restaurants, including Oyster Oyster, Reverie, and Jont. Fortu will continue to forage ingredients for his own vegetable-centric menu, which will feature around half a dozen dishes plus Manifest Bakery’s sourdough with cultured butter that is house-made every week with local cream. (A hungry table of two could order the whole menu if they wanted.)

“I’m not going to do any sort of commercial commodity meats or fish. Everything’s going to be like transparent sourcing,” says Fortu, a former intern at Noma in Copenhagen who works as a private chef. The restaurant prides itself on low waste, and Fortu plans to save vegetable scraps to feed a friend’s pigs.

The name Poplar comes from Tulip Poplar trees, which are among the tallest in local forests and provide canopy for mushrooms—and morels in particular—to thrive. Appropriately, the opening menu is heavy on mushrooms, including a wild mushroom paella for two and a grilled lion’s mane mushroom “steak” that’s marinated in beet juice, red wine, and spices. There’s also a sweet-savory, mushroom-shaped panna cotta—part of which is infused with candy caps and the other part with chocolate and porcinis. It’s garnished with chocolate-porcini crumble “soil” and cherries preserved with a syrup made with spicebush berries Fortu foraged.

Other opening menu highlights include a sunchoke soup with lightly pickled Asian pear and crispy fried sunchokes. There’s also butterflied Virginia trout glazed with a fruity paw-paw barbecue sauce and served with smoked salsa verde and trout roe. Everything is roasted in the pizza oven that the owners inherited from a pizzeria that never opened in the space. (Fortu has a couple small induction burners too.)

The equally concise drink menu draws heavily from Anxo, which is known for dry, naturally fermented ciders produced just down the block. The owners also have a small importing company and will bring in additional ciders and wines. Still to come: cocktails on draft.

Cerrissa has added her interior designer’s touch to the corner space, combining the original coffered ceilings and brick with new marbled porcelain wall tiles and warm wood furniture (including a communal table). There’s also a framed photo of her grandfather, who came to the US from China and worked his way up in New York’s Chinatown restaurants.

“Since my grandfather spoke no English the only way I had to communicate with him was through food… He would carefully craft dishes while somehow finding a way to in broken English teach life lessons,” Cerrissa says. “This restaurant is a nod to him. I wish he could have lived to see me own a place of my own but I know he would be proud.”

Check out the menu here

NOTE: Registration fee is non-refundable ($19 towards deposit $3 to help pay for the annual Meetup platform fee). In the event you change your RSVP, we can only refund if we are able to fill your seat. Thank you in advance for your understanding.

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We ask that ALL folks honor their RSVP. If you are unable to attend after sending in a YES, please update your status so that others may join and help us support local businesses. In the event our group incurs a fee for no-shows / late cancellations, your ability to RSVP for future events will be restricted. Thank you in advance for your understanding.

To enhance the opportunity for great conversation, we will continue to limit the group size. Please feel free to sign-up to meet us along with up to 2 friends.

In the future, we will vary the days of the week and the types of restaurants to keep events interesting.

PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU ARE COMMITTED TO GO WHEN YOU RSVP FOR THIS EVENT. Feel free to make suggestions for future meet locations.

If you are unable to join us in November, we hope you'll stay interested and join us for an event in the future. Looking forward to catching up with you at Poplar!