Sushi & International Snack Swap at Wren in Tysons!

Join us for a festive evening at Wren in Tysons as we celebrate the season together!

Bring an international snack to swap / gift - it can be wrapped or unwrapped, homemade or store-bought. If you're bringing a homemade treat, please include a list of ingredients to accommodate any allergies among our gifts.

From Washington Post:
A native of Ehime prefecture in southern Japan, where his family owned an orange farm, Matsuzaki, 54, previously worked at Ozumo in the Harbor Court Hotel in San Francisco. Washington audiences might recognize his name from the four years he served as executive chef at the late Zentan in the Donovan Hotel. Wren finds him “cooking food I like to eat,” including small plates typical of an izakaya, or Japanese watering hole.

I like what Matsuzaki likes. Tokyo fried chicken gets its kicks from soy sauce, ginger, garlic, sake — a long list of flavoring agents applied a day before the thigh meat is served, each (gluten-free) nugget crisp from a dusting of tapioca and cornstarch. The hot chicken is arranged in a bowl atop a cool slaw, sweet-tart with rice vinegar and yuzu, and some pickled cucumbers. “You need a break” between bites of fried chicken, says the chef. The tangy dark green pickles are a pause that refreshes.

He also demonstrates his frying skills in a tempura of sweet corn and sugar snap peas, a crisp lattice of vegetables that benefits from a drag through green tea salt after a dunk in dipping sauce. Brussels sprouts distance themselves from the routine when they’re offered sans their bitter cores, as little green leaves of flash-fried cabbage, ignited with hot mustard and garnished with crisp garlic. Each racy bite encourages another. Matsuzaki says of his food, “I want sweetness, sourness and saltiness” on every plate. Hence the threads of sweet fried leek atop the miso-splashed black cod, a shareable entree paired with smoky grilled shishitos.

“The food comes out as it’s ready,” servers tell you. “Your entire order is going to land in minutes,” they might just as well say. The best strategy is to order a few dishes at a time.

Hello, pork buns! Matsuzaki marinates pork belly for several days, then presses and sears the meat, concentrating the flavor of the pork, which he slips into tender bao buns with carrot matchsticks, cucumber slices and jalapeño. The ivory clutches, held together with dainty spears, look like something special on their long black plate, and they are. Matsuzaki is a stylist as well as a chef. Another of the more artful plates brings together a couple day boat scallops and bacon-wrapped enoki on a strip of bamboo leaf. The sweet of the seafood and the salt from the bouquet achieve balance with a vinaigrette made with yuzu kosho, the hot-tart Japanese condiment.

It’s hard to take your eyes off some of the food and drink, but when you do, you notice the ways in which Watermark is different from other hotels. No one wears name badges, for instance, and employees can choose from among a rainbow of colors for their shirts. No one talks from a corporate script, either. “We want people to be themselves,” says Cuadros, whose hotel curates music and even scents for its staff behind the scenes.

This being a hotel restaurant, there’s a hamburger, and it’s an impressive one. Wren uses buttery Wagyu beef for the patty, which arrives with some crunch from onion in addition to sriracha-spiced aioli on a toasted brioche bun. The juicy sandwich blossoms in the company of french fries, hand-cut and dusted with Japanese chile pepper. You can find a steak here as well, and it reinforces Matsuzaki’s belief that everything on the plate should be there for a reason. In this case, leeks act as a sweet foil to the grilled rib-eye and wasabi-green mashed potatoes. If I’m going to get meat here, though, it’s going to be in the form of ramen, thick with egg noodles, earthy pork and corn in a spicy miso broth that finds me tilting the bowl so as not to miss a drop.

Let's enjoy a delicious dinner and have fun swapping tasty snacks from around thw world!

Check out the menus here

WAITLIST:
Meetup does not allow a waitlist for paid events. If this event fills and you are interested in adding your name to the waitlist, please send host a message through the app.

To enhance the opportunity for great conversation, we would like to keep the group small. 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, geography and the cost of restaurants so that we can attract many different types of diners.

PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU ARE COMMITTED TO GO WHEN YOU RSVP FOR THIS EVENT. 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.Feel free to make suggestions for future meet locations. All diners will have their own tab to avoid any confusion.

If you are unable to join us in December, we hope you'll stay interested and join us for a meal in the future. Looking forward to seeing you at Wren!