Silver Spring’s Solaire Social, the 250-seat, 13,000-square-foot food hall that opened in June, features 10 food vendors, a 40-seat bar and an entertainment stage. Here are two entrepreneurs—both Silver Spring residents—with particularly intriguing offerings in the food hall.
Solaire Social, 8200 Dixon Ave., Silver Spring; 240-558-0082; solairesocial.com
Fire Pit Brazilian Barbecue
Gui Gonzalez, 36, who owns this Solaire Social spot with his wife, Fabiana Redondo Gonzalez, has Brazilian barbecue in his bones. The Silver Spring resident hails from Porto Alegre in Southern Brazil. “It’s considered the barbecue town in Brazil,” Gonzalez says. “It’s our culture. We grow up making gaucho-style beef barbecue, seasoning only with sea salt and cooking over a charcoal-fueled grill.” The star of the show, he explains, is the cut known as picanha. “It’s also called the rump cap. It’s in the rear of the cow on top of the sirloin, with a thick cap of fat and very marbled. That makes it tender and gives it a special texture and a unique flavor. When you talk Brazilian barbecue, it means picanha.”
Gonzalez slices picanha into 1½-inch-thick steaks, seasons the meat all over with salt, sears it on the grill to give it a good crust, slices it into bite-size strips and grills those again until rosy inside. He serves it with a sauce made with mayo, cilantro, scallions and garlic. Meat platters ($14.90 to $16.90) include two sides, among them black beans, potato salad and farofa (toasted cassava flour sauteed with onions and bacon).
Gonzalez and his mother moved to Rockville in 2003. After graduating from Wheaton High School in 2008, he went into landscaping, eventually opening his own company. He left it in 2022 to pursue his passion, opening Fire Pit Brazilian Barbecue food truck and parking it in Rockville’s Golden Arcade shopping center. When he had the chance to open a brick-and-mortar spot at Solaire Social, Gonzalez seized the opportunity. “The food truck was always going to be the first step of growing my fast-casual concept,” says Gonzalez, who continues to operate his food truck.
In addition to picanha, the menu at Solaire includes pork ribs, boneless beef ribs and grilled boneless, skinless chicken thighs. (The pork and beef ribs are smoked at an off-site kitchen and then grilled to order at Solaire, using a gas-powered grill with a tray of oak and eucalyptus wood embers underneath the meat.) It’s really all about the picanha, though. firepitbrazilianbbq.com
Shuga x Ice
Ice cream aficionados on the lookout for new ways to have their taste buds tantalized should make a beeline to Shuga x Ice, where Ndidiamaka Agu, 31, is using her Nigerian heritage as inspiration for her frozen creations. The New York City native was fascinated by science from an early age. Watching Alton Brown explain the chemistry of cooking on the TV show Good Eats was a catalyst for her to pursue her passion. “There was a vegan ice cream craze in New York in 2018,” Agu says, “and I thought, I can do this. I could open an ice cream cart. And so the seed was planted.”
Intending to start an ice cream business one day, Agu moved in 2019 to the D.C. area, a calmer environment than New York, she says. She bought an ice cream machine and started experimenting and refining recipes. After being laid off from a job as a project manager in 2023, she took a leap of faith. Having noticed the “coming soon” signs in the windows of Solaire Social, she tracked down chef and restaurateur Akhtar Nawab and pitched him her concept. He’s the founder and CEO of Brooklyn-based Hospitality HQ, the consulting and management group that curated Solaire.
Agu says her goal is to have an ice cream flavor at Shuga x Ice for every country in Africa because the continent is woefully underrepresented in the American culinary scene. For now, she’s starting with Nigerian inspirations. The menu features one dairy-free option, made with coconut cream and pieces of flaky, fried cookies known as chin chin, and four cream-based ones, including Madagascar vanilla. Tea + Bread, a tea-infused variety, is loaded with crunchy croutons fashioned from fluffy Nigerian Agege bread. Gbas Gbos (Nigerian slang for “a war of words”) is a silken chocolate ice cream with a slight kick of heat from ground Nigerian chiles. Love Nwantinti is made with a nonalcoholic African malt-based drink originally from Cameroon called Malta Guinness. Don’t look for sprinkles at Shuga x Ice. Agu’s intriguing toppings include fried plantain chips, cacao nibs, chin chin, Ovaltine cookie crumbles, kuli kuli (a spicy peanut snack mix) and Milo-brand malted chocolate powder. “You can get sprinkles anywhere,” Agu says. One scoop: $6.50; two: $8; three: $9.50. Waffle cone: $1.25. Toppings: $1 each. shugaxice.com
This story appears in the November/December 2024 issue of Bethesda Magazine.
