Call Your Mother’s Chef Will Start Serving Her Grandma’s Lasagna for Supper

Making the bagels that have plunged D.C. into a breakfast food frenzy has left Daniela Moreira with a tiny hole in her soul. Since Call Your Mother opened in October, the demand for the chef/parter’s wood-fired rounds has sent lines snaking outside the front door of the Park View deli. The breakfast counter looks to be an early success, but Moreira has missed creating multi-course meals.

When Call Your Mother starts its supper club next month, Moreira will be able to watch a small group of customers enjoying her food for hours.

“I lost all the cooking fun part,” Moreira says, “so this is a way of bringing that back.”

Starting March 5, Call Your Mother will serve themed dinners every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Tickets to the supper club must be reserved online (the first three are already sold out). For $68.50, guests get a welcoming bite, a cocktail, a three-course meal served family style, a dessert, and bottomless wine, beer, and soda. Tax and tip are included in the total.

The first night is reserved for a “Pasta Party,” with Moreira, a 2017 Eater Young Gun, crafting three kinds of noodles. There will be arancini to start, a Caesar salad with challah garlic bread, and cannoli bars to finish. For the main event, Moreira will make spaghetti and meatballs, tortellini stuffed with ricotta and pastrami, and a lasagna bolognese from a recipe she “literally copied” from her Argentinian grandmother.

“Lasagna is my favorite food besides pizza,” says Moreira, who is also partnered with deli owner Andrew Dana at Timber Pizza in Petworth.

The second themed dinner is “McMama’s Fast Food Night,” which will offer riffs on fast food classics. Dana says that might feature a wedge salad with chicken nuggets along with burgers and fries. Moreira is working on a version of a McFlurry with apple pie stirred into soft serve.

Kitchen manager and chef de cuisine Joe McPherson will lead the Southern Night. Dana says the kitchen has been experimenting with chicken fried turkey, black eyed peas, and corn bread. Moreira is looking forward to biscuits, hush puppies, and a cobbler finale.

Moreira is quick to say that baking is still her first passion, but she’s a culinary school grad with more to offer. She wants to tap into the feeling she got cooking with her mother and grandmother for grand parties in Argentina.

A plan for a supper club was always in the works, but Moreira was busy baking bagels at 1 a.m. when Call Your Mother first opened. She says she still shows up at the shop no later than 7 a.m. but doesn’t have to work the oven all the time anymore.

“Dani has long talked about how she loves making pasta,” Dana says, “so we thought this was a cool sort of creative outlet for her.”