There's some discussions on coming to a new neighborhood and the restaurant's operations that may be of interest whether you are a Morini frequenter or not:

* "In NY we had never really experienced the idea of opening in a whole new neighborhood. [...] In the first few months ,people were mad at us because they couldn’t find us." But apparently cabbies now know where 301 Water St. SE is.

* Another challenge: Patrons "not understanding what Southeast [DC] is like now. People who have lived in DC for more than 20 years will come here and say they can’t believe how beautiful it is here."

* The most memorable day of service: "Opening Day of baseball, without a doubt. At 3:45, the restaurant was empty. At 4 it was full. I've never experienced anything like that before."

* The customer base: "You might have a Congressman in the dining room, a lobbyist eating at the bar, someone in a Nats Jersey sitting down. [...] I remember one day when we had the head of the Federal Reserve at table 21, Nats fans at the bar, people from the neighborhood having pasta. "

The chefs were also asked about Nicoletta, the pizza/pasta carryout operation planned for one of the retail spaces under the overlook on the boardwalk, which was originally supposed to open a few months after Morini. White and Adler confirm that it's still coming, but that they are "in the process of getting the design right and working out the kinks." What about an opening date? "If I gave you a date, it probably would end up getting pushed back."

It used to be that the city offered the reports in an XML feed, but when that disappeared, I had to start going to the MPD reports page, go through a series of 15 clicks to download a usefully filtered file, open the file, and paste it into an import page I had created. Needless to say, this was not something I was interested in doing daily or even weekly.

But now I've built a new importer that parses a pasted version of the daily crime report sent out on the MPD-1D mailing list, stuffing each Near Southeast entry into my crime database.

This also means that I'm now getting additional "method" and "location" information that wasn't coming in the download from MPD.

I then went back through all non-theft from auto reports for the neighborhood back to the beginning of 2014 and updated the full database.

I also tweaked the display when you click on the red pushpins on both the homepage map and the archive database map.

I'll probably still need to go do the download from the MPD site every so often, to be sure that the data is complete, but at least now that's not the only way the data is coming in. And while I can't guarantee that this will always be updated daily, it's now a lot less likely to go three or four weeks between updates.