This week’s Meatless Monday takes us to Land of Kush, a black-owned vegan soul food restaurant on the western edge of the Mount Vernon neighborhood. It’s a stalwart of the city’s meat-free dining scene located about 10 minutes’ walk from the Peabody Institute.
One of Land of Kush’s most popular dishes is the vegan BBQ “ribs” (actually soy). We got ours with sides of kale salad and vegan mac and cheese, with a lemonade.
Given COVID-related physical distancing measures, we couldn’t eat at Land of Kush so we took a short walk to Pearlstone Park. The park’s site-specific concrete benches, created by celebrated sculptor Scott Burton, intentionally blur the lines between furniture and art. It’s a good place to contemplate how we can continue to figure out the balance between the needs for physical distancing and social connection. Meeting up with friends in uncrowded outdoor spaces is one of the best ways to satisfy both.
Pearlstone Park is located just opposite the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, home of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. The venue is closed due to the COVID pandemic, but the BSO has plenty of performance and podcast content online.
We’ve also created a special playlist on Spotify, to honor one of our favorite Baltimore cultural events: BSO Pulse. The series pairs indie artists with orchestral musicians to create extraordinary, unexpected music. Here’s a quick look at the BSO’s collaboration with Dawes in 2015:
There’s currently no way to stream BSO Pulse performances online, so we did the next best thing: created a BSO Pulse Homage playlist on Spotify. It has all the indie artists (including Moon Taxi, Valerie June, and Tank and the Bangas) and most of the composers (including George Gershwin, Erik Satie, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) who have been featured at Pulse concerts.
During the stress of quarantine, it’s genuinely beneficial to your mental health to try new things (see #11 on this list) whether it’s vegan ribs, a new hangout spot, or indie-orchestral mashups.
Research shows that Monday is the day of the week when people are most open to positive change, and engaging in healthy behavior on Monday helps to sustain that same behavior throughout the week. So eat, visit, or listen to something new today. And have a great week.