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Architects Declare has made a peace offering to Zaha Hadid Architects and Foster & Partners after they pulled out of the climate commitment signed by more than 1,000 practices.

The group said it regretted not trying to talk to ZHA before publicly suggesting the firm should step down because of pro-growth comments made by its principal Patrik Schumacher.

It invited both ZHA and Fosters to consider re-signing the declaration which commits practices to 11 principles around working to mitigate climate change and biodiversity decline.

We are saddened and disappointed that two such globally influential practices have found it necessary to withdraw, it said.

Fosters was first to pull out at the start of the month, with Norman Foster himself issuing a statement criticising Architects Declare (AD) for using protest rather than innovation to tackle the issues. He was denounced by a separate group, the Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN), for what it called a bizarre, outdated statement relating to the aviation industry.

Foster said emissions from the production of hamburgers, steaks and similar agricultural products was equivalent to those produced by air and motorised transport and called for a sense of proportion.

The following day ZHA announced it too was walking away from AD because the group had published a statement asking it to consider its position. Members objected to remarks by Schumacher about the primacy of growth and prosperity.

In a statement published last night AD said: from the outset it has been ADs policy not to publicly call out our signatory colleagues work. We recognise that practices have varying approaches to meeting the goals of the declaration. What unites us is a shared vision of a built environment that addresses the climate and biodiversity crises.

The reason we felt compelled to respond to Patrik Schumachers recent statements was because they appeared to represent a shift away from this shared vision and thereby undermine the principles of the declaration.

Having read ZHAs withdrawal statement, we regret not having sought further dialogue with ZHA before suggesting that they withdraw from the declaration. We would like to encourage both Foster & Partners and ZHA to consider signing the declaration again soon in order to be part of this growing collaborative network.

More than 1,000 architectural practices have signed the pledge in the 18 months since it was launched by all 17 Stirling Prize-winners, including ZHA and Fosters.

It has set up regional groups, begun writing a Climate Emergency Practice Guide, raised 15,000 towards a paid coordinator and met government officials including former PRP chief Andy von Bradsky, who is now head of architecture at MHCLG, and Catherine Westoby from BEISs behaviour change division.

We have built real momentum and we now face an absolutely critical 12 months before [climate talks] COP26 in which we can grow the seeds of transformative change in the built environment, It said.

We believe that high ambitions for change will benefit from unity and the coming together of all architecture practices, large and small, and that this collective, practice-level action is central to the strength of Architects Declare.

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Architects Declare offers olive branch to ZHA and Fosters after walk-outs - Building Design

The Smile Architects - Dentists in Huntersville, NC

HUNTERSVILLE, N.C. (PRWEB) December 09, 2020

The team at The Smile Architects in Huntersville, NC is excited to announce the release of their new hybrid-responsive website: https://www.smilearchitects.com. Just as the practice prides itself on building beautiful smiles, Chris Meletiou, DDS and Jim Meletiou, DDS have been hard at work building a better website for their patients.

As Dr. Chris Meletiou explains, "My brother and I are very excited to provide our new and existing patients an easy to navigate website and app. This will allow our patients the flexibility to schedule and contact us with their dental needs quickly and efficiently. The new interactive website and app are ever-changing to meet our patients needs now and into the future. Please take a moment to see how they have evolved and how our new website and app can benefit you."

The Smile Architects has been serving the Huntersville community since the early 1980s. The current head dentists are brothers with a combined over 60 years of knowledge and experience between them. Providing exceptional dental care is the brothers mission and the new website facilitates this by allowing patients to access the information they need and connect with the practice more easily.

On the new Smile Architects website, patients will find intuitive navigation and improved usability. With a hybrid-responsive design, the site renders equally well on smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktop computers. Whether patients are at home, at work, or on-the-go, theyll find a website that is easy to read and navigate, allowing them to find exactly what they need when they need it.

Above all else, the brothers goal with the new website is to create a resource for their patients. Rather than simply using the site as a marketing tool, Smile Architects provides information about insurance, dental conditions, procedures, and aftercare instructions. Patients can email their doctor, request an appointment online, and read updates from the practice on their blog.

In addition to working on the new website, the Smile Architects team has been busy implementing new protocols to protect patients and staff from COVID-19. The practice is following all guidelines from the American Dental Association, Centers for Disease Control, and Occupational Safety and Health Administration, including screening all patients prior to their appointments, offering hand sanitizer for patient use, and adjusting schedules to allow for social distancing between patients.

About Chris Meletiou, DDS

Dr. Chris Meletiou earned his Doctor of Dental Surgery degree from the University of Iowa and completed a hospital residency program at the university upon graduation. He has been practicing in Huntersville, NC since 1991, with a focus on complete family dental care including Invisalign orthodontics, restoration of implants, and aesthetic dentistry.

About Jim Meletiou, DDS

Dr. Jim Meletiou received a Doctor of Dental Surgery degree from the University of Iowa and worked as an instructor in the universitys Department of Oral Diagnosis and Radiology. Before joining his brother at The Smile Architects, Dr. Jim practiced in Wisconsin. He has advanced training in the restoration of dental implants and aesthetic dentistry.

About The Smile Architects

The Smile Architects provides comprehensive dental care to patients in Huntersville, NC. Services include preventive care, cosmetic dentistry, restorative dentistry, root canals, periodontics, sleep apnea treatment, and Invisalign orthodontics. To learn more or request an appointment, visit the new website at https://www.smilearchitects.com, schedule a visit to the office at 131 Marguerite Lane, Huntersville, NC 28078, or call 704-875-1621.

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The Smile Architects of Huntersville, NC Announces New Responsive Website - PR Web

Foster + Partners and Zaha Hadid Architects have both withdrawn from Architects Declare, an organization seeking to raise awareness of the climate and biodiversity emergency.Photo Hufton+Crow

Foster + Partners and Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) have left Architects Declare, a network of architecture practices seeking to raise awareness about climate change and loss of biodiversity.

As per Dezeen, the decision to exit Architects Declare was made after signatories, such as Foster + Partners and ZHA, were criticized for designing airports and for being involved in the aviation sector. Last week, Architects Declare told Dezeen that high-profilearchitects are clearly contravening climate pledges.

Foster + Partners has withdrawn from Architects Declare because, since our founding in 1967, we have pioneered a green agenda and believe that aviation, like any other sector, needs the most sustainable infrastructure to fulfil its purpose, said Norman Foster, studio founder,in a statement issued to Dezeen.

Agriculture and aviation are not going to go away and they will both need the most sustainable buildings to serve them together with the architects who can most responsibly design them, the statement said.

Architects Declare released a statement on Foster + Partners saying, We are disappointed that Foster + Partners have chosen to withdraw from the declarations and we would welcome a conversation with them on the points raised. We recognize that addressing the climate and biodiversity emergencies challenges current practice and business models for us all, not least around the expansion of aviation. We believe that what is needed is system change and that can only come about through collective action. Architects Declare is not a protest movement but a collaborative support network to innovate positive transformation. Our movement is global.

ZHA exited the group asserting that Architects Declare is setting the profession up for failure.

Architects Declares steering group has unilaterally decided on its own precise and absolute interpretation of the coalitions commitments, ZHA said in a statement to Architects Journal. By doing so, we believe they are setting the profession up for failure. Redefining these commitments without engagement undermines the coalition and trust. We saw Architects Declare as a broad Church to raise consciousness on the issues; enabling architectural practices of all sizes to build a coalition for change and help each other find solutions. We need to be progressive, but we see no advantage in positioning the profession to fail. In fact, it would be a historic mistake.

In response, Architects Declare said, Patrik Schumacher of ZHA (a signature practice to Architects Declare) had asserted that we need to allow prosperity and progress to continue and that will also bring the resources to overcome [the climate crisis] through investment in science and new technologies. That must be built on continuous growth. He also warned against those voices who are too quick to demand radical changes. We believe these statements are fundamentally in conflict with the Architects Declare commitment to advocate for faster change in our industry towards regenerative practices. We also believe these statements are scientifically flawed and decades out of date in terms of informed intellectual thought. Click here to read the full statement.

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Foster + Partners and Zaha Hadid withdraw from Architects Declare - The Construction Specifier

Bjarke Ingels, Danish founder of the architectural practice BIG (short for Bjarke Ingels Group), bridles at the suggestion that he is megalomaniac. I made a mistake at the dawn of time when I named my office BIG, he tells me, speaking from the converted car ferry in the port of Copenhagen that is one of his homes. It felt sweet when we started off in Denmark. Now it means we always get re-interpreted as megalomaniacs.

Well yes, maybe, but his new book, Formgiving: An Architectural Future History, does place the work of his practice in the context of a timeline of the creation of absolutely everything that goes back via the evolution of life to the big bang. It also introduces the concept of Masterplanet, whereby the Earth and its climate would be put to rights by the sort of plans that architects sometimes prepare for neighbourhoods and large-scale development proposals. The magic of form the architectural technique whereby BIG can, for example, give a twisting shape to an art gallery outside Oslo or a tower in Vancouver is in this view continuous with problem-solving for a whole planet.

Its partly a guy thing. Ingels, 46, doesnt seem troubled by the striking gendering of Masterplanet. The practices website address is Big.dk, which, however droll it might have seemed 15 years ago, has surely outlived its welcome. But he has his answers to the accusations of megalomania: You can dismiss the desire to deal with a very important issue or you should believe that youre going to intervene for the better.

Its fair to say that Ingels is a can-do sort of person. BIG is now big, with more than 550 employees in its offices in Copenhagen, New York, London and Barcelona. He has made his name with monuments for the Instagram age CopenHill, the Copenhagen power plant that is also a ski slope; or West 57th, his courtscraper in Manhattan a giant off-kilter pyramid punctured by a garden courtyard. He has designed (with Thomas Heatherwick) headquarters for the mighty Google, now rising in London and in Silicon Valley.

In BIGs world you can have it all. Yes is more, to quote the title of one of his earlier books. Opposites can be reconciled into what Ingels calls oxymorons or bigamy. You can have a power plant and a ski slope. The courtscraper, says the official blurb, combines the density of the American skyscraper with the communal space of the European courtyard. He speaks of pragmatic utopianism and hedonistic sustainability, which means you can save the planet and still have a good time. The Dryline, his plan for combining flood defences for lower Manhattan with public parks, encapsulates the idea.

Ingels cites as inspiration The Rational Optimist (2010) by Matt Ridley, the British viscount, self-described climate lukewarmer and former chairman of Northern Rock bank. I recognise a lot of the vibe, says Ingels of Ridleys book. He makes the claim that optimism is not a question of naivety. Its empirical. You can see that things tend to evolve in a good way. And this is part of the thesis of Formgiving. There is an ever-increasing ability to collaborate, of doing better and better. Where others get nervous about such things as artificial intelligence and the replacement of crafts by robots, Ingels gets excited.

In the world of architecture, Ingels presents a challenge. Hes prolific, hes rich. He turns the cherished tropes and dreams of other architects into smash hits. He makes the visionary physical. For the Burning Man festival he designed a structure in the shape of a giant orb. His Oceanix project proposes a floating city. His Google Bay View building puts a multiplicity of human life under a great oversailing roof. All seem to owe something to visionary architects of the past respectively to the 18th-century French revolutionary tienne-Louis Boulle, to the 1960s Japanese metabolist group, to the 20th-century American Buckminster Fuller.

Most obviously he has learned from his former employer Rem Koolhaas, with whom he shares a love of crashing together seemingly incongruous uses and forms a WTF fondness for puncturing piety and pomposity, an attitude that says lets embrace the modern world for all it is, in all its extremes of beauty and ugliness. Like Koolhaas, Ingels has a prodigious publishing habit: Formgiving is the last of a trilogy.

Koolhaas, however, comes with a certain amount of existential angst, which Ingels discards, which doubtless makes him more attractive to clients. He more generally dispenses with the difficulties and complexities and sometimes the social issues over which other architects agonise. He rinses out the problematic. Instead, he offers his oxymoron, which makes complexity and contradiction into a charmingly consumable package. Which raises a question: are the angst and scruples of other architects actually important, or should we just accept Ingelss invitation to lie back and enjoy the ride?

This is partly about detail. His projects tend to come with loud clunks, where his ambitions of his ideas and shapes are imperfectly reconciled. In those of his works that I have seen, there is often a lack of joy in the way cladding panels and Planar glazing enable the transition from computer screen to physical reality. At the 8 House, an early housing project on the outskirts of Copenhagen, many of its residents have furnished their flats and terraces from Ikea: combined with BIGs construction they conjure a dizzying feeling of just-stuck-togetherness, of coalitions of convenience between processed sheet materials.

Its also about politics. In January, Ingels met Brazils forest-wrecking, racist and homophobic president Jair Bolsonaro, in order to discuss a plan (as the countrys tourism minister put it) to change the face of tourism in Brazil. For this, Ingels was accused by a leading architecture critic of lacking a moral compass, and the controversy may have contributed to office space company WeWorks decision soon afterwards to cease employing Ingels as their chief architect. Id like to raise this with him, but the publicists for his book rule it out: there is no direct link to Formgiving with regard to politics, they say beforehand; please strike the question from the interview. Ingels, however, has previously expressed himself on the subject: criticisms of his Bolsonaro visit, he said, were an oversimplification of a complex world.

He also pushes back at critiques of detail. He cites his recent museum for the Audemars Piguet watch company, a grass-roofed spiral in the Swiss Jura. Its hard to complain about detail with that, he says. The 8 House was a very inexpensive project. It was finished in the middle of the biggest financial crisis in my lifetime. Every cost that could be reduced was reduced.

Its probably clear that Im what Lord Ridley might call a BIG-lukewarmer. I believe that much gets lost in Ingelss blithe renunciation of the complex and the particular. But those of us who would curl our lips and wrinkle our noses should answer his challenge. A project such as CopenHill makes a powerful and direct appeal to almost all the non-professionals who see it, as the Dryline in New York probably will. What can more fastidious beings offer to match them?

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Bjarke Ingels: the BIG-time architect with designs on the entire planet - The Guardian

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CAMH Research Centre, by KPMB with TreanorHL - Canadian Architect Award of Excellence winner.

Winners have been announced for the 53rd annual Canadian Architect Awards of Excellence. The awards are considered the highest recognition for Canadian architects and projects currently in the design and construction phases. This year 132 entries were submitted and reviewed by the jury.

The awards program shared that the entries themselves "show that Canadian architects are still amply producing innovative designs that are sensitive to their physical, social and environmental contexts."

View this year's winners in all five categories and select project images below.

2020 CANADIAN ARCHITECT AWARDS OF EXCELLENCE

2020 CANADIAN ARCHITECT AWARDS OF MERIT

2020 CANADIAN ARCHITECT STUDENT AWARDS OF EXCELLENCE

2020 CANADIAN ARCHITECTPHOTO AWARDS OF EXCELLENCE

2020 CANADIAN ARCHITECTPHOTO AWARDS OF MERIT

Award-winning projects will be featured in the December issue of Canadian Architect. To learn more about the winners and their projects click here.

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The annual Canadian Architect Awards of Excellence highlights its 2020 winners - Archinect

MONROE, CT Michelle Kaplin was on remote leave as a nurse at ACES Wintergreen Interdistrict Magnet School last the spring, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced educators to close the building. But, rather than stay home, Kaplin chose to join her colleagues on the front lines, taking a job at The Watermark, a continuing care retirement community in Bridgeport.

Kaplin, who now works at David Wooster Middle School in Stratford, served on the medical team at The Watermark, treating residents on the COVID floor, and witnessed the heartbreak of seeing some patients dying alone.

I just felt this calling to go, Kaplin said. I just couldnt imagine sitting home. Its not about the money, its about helping people. I needed to do something about the pandemic.

Kaplin, who lives in Monroe, was recently recognized as aHeartthrob Hero in MDF Painting and Power Washings campaign to show appreciation to health care workers during the pandemic.

Michelle Kaplin, an R.N., at work at The Watermark in Bridgeport.

We all know someone who is working at the front lines of this virus, the company website says. Whether it is a friend, family member, or significant other, those who work in healthcare are appreciated now more than ever. To say thank you to those who are working for us, were going to work for you.Nominate the frontline hero that you love for a chance to win them painting services worth up to $6,000. Say thank you by giving them one less thing to worry about.

The campaign is named after the Sherwin Williams paint shade, Heartthrob, which inspired it.

Kaplin said she doesnt have a clue who nominated her, adding she was surprised to receive a phone call about being awarded the free painting services from the Heartthrob for Heroes campaign.

I thought it was a spam call and asked her to stop calling me, she said of the woman from MDF. Then she emailed me to say, were not kidding.'

Painters from MDF Painting & Power Washing, from left, Renaldo Lima, Alceu Neto and Edson Santos, carry supplies into Michelle Kaplins house in Monroe Thursday.

Who would nominate me? Im a nurse from Monroe and youre in Greenwich, Kaplin thought. Its nice. Im just shocked. There were a lot of doctors and nurses in the ICU doing far more than I was. I was just doing my part in COVID land.

On Thursday morning, a white van pulled up on Kaplins street and three painters from MDF emerged, carrying painting supplies.I cant believe theyre here and Im not paying for this, she said.

She expressed her appreciation to whomever nominated her, calling the painting services a nice gift.

Perfect timing

Kaplin and her wife, Karen Widdows, recently paid Basement Systems to waterproof the walls and floors of their basement, and install a drainage system with a sump pump, after two flooding incidents at their Monroe home.

The guy left and said we should really get it painted. We couldnt afford that, Kaplin said. I got cancer in December. My son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in February. Then COVID struck. No one was thinking about paint.

Because of the pandemic, Kaplin said her radiation treatment was delayed by eight months and her first session was in August.

Michelle Kaplin, right, with, from left, her son Shalom, 14, daughter, Emma, 10, and wife, Karen Widdows.

Kaplin and Widdows have a daughter, Emma, 10, and their 14-year-old sons name is Shalom. Kaplin also has another daughter, Hadassah, 16, who lives with her grandmother, while going to high school.

Emmas bedroom will be painted a blue color called Wave Top.

Aside from type 1 diabetes, Shalom has Autism and a broken femur. The basement is set up like an apartment for him with a medical bed. His area will be painted a green color called Fern Canopy.

Hes into Army and nature now, Kaplin explained.

While working in the living room, Widdows, a human resources professional, was seated on the couch with her laptop and phone in her lap.

I think its fantastic, she said of her wife being honored as a Heartthrob Hero. She deserves it. She worked hard. She has a good heart. When this was happening, she wanted to help out.

Widdows said Kaplin would come home from work and sanitize herself inside their garage, before entering the house to make sure no one would get sick.

I would spray Lysol and get undressed in the garage, Kaplin said. I kept my work clothes in there.

I would bring her clothes and she would come in and shower, Widdows said. The next day, we would take the work clothes from the garage.

While treating patients, Kaplin said she never worried about catching COVID. One time, a woman with the disease checked in and was within inches of Kaplin, who said she was fortunate not to contract it.

She said she probably received 12 COVID tests, while working at The Watermark, where staffers were tested weekly.

Sad goodbyes

The Watermark did not want to risk spreading the coronavirus by having too many visitors coming and going, so Kaplin said families could not visit their loved-ones, until they were at deaths door.

She said family members would either arrange for a video call or sit on a chair in the parking lot to look at their loved-one from their window, while talking on the phone.

When patients were near death, relatives could be suited up with protective gear and go in the room to hold their hand.

Kaplin said some relatives declined to visit, saying that was not how they wanted to remember their loved-one. She remembers talking to a woman, who was incapacitated, telling her that her family loved her, wanted to be there, but it was hard. Kaplan hoped the woman could hear her and feel comforted.

People were scared to go in there. The longterm care facilities were hit the hardest, Kaplin said. Thats why we went into nursing. It was a calling. I was a school nurse on leave and I just couldnt fathom sitting idly by, while people were dying.

Kaplin said people at The Watermark were kind to the medical staff, providing lunches for them every day, adding, those three months were perhaps the most rewarding of my career.

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Hero of the pandemic: Diagnosed with cancer, a Monroe nurse answers the call - The Monroe Sun

Nikola Badger Is Dead Before It Was Even Born

Nikola had conceptualized the truck, but it was to be brought to life by General Motors.

Earlier this week, Nikolas meeting with the auto giant resulted in a new Memorandum of Understanding that had no mention of GMs commitment to build and validate the Badger. The company said in a statement, As previously announced, the Nikola Badger program was dependent on an OEM partnership.", "Nikola will refund all previously submitted order deposits for the Nikola Badger,". Well, its confirmed that Nikola doesnt want to partner with any other automaker.

Back in June when the company revealed details about the Badger, it also said that the truck would debut at the Nikola World 2020 event that was to be held on December 3 and 4, 2020. Here we are on D-Day, mourning for the truck instead of being all excited about its launch. Well, some things are not meant to happen.

Did you have your hopes pinned on the Nikola Badger and were looking forward to its debut, or did you think it was too good to be real? Also, hypothetically speaking, if Nikola went scouting for a new partner-automaker, who would its first choice be to build the Badger? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.

Source: Cnet

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The truck had a lot of potential, but GMs move to back out of building it has resulted in its death - Top Speed

National Review

As Democratic Senate Candidate Raphael Warnock tries to assure Jews that he is a friend, new video has surfaced of the Georgia Baptist preacher again linking Israel to apartheid.In the video, purportedly from a Palm Sunday sermon in 2015, Warnock also likened Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to former segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace.Warnock made the statements shortly after the 2015 Israeli elections, won by Netanyahus Likud Party. On the final day of the campaign, Netanyahu announced his opposition to a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, walking back previous support.In his sermon, Warnock described the Israeli and Palestinian region as a land of violence and bloodshed and occupation, and said he heard a very clever politician running for re-election as prime minister suddenly announce No two-state solution, he said.Thats tantamount to saying, occupation today, occupation tomorrow, occupation forever, Warnock said, using phrasing mirroring Wallaces racist call in 1963 for segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.> During his 2015 Palm Sunday Sermon, Dem. Raphael Warnock explicitly called Israel an Apartheid State, describing it as a land of violence and bloodshed and occupation and he referred to Israeli leaders as clever politicians, and accusing them of being racist and vicious. pic.twitter.com/jfdkOUzung> > -- Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) December 10, 2020Warnock urges his parishioners to consider the Middle East demographics. There are more Arabs in the region that Jews, he said. Without a two-state solution, the Jews in the region would need undemocratic apartheid-like policies, or risk being overwhelmed at the polls.The state will either be Jewish, or it will be a democracy, he said. It cant be both if you dont have a Palestinian state. You would have to have apartheid in Israel that denies other citizens, sisters and brothers, citizenship.Warnock also took aim at a statement Netanyahu made in the lead-up to voting when he warned that his right-wing government was in danger, and urged his supporters to vote because Arab voters are heading to polling stations in droves. Warnock described Netanyahus statement as kind of racist and vicious language.Warnock is one of two Democrats in Georgia trying to defeat Republican incumbents in a January runoff election. If both win, Democrats will take over the Senate.This wasnt the first time Warnocks past statements about Israel have come back to haunt him. Last year, Warnock was part of a group of African American church leaders who toured the Middle East and released a statement accusing Israel of engaging in tactics similar to those previously used by apartheid South Africa and communist East Germany patterns that seem to have been borrowed and perfected from other previous repressive regimes.In a 2018 sermon, after a Hamas terrorists stormed the Israeli border, Warnock accused the Israeli government of shooting down unarmed Palestinian sisters and brothers like birds of prey like they dont matter at all.As a Senate candidate, Warnock has attempted to walk back his apartheid allegations, and released a position paper asserting that he is a friend of Israel.I will stand with Israel and the Jewish people to protect their interests, advocate for the human dignity of the Palestinian people and their position in the world, promote peace, and ensure the U.S. remains economically strong, safe, and secure.

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Michael Hughes Arrested After Shots Fired In Direction Of Several Police Officers In Fountain - Yahoo News

A hometown bar. A living room. A non-French French restaurant. A place for long conversations. These are just some of the words that Mona Poor-Olschafskie and Christian Perkins use to talk about Fin Du Monde, their just-opened restaurant and bar at 38 Driggs Avenue, at Sutton Street, in Greenpoint. The duos vision for the restaurant is multifaceted, but their first priority is to create a place where residents in the neighborhood feel welcome.

We wanted to open a place that we would want to go to ourselves, says Poor-Olschafskie, a hospitality industry veteran who lives a few blocks from Fin Du Monde. A place that was accessible, not a place with a huge super-expensive wine list or lots of ingredients nobody knows how to pronounce.

To note, neither Poor-Olschafskie nor Perkins have much experience working in those types of restaurants, despite each having been in the hospitality industry for more than a decade. Before opening Fin Du Monde, Poor-Olschafskie worked at several of the citys leading breweries, including Threes Brewing in Gowanus and two spots in Carroll Gardens, Other Half Brewing and Folksbier Brauerei. Beers from her old haunts have made their way to the menu at Fin Du Monde, which in addition to a few bottles of wine serves a lager from Folksbier and an IPA from Threes on tap.

The restaurants food menu is loosely French-American but strictly local, a pairing that Perkins picked up while working for restaurateur Andrew Tarlow at hit restaurants such as Diner, Marlow and Sons, and its offshoot butcher shop Marlow and Daughters. Most recently, he helped open Annicka, a brief but well-received Greenpoint restaurant that focused on seasonal food and local craft beer. Theres a similar ethos behind Fin Du Monde, according to Perkins, which aims to serve locally sourced produce and meat without charging more than $30 for an entree, which isnt uncommon at many upscale restaurants in the city.

Its a tightrope walk, but its possible, Perkins says. You have to create a very, very tight menu that isnt reliant upon luxury ingredients.

All told, the food menu at Fin Du Monde is 10 items long, desserts included, and Perkins keeps things simple. The restaurant serves a big French salad topped with fried walnuts and funky Roquefort cheese ($13). Further down the menu, theres a roast chicken and pepper risotto ($22), along with a braised boeuf bourguignon that comes with buttery noodles ($24). These dishes are meant to invoke a French bistro or a Parisian natural wine bar but only sort of.

Its a non-French French place, Perkins says. It has a French name, but we like the goofiness of it.

Like countless other restaurant owners, Poor-Olschafskie and Perkins had been planning Fin Du Monde long before the start of the pandemic in March. In July 2019, the duo launched a GoFundMe campaign to help open the restaurant and assist with construction costs. More than a year and nearly $20,000 in donations later, Perkins likened Fin Du Monde to a train rolling down the tracks that couldnt be stopped. We had no choice but to keep going, and we wouldnt have wanted to stop anyway, he says.

As for the name translated as end of the world in French Perkins says the restaurant is the kind of place you want to be at the end of the world, which he quickly adds is, thankfully, not right now.

Fin Du Monde has roughly 20 seats for outdoor dining and six seats inside at the state-mandated 25 percent capacity. The restaurant is open Tuesday to Saturday from 5 to 10 p.m. and closed Sunday through Monday.

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Greenpoints Newest Restaurant, Fin Du Monde, Brings a Touch of France With Craft Beer - Eater NY

Mina Corpuz|The Enterprise

BROCKTON Rudy Alves is tapping into his artistic background and sharing Cape Verdean culture at his new restaurant Khalil's Kitchen.

"When you come here you're going to get a good meal and enjoy the vibes," he said about the eatery, which opened about a month ago at 808 Main St.

The restaurant serves up soul food with a Caribbean twist, Alves said.The menu includes burgers, fries topped with protein, wings, smoothies and more. Some of the dishes featurelobster, like the mac and cheese.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, he closed his T-shirt business andbegan cooking at home to make money for his family. That turned into a business.

While cooking at home, Alves has been able to see his three children more. They were able to be around, which was not possible in his other jobs, like T-shirt printing and tattooing.

His middle child, Khalil, is the restaurant's namesake. At home, Khalil would come around the kitchen and Alves said he had the idea to call the kitchen his.

Since the business opened, his 5-year-old daughterChloe, 2-year-old Khalil and 9-month old son London have visited the restaurant.

Alves said he never imagined that he would open a restaurant. But everything happened so fast, starting out as a vision that he was able to manifest.

"I wake up ready to come here," he said. "I doesn't feel like a job."

Alves found the Main Street space for his restaurant in the summer and worked on it, drawing on his construction background and designing the inside.

The pandemic has been a challenging time for businesses and restaurants. But Alves said that being able to open during this time was motivational.

"If I can do all of this during this time, I can grow and more," he said.

Alves learned to cook from his mother, who wished she had a daughter. She would ask him to cook rice after school so that it would be ready when she came home from work.

Little by little, he would ask her more about cooking. She taught him Cape Verdean dishes that Alves has been able to put his own spin on and blend with other food styles.

He said she she is proud to see him open the business and do something he loves.

Now that Alves has a commercial kitchen, he said there are endless possibilities for what he can cook. He likes to create his own sauces and find his own flavors.

"I'm always trying to create things and experiment," Alves said.

Looking ahead, hewants to share his newfound love for the kitchen. Alves shares pictures on his Instagram @khalils_kitchen_ and plans to release videos that provide a behind the scenes look at the restaurant.

Opening up a restaurant in Boston is a future goal, he said.

Staff writer Mina Corpuz can be reached by email at mcorpuz@enterprisenews.com. You can follow her on Twitter @mlcorpuz.Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Enterprise today.

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Here's what's on the menu at new Brockton Caribbean soul food restaurant - Enterprise News