It was a bit warm this weekend, but still a great time to enjoy Rockville’s annual Hometown Holidays. I love seeing lots of people downtown enjoying our fair city, and I also like to see what’s happening with restaurants through the “Taste of Rockville” (you may figured out I’m a bit of a foodie). Lots of restaurants were there and the most exciting was Oro Pomodoro, who was making pizzas with a portable wood-burning oven. Some people may be disappointed in the lack of variety, but participating in a “taste” event is very difficult–restaurants often have to stretch their resources to staff a second location for two days and then guess at how much food to bring. Most do it as a community service and hope it will result in future customers–they rarely make any profit at these events. Alas, the “tastes” were large and typically cost $5 so I only managed to try out three restaurants. I hope next year they’ll include smaller menu items in the $1-3 range to encourage people to take a risk on something new.
There was plenty to do for families (which also meant lots of strollers to navigate) but adults could probably explore it all in a couple hours unless you enjoyed an entire performance. The City did a great job of placing and scheduling bands carefully throughout downtown, but setting up all the stages and chairs also pointed out that we lack obvious community gathering places downtown (hardly any benches and shade trees arranged for a group of a dozen or more people). Let’s hope the new buildings going up soon will solve that.
Max for Rockville 