Hispanic Heritage Month is here, and around the DMV that means a month of good food, live music, and culture as communities show up to celebrate what makes them, well, them.It runs September 15 through October 15, not the 1st, cause September 15 is Independence Day for five Latin American countries (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua), with Mexico's right behind it on the 16th and Chile's on the 18th. What started as a one-week observance in 1968 became the full month we know now in 1988, and ever since, it's been a chance to celebrate the history, culture, and contributions of Hispanic and Latino communities in everything from food and music to art and business.See our calendar of events for events and celebrations all month long.

Nycci has 24 years of industry tea, and she's spilling it here.

Nycci Nellis joined WTOP to preview the return of Summer DC Restaurant Week, which features nearly 400 participating restaurants across the DMV. She explained that diners can enjoy three-course lunch and brunch menus priced between $25 and $35, along with three-course dinners ranging from $40 to $65. Nycci encouraged guests to review Restaurant Week menus before dining, make reservations in advance due to high demand, and tip servers based on the full value of the dining experience. She also highlighted several first-time participants, including Malabar, Rosselli, The Grace, Uchi, Catahoula, and Rye Bunny, while recommending the free Let's Eat DC website, which allows diners to easily search every Restaurant Week menu. Beyond DC, Nycci also spotlighted Falls Church's inaugural Summer Restaurant Week and Maxwell Park's annual Lambrusco Week, giving food lovers even more opportunities to explore the region's dining scene.

Gus Constantellis, the comedian behind the viral Greek Mom videos, joins this DC food podcast to talk about the cookbook his mother's death made him write. Four days after she passed, he posted a meatball video that changed everything, and comedy turned out to be the only way he knew how to survive what came next.Gus Constantellis is the Greek American stand up comedian and writer behind the Greek Mom videos, the ones where he becomes his late mother, Julia, on camera with more love than most tributes manage. The character went viral during the pandemic and never really stopped. The real story is what happened after Julia died. Four days later, Gus posted a video making her meatball recipe, the first thing she ever taught him to cook, and that grief turned into My Greek Mom's Recipes, a cookbook with the tagline she died, I wrote this cookbook. On this episode of Industry Night, the DC food podcast hosted by Washington DC restaurant insider Nycci Nellis, Gus talks about the forty years his mother spent in America without learning English, the difference between the edited version of her the internet fell in love with and the real woman who complained about restaurants and got sick from fish, and how he decided which family recipes and stories belonged in the book. It is a conversation about comedy as a coping mechanism, food as a language that outlives the person who spoke it, and what it means to keep someone's voice alive on the page after it is gone from the room.Watch the interview here, or listen to it here.