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The Arlington location of Sweet Science Coffee in Lyon Village rang in the New Year with a new name, SIMONA Café, and more food and drink options.

Despite the new offerings, “the coffee program is still a really good program,” says owner Jad Bouchebel, who remains a partner in the business. Sweet Science continues to operate under the original brand in D.C.’s NoMA neighborhood.

The acclaimed Sweet Science Coffee opened the outpost at 2507 N. Franklin Road, near Courthouse, about two years ago, advertising some “all-day” offerings to differentiate the Arlington offshoot.

But Bouchebel says it took until last spring, with help from his associate Roberto “Tito” Peña, to get more lunch items on the menu and to put to use its ABC license for beer and wine. Last fall, the duo decided to rebrand, redecorate the coffee shop’s spartan interior and expand the menu and hours.

“We wanted to make it more of an all-day concept. That’s the reason we changed the name — to separate from the D.C. location,” said Bouchebel, an Alexandria resident who named the cafe after his daughter. “We don’t want to confuse people. We offer totally different offerings.”

Bouchebel, still a partner at Sweet Science as well as Clarendon nightlife spot Wilson Hardware, says the cafe never really closed, but SIMONA Café had a soft opening in late December and its grand opening on Friday, Jan. 20.

Now, Peña says, the café’s interior gives people “a cool place to hang out in the afternoon,” and enjoy lunch and dinner options, charcuterie and cheese boards, beer, wine and weekend mimosas.

Like the coffee menu, Peña says the wine list is one that “people can delve into without much knowledge.”

The food menu, meanwhile, keeps the kitchen staff at SIMONA busy.

“We bake our own bread for our breakfast sandwiches,” Bouchebel said. “Everything we do in house: from salsa, to toppings, to bread and to our pastries — we bake them every morning here.”

Peña says the coffee comes from Rare Bird Coffee Roasters in Falls Church, and his baristas aim “to provide really nice coffee that’s approachable.”

“We can get nerdy if people want, but the goal is to meet customers where they’re coming in,” he said.

For Peña and Bouchebel, the expanded hours and menu pay homage to the coffee shop’s history. The space used to be home to Java Shack, a community hub at one point owned by Commonwealth Joe, which closed the location in 2019.

“We still get a lot of clients who’d been coming for 20 years,” Bouchebel said. “Java Shack was a staple — a neighborhood cafe — so instead of just offering half-day hours, we kept it going whole-day for people looking for [that experience].”

Peña says he remembers going to Java Shack in the ’90s as a high school student.

“It was my first favorite coffee shop,” he said. “It’s kind of cool: the original owner, Dale, is now a regular for us. I talk to him every week… We have some regulars who’ve been coming for 20 years.”

OUTER BANKS, N.C. — As we celebrate Black History Month, Spectrum News 1 has been looking back on life-changing people, events and movements in North Carolina’s history.

This week, we’re honoring the heroic actions of the crew members of the Pea Island Lifesaving Station, with the help of Zachary Lemhouse, staff historian for the Culture and Heritage Museums of York County, South Carolina.

What You Need To Know

From 1874 to 1878, a chain of 18 lifesaving stations were built 15 miles along North Carolina’s Outer Banks, in an area referred to as “The Graveyard of the Atlantic.”

The Pea Island Lifesaving Station became the first lifesaving station in the country to have an entirely African-American crew, including their commander, Richard Etheridge.

“Etheridge was born into slavery in North Carolina in 1842. His enslaver was a commercial fishing operator, and Etheridge learned to navigate the shallow waters off of North Carolina’s coast,” Lemhouse explained. “He joined the Union army (36^th Colored Regiment) during the American Civil War. Following the war, he was appointed keeper of the lifesaving station on Pea Island.”

Lemhouse says Etheridge developed a series of rigorous life-saving drills to help prepare his crew for emergency operations.

“These drills paid off — on Oct. 11, 1896, a schooner called the E.S. Newman ran aground during a hurricane two miles south of the Pea Island Station,” Lemhouse said.

Etheridge's crew saw the distress flare from the E.S. Newman and sprang into action.

“The Pea Island crew risked their lives during a four-hour rescue operation to save the nine crewmen aboard, including the captain’s wife and 3-year-old son,” Lemhouse said.

In 1996, the Coast Guard posthumously awarded the gold lifesaving medal to members of the Pea Island Lifesaving Station:

For more information about Pea Island Life-Saving Station, visit the Pea Island Preservation Society website.

Lemhouse also helps to organize a series of Black History Month events at Historic Brattonsville. To learn more about them, click here.

The September pairing of two area artists, Anne Rauton Smith and Judy Adamick, in the Aiken Artist Guild gallery inside the Aiken Art Center should come as no surprise.

Not only does the work of each artist complement that of the other, but the two are good friends who paint together weekly.

Both of them live on the Ridge – Adamick near Ward and Smith near Johnston – and both draw inspiration from the countryside around them. However, that countryside manifests itself in different ways in their paintings.

Smith is a Johnston native who, with her husband Clyde, returned to the family homestead, remodeling what was once a tenant house on her family's farm and then building a studio behind.

Smith is well known in her own community and beyond for pen and ink drawings that sometimes remain black and white, but often become the basis for her watercolor paintings.

She has pictured a variety of buildings over the years and has drawn and painted residences on commission, but when you look at her work as a whole, it is clear that old barns and other farm buildings are a favorite.

Her work expresses admiration for them as they weather old age, and it becomes a memorial to their past lives when the buildings crumble.

Adamick is a Connecticut native who grew up on a dairy farm. She moved to Ridge Spring with her husband to open a bed and breakfast, Southwood Manor, which included a fly-in facility for pilots.

Upon her husband's death, she sold the house and found a country place: 12 acres on a pond with a Ward address that just happens to be across the road from her daughter and her family. There she established a menagerie: chickens of several varieties, English Southdown Babydoll Black Sheep, and ducks who waddle through the gate and up the walk in picturesque formation for a morning visit when they hear her put the kettle on for her morning cup of tea.

Not only do these animals provide companionship, but they also provide models for many of Adamick's paintings. She had painted in oils and acrylics before moving to South Carolina and, once here, added watercolor to her repertoire of media.

She continues to work in all three, depending on the subject and the effect for which she is looking.

Besides the exhibit in Aiken, both artists have another project afoot for September.

The Edgefield County Theatre Company will present “Nightwatch,” a suspense thriller by Louise Fletcher in which local artists will adorn the set with paintings reflecting the masterworks of well known artists.

For Adamick, it's an easy choice. Since she has painted in Monet's garden at Giverny, she plans a painting in that artist's style, of water lilies, one of his favorite subjects.

Smith has not yet decided what artist she will imitate, but she knows she will have fun doing it. Though her ink and watercolor pictures offer a distinct style, she occasionally strays from it just for relaxation, painting abstracts and experimenting with different techniques. This will be one more opportunity to try something new.

The Aiken Artist Guild exhibit will provide a large sampling of the work of both artists.

Their work is on display in a variety of other venues, but favorites of both artists are Neighbors Café on 133 North Oak St. in Batesburg and Juniper on 640 East Main in Ridge Spring.

Both are members of the South Carolina Watermedia Society and both have served the Aiken Artist Guild in a variety of capacities.

Their work in the Aiken Art Center at 122 Laurens St. S.W. will be on display from Tuesday through Sept. 26.

A reception on Sept. 11 from 6 to 8 p.m. will honor them as well as the 15 artists of Cedar Creek whose work will be in the main gallery. The public is invited.

When Linda Hardy left Missouri, medical degree in hand, in order to pursue a residency in Augusta, she probably did not realize she would spend the rest of her life there.

As she pursued her career as a child and adolescent psychiatrist, she married a radiation oncologist and focused primarily on medical interests.

For several years, she was director of medical student education in the Department of Psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia (now a part of Augusta University), leaving that to go into private practice.

Upon retirement, she thought she would try painting, a totally new venture for her, and she has been painting successfully ever since.

When she decided to pick up a paintbrush, it was only natural that Hardy would turn to David Mascaro as her teacher.

She did not know him well, but she knew his reputation as a professor of medical illustration at the Medical University where both had worked, and she knew that, in his retirement, he was offering painting classes in a Washington Road studio.

Although Mascaro is now deceased, she joins other of his students in his studio one day each week to pursue her art.

She said it is motivating to “know you’ll spend the day painting,” and she enjoys being with artists who share her impulse.

On other days, she paints at home in a basement-level studio, though perhaps not for such long sessions. She finds that regular practice is important in achieving what she is looking for and she tries to paint nearly every day.

Hardy’s first paintings were in oil, but she found that acrylics suited her style better. She works quickly, and with acrylics, she does not need to slow down to wait for paint to dry. Initially, she was displeased with what she put on canvas, but a breakthrough came and she began to like what she found herself creating.

Although her style is loose, the brush strokes have a certain authority that tell the viewer this artist knows what she is doing. Her aim is not to recreate an image using photo realism but to capture the essence of what she sees.

Unlike many artists, Hardy does not fill her walls with her own paintings. Rather, they hold an assortment of large canvases, for the most part painted by artists such as Bea Kulke and Mary Ann Brock known and revered in this area.

Her home is also ornamented by two aging long-haired cats, siblings, Rowdy and Pretty Boy, and by a standard poodle, Drake, a breed she selected in part to cut down on the accumulation of animal hair in the house. Drake often accompanies her on walks, her favorite form of exercise.

Marsh scenes and flowers, two of Hardy’s favorite subjects, are the dominant subjects of Hardy’s paintings that will be exhibited at the Aiken Center for the Arts from Tuesday through Feb. 13.

A reception from 6 to 8 p.m. on Thursday will give the public the opportunity to meet her and to see her work. Other exhibits featured at the arts center are being held over from December, offering viewers the opportunity to catch up on what they might have missed earlier.

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCIV) -- Neighbors say a woman's arm was amputated after her husband's{}dog attacked her Sunday night in the Wescott Plantation neighborhood of North Charleston.

Police say the call first came in as a dog attack on a child, but when they arrived they found{}48-year-old Katherine Rizk{}had been viciously bitten.

"Terrible, absolutely terrible," said Jill Carpenter, also a resident of Wescott Plantation. Carpenter said she walks the neighborhood daily and sees all kinds of dogs but had never heard of an attack in her neighborhood.

Charleston Animal Society Veterinarian Lucy Fuller said the dog was registered as a Staffordshire Terrier, known as a kind of pit bull.

"We received a dog brought by animal control, North Charleston{}animal control, implicated in an attack on a woman," Fuller said.

Fuller said the dog was too aggressive to handle.

"We had to restrain the dog chemically, to sedate the dog when it came to the shelter," Fuller said.{}"So I didn't see him awake."

Police say they found the dog with blood stains on his mouth and body when they arrived at the Ayscough Road home. The victim was sitting on the sidewalk outside the home with serious wounds to her arm and legs. Police later discovered the dog{}is{}registered to the victim's husband, 30-year-old Mahmoud Rizk, who was not home at the time of the attack.

"I feel terrible for her and I feel terrible for the dog owner," Carpenter said.{}"I hope that it wasn't, you know, he wasn't trying to ... I don't know. Was he trying to protect her? I don't know the situation."

It is unclear what caused the Sunday night attack.{}Neighbors said{}the dog hadn't been around long, maybe just a couple of months. But they had{}been warned against touching the pit bull.

"I personally wouldn't have one," Carpenter said. "I've heard that they can attack."

Fuller said it's not about the breed. In fact, she said pit bulls are not among the top five breeds known to bite.

"It's very much based in the situation, the dog's personality -- so if they're anxious or not -- and then how the owner handles the situation."

Police say they were told{}the dog dragged the woman around her front yard by her arm. They say the only reason she got away was because someone threw a guitar stand at the dog, forcing him off.

The dog was taken by animal control officials Monday morning. It was later euthanized at Charleston Animal Society.CAS officials released a statement urging the public to have their pets fixed and to only adopt from reputable sources, noting that the dog{}involved in the attack was not sterilized{}nor was it obtained from Charleston Animal Society.

"While there are no guarantees that a dog will never bite, pet owners can significantly reduce the risk of dog bites or attacks by spaying or neutering their dogs, socializing their dogs, training their dogs and obtaining their dogs from a source that utilizes certified aggression assessors or certified professional dog trainers to identify aggression indicators and predictors," said CAS CEO Joe{}Elmore.{}"Please spay or neuter your dog! If you cannot afford it, we will do it for free."{}

There are no official details on the woman's condition.{}