In DC, is there a place you can go where everyone knows your name in sign? (Okay, sorry for the lame attempt at trying to re-create the spirit of the theme song from “Cheers” … Where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came. You wanna be where you can see, our troubles are all the same. You wanna be where everybody knows your name… )

I’ve got one. This summer I’ve fallen in love with Sticky Rice, a sushi place that just opened on H Street NE, between 12th and 13th. With it being a mere ten minutes walk from my house, I find myself there every week (sometimes even twice in the same week despite the complaints of my painfully thin wallet).

When I go in, one of the hostesses, who does know how to sign because her mom’s deaf (although she’ll soon be leaving for college again once the summer ends), greets me familiarly and asks if I want to sit at the bar, my usual location. The bartender with the mohawk will pour me a particularly potent gin and tonic while I linger over the menu with prettily named items (”snap, crackle, pop”) when I already know I’ll just order the dirty vegan with a couple of sushi rolls.

If I’m there with my friends (usually Kristi Ann and Michelle - we stay for hours just talking, laughing, and ordering another plate of garden balls), we’ll opt for a table on the first floor, although there is a sushi bar on the second floor that sometimes has deaf sushi chefs (is there some technical term that I am ignorant of? I guess I could google it… itamae!). Our table is the first booth, which Kristi Ann thinks the better electronic waterfall sign is located. I like it because I get a good view of the Asian soap operas (subtitled!) they play above the front door.

The bartenders and the waiters might scribble away at their pads, resuming conversations that we started the last time I was there. Like Erik, the general manager, wants to know how to make their Blingo nights ASL-friendly. Blingo nights are the speedy bingo games held every Thursday night. Once they gave away a free iphone for the prize! These games have even hearing people going “what did he just say??” So the matter of making it accessible to ASL users is no easy matter. I brought another friend of mine, Jen Kaika, a brilliant ASL interpreter and awesome friend, over once to discuss strategy on this very matter but we were too distracted by the bucket of tater tots and sinfully delicious coconut rice dessert to make any concrete plans. But I have confidence.

Sticky Rice, you’ve become my Cheers (minus the guys at the bar with business suits, remember Norm? and insert young and hot-looking tattooed waiters and waitresses).

So what about you? What’s your place, your Cheers?