Food

Here Are Menus for Tony and Joe’s and Nick’s Riverside Grill

The restaurants are set to reopen next month. Here's a peek at the offerings.

Tony and Joe's should debut its new dining room next month. Photograph courtesy of Flickr user The Brit_2.

Wednesday’s Georgetown Current reported that Georgetown Waterfront restaurants Tony and Joe’s and Nick’s Riverside Grill would fully open at the end of this week—but that’s not going to happen, says Nick Cibel, whose family owns both. “It will be after the first of September,” he told us (and, apparently, Zagat) yesterday. He cites construction delays and pending fire-system approval as reasons for the holdup.

The restaurants, badly damaged in an April 2011 flood, have been serving a limited menu on their outdoor patios. Currently dishes for both are prepped in the renovated kitchen at Nick’s. Chef David Stein, last of Bistro St. Michaels in St. Michaels, Maryland, is overseeing that situation. The plan is to maintain Tony and Joe’s as a seafood spot, says Cibel, though he says Stein has been charged with “moving the restaurant up to the next level.” Nick’s, meanwhile, has expanded into 30 percent of the shuttered Cabanas next door—also owned by the family. Stein is developing a menu there that may include Korean-style lettuce wraps, a selection of tartines, and entrées such as grilled “airplane chicken” (wing and breast) with an ancho-agave glaze.

Cibel sent over working menus at both Tony and Joe’s and Nick’s, but cautions that there may well be changes between now and opening day. Go ahead and look forward to calamari and crabcakes, however. Cibel says those two waterfront classics are a sure thing.