Jamie Leeds’s first two restaurants—twin outposts of Hank’s Oyster Bar in Dupont Circle and Old Town—may be seafood-centric, but the chef/restaurateur confesses that meat is her first love. She channels this at CommonWealth, her gastropub in DC’s Columbia Heights that opens this Wednesday. The menu of British-style pub fare includes butcher boards of charcuterie (don’t miss the ultra-flavorful Surrey County ham), house-made head cheese, stuffed pigs trotters, deviled sweetbreads, pork belly, and Scotch eggs wrapped in sausage—the chef’s favorite. “For a nice Jewish girl, there’s a lot of pig on my menu,” she laughs.

CommonWealth's pub fare includes charcuterie and cheese boards.

Beyond the carnivorous offerings, there’s (Smithwick-beer-battered) fish and chips, Yorkshire pudding, even a side of “mushy peas with mint.” But there are also salads, both porcine (heirloom tomatoes with crispy pig’s ear) and vegetarian-friendly; shepherd’s pie filled with tofu; and a dish of vegetable tikka masala. “I wanted it to be good for the neighborhood,” says Leeds, who lives right around the corner from her new restaurant and tavern.

CommonWealth sits on the ground floor of a new luxury apartment building across from Columbia Heights’s shiny Target, but inside, it feels authentically worn-in. To the right is the pub room, where CommonWealth’s logo is painted on a cinder-block wall and wooden stools are lined up for pint-sippers. (Beer also comes in half-pints, 20-ounce “English” pints, and tasting flights of four 4-ounce pours.) There are hand-painted game tables for checkers and chess, and for further entertainment, bar-goers get a glimpse into the semi-open kitchen, where cooks work under a white-tiled archway that evokes London’s tube.

On the dining-room side, a brown leather banquette stretches the length of one wall. Dark wooden tables are stocked with bottles of vinegar, mustard, and house-made Piccalilli relish—a British pub staple made with pickled cauliflower, carrots, green peppers, and green beans. Chalkboards overhead announce the weekly Sunday roast and display drawings by a local artist—one is, appropriately, a sketch of a pig.

Running CommonWealth’s kitchen while Leeds hops around between her three places is Antonio Burrell, late of Viridian and most recently Eleventh Street Lounge in Arlington. For the past six months, Burrell had been working at Hank’s in DC and helping Leeds with menu-planning for CommonWealth, which included a research trip to London. “The standard pubs there buy their Piccalilli relish in a jar and they use frozen food,” says Leeds. “We wanted to take that to a whole new level.”

In the magazine’s August issue and in our slideshow on the making of CommonWealth, you’ll see the napkin on which Leeds scribbled her vision for the restaurant a year and a half ago. Now on the brink of opening, the finished product seems to reflect that napkin’s notes: “Gastropub...meats...roasts...no kitsch....real food.”