About Restaurant Openings Around DC
A guide to the newest places to eat and drink.
Providencia, 1321 Linden Ct., NE
Chef Erik Bruner-Yang has worked with Pedro Tobar and Daniel Gonzalez as his bar team at Maketto for years. Maketto was the first place Gonzalez worked after immigrating to the US a decade ago.
Their first collaboration as co-owners, Providencia, opens today, August 7. It’s an Asian-Latin cocktail bar that blends influences from Bruner-Yang’s birthplace, Taiwan, and Tobar and Gonzalez’s home country, El Salvador. Providencia’s 14 cocktails and tight menu of bar snacks and sweets is personal for the trio, Bruner-Yang says.
“Our philosophy with this opening menu is about exploring our core memories of coming to this country, and just things that we think about when we miss home,” Bruner-Yang says. “We’re all immigrants.”
That means drinks like the Sabanetas (Cihuatán Salvadoran rum, blackberry, ginger, lime, and red wine), inspired by Gonzalez’s mother’s tradition of collecting blackberries to make an agua fresca; the Cafe de Olla (cachaça, coffee, sesame horchata), based on coffee prepared by Tobar’s grandmother for early morning trips to the cow pasture; and Run Bing with Nai Nai (charanda, Zucca, Licor 43, mazapán, oolong, lemon, and milk), a play on Taipei-style ice cream. There are also riffs on margaritas and micheladas.
Bruner-Yang was a longtime bartender as well as chef, but these days, he doesn’t drink. Most cocktails on the menu have nonalcoholic options.
Dishes will switch out often, but the inaugural menu includes a lobster roll-like “pan de playa” made with Maryland crab; a pupusa filled with eggplant and hazelnut purée; and chorizo-stuffed chicken wings with butter-lime sauce. Other offerings include a daily rotating “tamal del dia” and oysters on the half shell with white soy, lime, and chili paste.
To kick off service at the cozy, sparsely decorated cocktail bar, pastry chef Paola Velez served a pop-up dessert menu on Tuesday with items like Baked Alaska frio frio (a torched meringue-topped dessert with Virginia-plum/guava syrup)— and she hinted that some of her creations might stick around longer.
In 2021, Bruner-Yang left his acclaimed restaurants at the LINE DC Hotel, Spoken English and Brothers & Sisters. Emerging from the pandemic, the chef was involved in numerous smaller projects around the country but was planning to focus on Maketto’s recovery, not plotting an expansion.
But the opportunity that came along was too good to pass up. Just behind Maketto, there was a vacant two-story commercial space (formerly a flower shop) in a quiet, brick-paved alley reminiscent of Shaw’s Blagden Alley, which has become home to a host of noteworthy DC restaurants. Its owner was a regular at Maketto, and he offered the lease to Bruner-Yang.
Bruner-Yang began discussing a concept with Tobar and Gonzalez that would reflect the natural familiarity they had with each others’ traditional cuisines. That became Providencia.
“I would say jokingly that most people mistake me for Spanish these days instead of Chinese,” Bruner-Yang says. “We’ve all just been around each other for so long, whether they’re eating my food or I’m eating food that they bring from home.”
