Bar Spero, the upscale Basque-inspired restaurant from chef Johnny Spero, has closed. “These past two years were filled with a lot of successes and failures, a lot of mixed emotions trying to navigate post-Covid world downtown,” Spero says in a video posted on Instagram today. “We were kind of at a loss as far as how to move forward.”
The ambitious Capital Crossing restaurant was known for its live-fire, seafood-centric cooking with dishes such as ember-roasted scallops and Jonah crab fried rice. It received plenty of critical acclaim during its two-year run. Both Esquire and Bon Appetit named it one of the best new restaurants in America. It also earned a place on Washingtonian‘s 100 Very Best Restaurants list.
“Every time we got a lot of that national press, we’d have a great week here, a great week there, and then it would just kind of fizzle back down,” Spero tells Washingtonian.
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Spero says his original vision for the restaurant was to serve lunch and dinner seven days a week, but ultimately never expanded to lunch. “We expected to be in a building with offices and people walking around, and it just never worked,” he says. “It was intended to be double the services that we were actually able to put out of that space.”
Spero says this year was “financially very hard on us” and a slow summer season “took the wind out of our sail.” He had recently changed the a la carte menu to a $65 prix fixe format. He’d also experimented with brunch and different operating hours.
Word of the closure first leaked out on Reddit, where someone posted that Spero had failed to pay staff resulting in a “mass resignation” last week. Spero says staff got paid late due to “a mistake in our payroll system and a mistake in me communicating” and that “only a couple people” walked out. He says those paychecks have since been sent out and final paychecks go out tomorrow.
“They all have bills and families to take care of, and even if they don’t, they’re taking care of themselves. So, it was real, and it’s scary,” Spero tells Washingtonian. “In the six years of me operating a restaurant, I’ve never missed a payroll. I’ve never been late. If there was something wrong, we cut hand[written] checks and we made it work.”
Spero continues to operate Michelin-starred Reverie, a seafood-centric tasting menu restaurant in Georgetown, which reopened this year after a fire had shut it down in August of 2022.
“More than anything, I’m embarrassed and upset that I disappointed anybody. We weren’t able to make it happen,” Spero says in the Instagram video. “It’s a special place. It means a lot to me. I don’t want to see it go. Maybe in a few years, maybe we’ll see it come back in some form or another.”
This story has been updated with comments from Johnny Spero.
Jessica Sidman covers the people and trends behind D.C.’s food and drink scene. Before joining Washingtonian in July 2016, she was Food Editor and Young & Hungry columnist at Washington City Paper. She is a Colorado native and University of Pennsylvania grad.
