About Restaurant Openings Around DC
A guide to the newest places to eat and drink.
Minetta Tavern. 1287 4th St., NE.
Keith McNally has a reputation in New York for building buzzy restaurants where the famous and powerful dine—and for publicly calling out those customers on his Instagram if they behave badly. Now, he’s taking on DC. On December 10, he’ll open Minetta Tavern—billed a “Parisian steakhouse meets classic New York City tavern”—in a Union Market alleyway.
While DC’s Minetta Tavern will carryover the New York location’s famous Black Label burger and a similar moody wood-paneled aesthetic, it will differ from the Greenwich Village flagship thanks to a sumptuous upstairs lounge named the Lucy Mercer Bar, after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s mistress. There, you’ll find a plush early 20th-century inspired room for martinis, champagne, and refined bites with caviar and truffles—no phones allowed.
The original Minetta Tavern dates back to 1937, when it became a hub for literary luminaries like E.E. Cummings and Ernest Hemingway, alongside other prominent and powerful names. McNally took over the restaurant in 2008 and made it—as he has with his other restaurants including Balthazar, Pastis, and Morandi—a destination for a new generation of celebrities and cultural figures (plus the “layabouts, prostitutes, and ex-cons” McNally has said he considers his ideal clientele).
McNally has at least some familiarity with DC. He says he used to take the train here once a month to visit the National Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection during a period when he was particularly obsessed with paintings two decades ago. “Although I saw little else but museums, I loved DC and always wanted to spend more time here,” he says.
Ultimately, it was a stroke in 2016 that motivated McNally to expand his restaurant business. The left side of his body was semi-paralyzed and his speech became impaired (as such, most of his interview with Washingtonian was conducted over email). “I was so depressed that I lost all sense of purpose. For better or for worse, the only thing that gives me purpose in life is building and operating restaurants,” McNally says. “Because I’ve always enjoyed the seriousness of DC, I thought I should open my most serious restaurant here.”
For DC’s Minetta Tavern, McNally has partnered with his director of operations Roberta Delice, who’s worked with him for 27 years, and Minetta Tavern New York chef Laurent Kalkotour—”the best chef I’ve ever worked with.” (Separately, McNally partnered with Stephen Starr on French bistro Pastis in New York, but he’s “really just a consultant” at the DC location, which opened earlier this year.)
Expect a 75-percent overlap between the DC and New York menus of Minetta Tavern. Favorite dishes include the roasted bone marrow, onion soup, dry-aged bone-in New York strip, and the Grand Marnier or chocolate soufflé. Among the new offerings: trout with beurre blanc and smoked trout roe as well as pork ragout-stuffed pig’s trotters on a bed of French lentils.
Kalkotour says he aims to balance the heavier, meatier dishes with lighter, shareable fare. The menu also combines familiar classics such as coq au vin and moules frites with lesser-seen French dishes like lobster bellevue with a lobster gelée atop lobster medallions on a bed of celery remoulade. A predominantly French wine list pairs with the food.
The reservations-only Lucy Mercer Bar upstairs has a totally different, more indulgent menu and look. McNally says he drew inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film, Barry Lyndon, about an 18th century social climber who seduces his way into the British aristocracy. “Some of the French palaces in the film are so sumptuously decorated with mirrors, sconces and chandeliers, I thought this would make an interesting contrast with the 20th century American tavern on the floor below,” McNally says.
As you walk up to the Lucy Mercer Bar, you’ll spy photographs of prominent political figures with their mistresses (or rumored mistresses). McNally was drawn to the theme of mistresses because of the way their roles are underestimated and hidden. “I think they get a bad rep in history,” he says. Lucy Mercer specifically was “really intelligent” and was at one point social secretary to Roosevelt’s wife Eleanor. “I want to debunk the typical image of the lover.”
The bar itself is outfitted with plush velvet sofas, antique tables and lamps, a working fireplace, and portraits of women with provocative eyes—all custom hand-painted replicas of 16th century artworks. The in-house artist behind the portraits, Robert Padilla, also spent nine months painting a mural of historical Washington scenes across the downstairs dining room. That space, with red leather banquettes and checkered floors, is also decorated with illustrations, photographs, and caricatures, including some from McNally’s personal collection.
The upstairs menu features more refined small bites and appetizer-sized dishes, such as truffle-and-ricotta flatbread, smoked-salmon mille feuille with salmon roe, and wagyu carpaccio with caviar. The Black Label burger will be there, too—but in slider form—as will the French fries. The Lucy Mercer Bar wine list will be “a little more indulgent,” and French-inspired cocktails will be “intriguing but simple,” Delice says.
Back to that no-phone policy. Asked how strict the bar will be about enforcing it, McNally says, “In some ways I’d like the customers in the Lucy Mercer Bar not to use their cell phones. We’ll see. I have to finish building the place first.”
That said, what happens inside the restaurant won’t necessarily stay inside the restaurant. McNally is famous for using his provocative Instagram account to dish on the rich, famous, and poorly behaved at his New York restaurants. He went viral a couple years ago for banning talk show host James Corden for allegedly abusing the staff at Balthazar over egg white mixed into his wife’s egg-yolk omelet. The restaurateur famously put magazine editor Graydon Carter on blast after the “fancy Fucker” no-showed on a lunch reservation for 12 at Morandi. He also regularly posts managers’ end-of-night reports chock-full of juicy details about covers, complaints, comps, and VIPs.
Asked who would be on his VIP list for DC, McNally lamented that writer Christopher Hitchens—”the only friend I’ve ever had who lived in DC”—was no longer alive. He added that he’d never met Politics and Prose owners Bradley Graham and Lissa Muscatine, but that they sounded like “perfect customers.”
So will McNally post manager reports from DC’s Minetta Tavern and continue to dish on VIPs and customers behaving badly like he has in New York? “Absolutely!,” he says.
This story has been updated to more accurately reflect McNally’s relationship to the DC location of Pastis and the phrasing of the question about manager reports.
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.
