About Restaurant Openings Around DC
A guide to the newest places to eat and drink.
Wye Oak Tavern, 211 E. Church St., Frederick.
Chef brothers Bryan and Michael Voltaggio rose to fame on Top Chef and have partnered together on restaurants, including a steakhouse at the MGM National Harbor. But their latest, Wye Oak Tavern, is the first they’re collaborating on in their hometown of Frederick, Maryland. It opened inside the Visitation Hotel, a converted convent and Catholic girls’ school, just before Christmas.
“It’s a steakhouse at heart, but we’re leaning toward a modern tavern where dishes and ingredients are from the mid-Atlantic,” says Bryan, who previously operated Volt and Thacher & Rye in Frederick. The name Wye Oak comes from what was the largest white oak (Maryland’s state tree) in the country until it fell during a thunderstorm in 2002.
One of the showcase dishes is a prime rib, slow-roasted for six hours. It’s served with a creamy horseradish-spiked “tiger sauce” that they’re presenting to actually look like tiger stripes using a Worcestershire sauce reduction and smoked oil with pimento and turmeric. Other meat options include dry-aged ribeyes, beef short rib pot roast with tomato gravy, and smoked pork chops with barbecue caramel.
Baltimore coddies—traditionally salt cod patties with saltines and yellow mustard—are reinterpreted as salt cod brandade with a saltine breading, served with a cauliflower tartar sauce and mustardy giardiniera. A Maryland-style crab cake will be showcased on blue corn masa tostada seasoned with Old Bay, shishito pepper emulsion, and a lime crema. And classics like the shrimp cocktail come with shrimp toast made with grits, a play on shrimp and grits, which you can dip into a green cocktail sauce.
The cocktail menu is also full of reimagined classics, along with an entire section of martinis, all of which are served with a sidecar on crushed ice. One dubbed “Mirepoix” incorporates the cooking aromatics with carrot-infused vodka, celery bitters, and red pearl cocktail onion garnish.
The Voltaggios have also taken some inspiration from the girls’ school that the restaurant and hotel now occupy. For example, when they learned about “apple dumpling day,” they decided to play on that tradition with a Granny Smith apple dumpling with a cider caramel, cereal granola, and a cinnamon toast ice cream. “It’s like breakfast and dessert all in one,” Bryan says.
The dining room is located in the sanctuary of the historic convent and the historical architecture has been meticulously maintained, including 40-foot ceilings, a mezzanine that used to be a choir balcony, and massive stained-glass windows. The Voltaggios also operate a more casual all-day cafe to service the 65-room hotel, Acorn Provisions, which offers coffee, pastries, grab-and-go meals, and canned cocktails.
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.
