Willowsong, 801 Wharf St., SW.
For a hotel that’s only existed since 2017, the InterContinental Washington D.C. at the Wharf has already accumulated quite a bit of restaurant history. First came chef Kwame Onwuachi, who opened Kith/Kin before abruptly leaving to start his own acclaimed New York restaurant in 2020 (Onwuachi returned to the Wharf with Dōgon last year). Chef Kevin Tien opened Moon Rabbit in the space, but the hotel forced it to shutter three years later, apparently in an effort to kill a union drive.
Jeffrey Williams, a self described “journeyman chef” who has led dozens of hotel kitchens across several cities, is hoping to give the place a fresh start. He’ll open Willowsong, a seasonal American dining room, as the InterContinental’s flagship restaurant on Wednesday, February 12.
Willowsong is a departure from the splashy restaurant destinations that came before it. Williams wants it to be an accessible, reliable place where the staff remembers your name and ingredients are sourced from local farms—including one near his new home in Waldorf. Hotel guests, he says, should come away with a picture of DC’s food scene, even if they only eat at Willowsong.
“Hotel restaurants always feel stuffy, and we’re trying to separate ourselves from that,” he says. “But hotel chefs do try to give a snapshot of what a city is.”
That snapshot is an eclectic menu based on ingredients from farms in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland, but drawing on Williams’s peripatetic experience. Breakfast starts with shareable treats like cinnamon buns with miso cream cheese frosting, and moves on to dishes like wagyu steak and eggs, Maryland crab quiche, and yogurt topped with carrot-butterscotch and toasted coconut.
House-made pastas anchor the dinner menu: Williams’s creations include squid-ink orecchiette with crab, and cresto di Gallo (rooster’s crest-shaped pasta) topped with crispy oxtail, roasted tomatoes, and broccoli rabe. Tagliatelle is sauced with smoked duck tinga, queso fresco, and lime, a nod to California taquerias. Beer-brined fried chicken is served with apricots and sweet potatoes. To start, there’s a bread service of milk bread with brown-honey-miso butter and salmon roe.
The 152-seat space has gotten a minor makeover, with a new mural, leather banquettes and brass finishes, and a patio with Potomac views that will open when the weather improves. Happy hour, focused on local beers and European wines, will run from 4 to 6:30 PM at the 20-seat bar.
Williams was inspired to cook by his grandfather, a chef who’d owned a restaurant in New Orleans, and later started a neighborhood garden program in Philadelphia. The younger Williams’s career has jumped from coast to coast, including several upscale restaurants in Philadelphia and Baltimore, various high-end hotel restaurants in San Diego and Los Angeles, and even a job as executive chef at Pepperdine University in Malibu. Most recently, he opened NOÉ Restaurant & Bar at the Omni hotel in LA.
The InterContinental tapped him to lead the first noteworthy restaurant in its flagship space since Moon Rabbit exited in 2023. Many of Willowsong’s employees will be holdovers from Moon Rabbit, who finally won the right to unionize and resolved their dispute with the hotel. Last year, DC’s attorney general also ordered IHG to pay 42 former Moon Rabbit employees $126,650 as a penalty for misleading pay policies. Tien successfully rebirthed Moon Rabbit in Penn Quarter last year, but the InterContinental was left with a nondescript stopgap called Dockside Restaurant & Bar.
As a longtime cook, Williams says he’s been in the same shoes as the restaurant employees who have unionized and stuck around through these changes, and wants to give them a fresh start.
“The best thing about being a journeyman chef is there’s always going to be things that happened in the past, and it’s my job to come in and fix them,” Williams says. “They often want you to keep the same restaurant name, which would have been 10 times harder. Here, I get to open up a fresh restaurant with it.”
