The D.C. Restaurant Scene
CreditMatt Roth for The New York Times
WASHINGTON — On a scrubby block in a working-class neighborhood east of Rock Creek Park, plopped down among cheap hair salons, a dry cleaner and a sad-looking liquor store, the future of dining in Washington, D.C., has arrived.
On one side of the street is Petworth Citizen & Reading Room, a warm little haunt with schoolhouse-style light fixtures and Art Deco wallpaper, where old-fashioneds, complete with a ground sugar cube, are mixed for $4 at happy hour.
On the other is Crane & Turtle, a sewing-box-size Asian-influenced spot where an adventurous bouillabaisse with pan-roasted cobia and a delicate maitake-mushroom tempura dish are cooked by a former sous-chef from the soon-to-close CityZen, one of the city’s most upscale restaurants.
For decades, Washington’s dining scene has been made up mostly of two kinds of restaurants. There are the expense-account steakhouses and hushed white-tablecloth hotel dining rooms catering to the political class with money to spend. At the other end are the cheap ethnic restaurants dotting the city and its outlying suburbs.
Local restaurants like those in Philadelphia or Charleston, S.C., where the stroller set settles in with the small-batch-bourbon-swilling groovesters for some solid roast chicken, were as rare as bipartisan budget bills. While those other cities were becoming known as food towns, Washington seemed to miss out. Restaurants like Cashion’s Eat Place in once-dicey Adams Morgan and BlackSalt Restaurant in the residential Palisades neighborhood were the random exceptions. But no more.
Washington has a growing number of small-scale neighborhood restaurants serving simple and often innovative fare in many parts of previously neglected Washington. Chefs — like Aaron Silverman behind the calescent Rose’s Luxury — are opening places where they live.
“One thing that was always missing in D.C. were restaurants that were in your local neighborhood,” said David Chang, who grew up in the Washington area and next year here will open his first Momofuku in the United States outside New York. “Now it’s about opening personalized restaurants by chefs that you didn’t have before.”
In the last few years, an improving local economy has reordered this city where government and politics used to be the driving engine. Washington has bounced back from the high crime rates and extensive municipal scandals of the ’80s, and has been largely impervious to the embattled national economy. It has been left with a population made up of fewer federal workers and more people employed in education, health care and hospitality.
Many of those young new residents were looking for lower housing costs in areas once dominated by crime. Old townhomes became apartments; tiny bungalows have been restored. These younger residents were raised on the Food Network. And they are eager for good restaurants.
There will always be a need for the Oval Room for those with a corporate American Express card. Chefs and restaurateurs like José Andrés and Ashok Bajaj continue to enjoy their fans and have trained many of the next generation of chefs here. But a changing city has attracted better restaurants for everyone else.
From 2000 to 2010, the number of 18- to 34-year-old residents grew by roughly 37,000; they now make up 35 percent of the population, according to the Urban Institute. Last year, there were 2,111 restaurants in Washington, almost double the amount of a decade earlier, and a new one opens every week. As of Aug. 27, 878 alcoholic beverage licenses had been issued to restaurants in the district this year, a 10 percent increase over the total for all of 2013, which was larger than the previous four years.
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The Red Hen, in the emerging neighborhood of Bloomingdale just blocks from a public-housing project, is pulling in local homeowner pioneers, new careerists clinging to the Eater DC hot list and, yes, United States senators.
“You are seeing a shift from boomers to young people,” said Mike Friedman, the chef at the Red Hen, who surprisingly opened in Bloomingdale last year in a building that had been empty for 30 years.
His choice of spots came down to price, Mr. Friedman said. “It was a dangerous business decision in many respects,” he said. “We banked on the fact that we had built-in clientele in the community, and we hoped people would check us out.”
One summer night, Senators Mark Warner of Virginia, Michael Bennet of Colorado and Charles Schumer of New York cozied into the industrial space with its bare, weathered brick walls and stacks of firewood, where one drink is a rye concoction called All the Best Diseases Are Taken. “Mark Warner is the culinary Cousteau for senators hoping to find new hip places in Washington,” Mr. Schumer said.
More and more big-name out-of-town chefs like Mr. Chang are moving in.
“We have a full crop of really top-notch restaurants, and we have probably never been to that level before,” said John DeFerrari, a historian of Washington and the author of “Historic Restaurants of Washington, D.C.: Capital Eats.” “The best places now are vying with other great restaurants around the country. It’s been a natural progression built mostly on economics.”
Two restaurants — Rose’s Luxury near Capitol Hill and Little Serow, a Thai restaurant smooshed into a basement — are enjoying top spots on national listings of “best places to eat now.”
Many restaurants are pulling their influence from Southern traditions that have long marked D.C. cooking; the Chesapeake Bay, now chic; and local purveyors.
“We were slower here to develop homegrown traditions,” said Brian Miller, a senior designer at Streetsense, a design and strategy agency where his restaurant design team has grown to six people from two in six years. “But in the last few years, you have seen that grow rapidly,” he said, citing DC Brau Brewing Company, Green Hat Gin, Gordy’s Pickle Jar and the Dolcezza coffee and ice cream makers.
Little Serow and Daikaya, which serves creative izakaya food on one level and steaming bowls of ramen downstairs, are among restaurants drawing on a long tradition of internationalism here.
“We have had the fortune of getting immigrants from all over the world,” Mr. DeFerrari said. “The traditional profile of an ethnic restaurant is someone who had to leave their own country without much financial support so start a casual restaurant, but now we are seeing those roots established with people taking it to the next level.”
Professional service has not caught up to the food. Waiters often can’t answer basic facts about wine. Oyster forks go missing; water glasses are not on tables until midmeal. “It is really hard to find good staff,” said Rose Previte, the owner of Compass Rose, a new addition to the restaurant row along 14th Street. “When I started working tables, I worked at Human Rights Watch, too. I came to D.C. to save the world. This does make the staff interesting. Everyone on my staff is doing something else on the side. You just don’t find as many professional service staff.”
Some out-of-town chefs have answered this with importation. For Le Diplomate, a much-ballyhooed French bistro on 14th Street, the Philadelphia-based owner, Stephen Starr, brought a task force for the first 60 days, and some of his most experienced team members relocated here.
Further, all the fresh action has increased rents and added some sharp elbows. Jeff Black, who has operated restaurants here since the 1990s, said that one chef tried to recruit two of his key staff members as he gave him a tour of one of his restaurants.
“The prices have tripled per square foot over the last few years,” said Mike Isabella, who owns three successful spots in this district. “You know, five years ago D.C. was a city where there was a lot of work to be done, and now these neighborhoods have more density, and celebrity chefs are coming to join the party.”
While the Washington food scene has spun off from the nexus of politics and government, it’s hard to get away from it completely. Khalid Pitts, a pioneer in the once highly shady Logan Circle with Cork Wine Bar, which he started with his wife, is now running for City Council.
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of one of the senators who ate at the Red Hen. He is Michael Bennet, not Bennett.