“You Have to Move On”: Washington’s Best Restaurants Gird for Trump 2.0

On a Wednesday in late November, Keith McNally, the king of New York restaurants, was somewhat improbably standing not in Manhattan but in the outer reaches of Washington, DC, in an alley where operating meatpacking shops were still actively chopping up livestock. He was getting ready to open the world’s second Minetta Tavern, some 90 years after the first one debuted in the heart of Greenwich Village, in a neighborhood that has provided the District of Columbia with its meats for 100 years. The area, Union Market, has been building since those “cool” Obama years, and the last decade saw the arrival of chic pour-over purveyors and high-rise luxury apartments.

The second Minetta Tavern possesses the same magic-glowed, backlit, clubby feel of the original, with one crucial difference. The framed pictures at the Manhattan Minetta feature artists, musicians, and stars of screen and stage. In DC, it’s all about the politicians.

“I saw this place down the alley, and I knew I wanted to bring my most serious restaurant here,” McNally told me, adding that he got an apartment nearby to be close to the project.

McNally’s steakhouse is just one of the anticipated restaurants to come to the nation’s capital from New York or LA in recent months. The powerful restaurateur Stephen Starr convinced Nancy Silverton, the chef considered Tinseltown royalty for her La Brea Bakery and trio of haute Italian eateries, to open her first East Coast restaurant in a historic canal-facing marketplace building in the heart of Georgetown. Last year José Andrés opened a version of his restaurant concept The Bazaar—the eatery he opened in Beverly Hills in 2008, inflicting upon Angelenos El Bulli–ish gastro-nibbles—at the Waldorf Astoria Washington DC, which opened in the Old Post Office near the White House in 2022. Kwame Onwuachi, the chef behind the phenomenon that is Tatiana at Lincoln Center—named America’s best restaurant by The Infatuation—just opened Dōgon at the Salamander hotel.

Washington is a one-industry town in which 14% of the population works for the federal government, and a large chunk of its white-collar residents work in fields that orbit around the administration. (Compare that to another famously one-industry town, Los Angeles—only 4% of that city works in film, television, or entertainment.) All of these restaurants, years in the making, will now stare down a particularity of life that uniquely affects the District of Columbia: that quadrennial fit of unease brought on by the exit of one president and the arrival of another. Even under regular circumstances, these transitions can present vibe shifts of the highest order. And the transfer of power set to take place next month, after Donald Trump’s nonconsecutive reelection, promises to be more than regular.

Last time around, Trump used his Trump International Hotel as a de facto clubhouse and encouraged all of his deep-pocketed supporters to stay there while in town. Instead of exploring the city’s culinary offerings, Trump only ventured out of the White House to go down the block to BLT Prime and enjoy his burnt steaks and specially prepared Diet Cokes, surrounded by his cronies. And he could do this without fear of being served by a Trump-hating Democrat, a real concern in a city that significantly voted for Hillary Clinton over Trump—91% to 4%. It was literally the only restaurant he ever visited in Washington in the four years he was president, and he always got the same thing: shrimp cocktail, well-done steak, and fries. He always sat at Table 72. His Diet Coke had to be opened in front of him, to make it clear it was free of germs. Same thing for the mini ketchup bottles, which, terrifyingly, were brought out to accompany the steak. Sometimes he got dessert, either apple pie or chocolate cake. That’s all he ever ate.

This time there’s no Trump International Hotel—it became the aforementioned Waldorf Astoria, and the old BLT Prime space is occupied by Andrés, who has been a vocal Trump critic. So Trump’s people may have to fan out throughout the city, which went 93% for Kamala Harris, when they want to get a bite to eat. According to a postelection story in Washingtonian, some service workers are, at the very least, planning to inconvenience those who work with Trump, seating them in the back of the restaurant or making them wait longer for dishes. A server and manager at Beuchert’s Saloon in Capitol Hill told the magazine that she wouldn’t serve Trump people if she knew them to be “a sex trafficker or trying to deport millions of people,” but was fired from the establishment after publication of the story. (In a publicly posted statement, the restaurant said her comments violated its “zero-tolerance policy on discrimination.”)

McNally, however, showing me around his gorgeous new restaurant, seemed unconcerned. He knows DC quite well. A painting fanatic, he spent years coming down on the Amtrak just to check out the shows at the National Gallery and then go back to Manhattan. His good friend, late Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens, lived in The Wyoming on Columbia Road, where he hosted scotch-soaked lunches for the town’s intelligentsia. McNally understands the DC mindset that usually only natives fully grasp. (Full disclosure: I grew up in Bethesda, right outside the district.) The town’s elites generally get along in private regardless of who’s in charge or what they’re saying about one another in public; everybody has to eat dinner.

McNally personally endorsed Harris, and even bought cases of Champagne ready to pop once the election was called for her. “It’s all still there,” his business partner Roberta Rossini Delice, who has opened nearly all of his restaurants with him, said of the Champagne. We were now sitting in a red booth in the main dining room of his DC Minetta, a facsimile of the original in the best way possible, with staff in the middle of training for its friends-and-family open, 10 days away.

“I really thought she was going to win,” McNally said. “It’s not the outcome I would have wanted, but you have to move on.”

One upside of moving on was realizing he was opening a steakhouse just as a bunch of steakhouse-loving Republicans would be coming to town. The first Minetta Tavern DC buyout was by a Democratic congressman, but there will inevitably be Republicans there celebrating as well. And McNally, an outspoken Democrat, has no plans to bar anyone from eating there—including the president himself, who once took Melania to Balthazar, as Delice pointed out.

“Somebody asked me what I would do if Trump came in here,” McNally said, looking around at the restaurant.

“And I said I would serve him. He’s welcome to come.”

If there’s anyone who can survive the whiplash DC’s restaurant scene gets from consistent changes of the guard, it’s Starr. Born in Philly, he spent decades building out a nightlife-and-hospitality empire in the once forgotten Old City, before expanding to New York and Miami. But he always wanted to open a place in DC. As a kid, he would travel down to hang out in Georgetown. He fell for it in a way that baffled his fellow big-city coastal elites.

“People forget that it’s the capital of the United States,” Starr told me during a phone call this week. “New York gets all the attention, and LA, but this is the capital of the United States of America, the most powerful country in the world. All kinds of shit is going on there. So people in Washington may think, Maybe it’s a little boring—but it’s not.”

He had a clear vision for his culinary debut in DC. It had to be a freestanding structure, not a nook in an office building, with enough space to have outdoor seating spilling out onto the sidewalk. It had to be stuffed with authentic chairs and old tables and cracked tiles and creaky wood and a zinc bar and weird little knickknacks, all sourced from France. It needed legit Gallic cooking, as well as a level of sophistication that hadn’t quite yet arrived in DC.

“If you have to analyze it, you could say DC was—and probably still is, to some extent—underserved,” Starr told me. “The amount of people that are there, the amount of internationally traveled people, educated people, people with fairly high incomes—it’s probably still underserved. It certainly was 11 years ago.”

And he had a name for the concept that he saw when strolling through the Marais on one of his many trips to eat his way through the City of Light.

“I saw a bistro and the name was Le Diplomate, and I said to my wife at the time, ‘If I ever want to open in Washington, this is the name,’” he said.

It opened in April 2013, the fulcrum point between the two Obama terms, and was an immediate hit with the ruling administration. Michelle Obama took then French president François Hollande to Le Dip (as it’s known to locals) in 2014, priming them for the state dinner the following evening. John Kerry was an instant fan, as were Susan Rice, Chuck Schumer, and countless others.

And when the Trump people came to town in 2017, that crew embraced it as their own too. Jared Kushner and Ivanka liked to brunch at Le Diplomate, and Newt Gingrich was a regular. EPA chair Scott Pruitt liked it so much that at least once he took advantage of the lights and sirens of his motorcade to get down traffic-clogged 14th Street—the man needs his snails, stat! Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke: confirmed Le Dip superfan.

And then when Joe Biden took office, it was one of the few DC spots where he would make regular pop-ins. In 2021, over Memorial Day weekend, he stopped by Le Dip with Jill Biden, accompanied by Harris and Doug Emhoff—it was his first time eating out since the inauguration. He ordered takeout from Le Dip on Valentine’s Day in 2023—marking a full decade of frequenting the establishment, as he was first spotted at the 14th Street restaurant in 2013, while serving as vice president.

“He and his wife love the cheeseburger there,” Starr said of the current president. “It’s their favorite.”

Starr expects the restaurant will be as bustling as ever once Trump’s crew comes to town—“It’s comfort food. It knows no ideology,” he said. And he has reservation books to fill at other places besides Le Dip—Osteria Mozza, his collaboration with Silverton, opened in October and was jam-packed on a recent visit a few weeks after the election. The focaccia that made Silverton famous in LA has made its way from the West Coast, and the staff trained by Silverton herself kept things moving throughout the evening.

And just weeks after the inauguration, he’s opening another hot spot—this one just steps from the White House. Built inside the historic Willard hotel, The Occidental will be an upscale fine-dining establishment, and it’s designed by Ken Fulk, perhaps best known for designing a little restaurant that used to be a modest red-sauce joint on Thompson Street—and turning that spot into the global juggernaut that is Carbone, with its Godfather-movie-as-dinner experience. It’s going to be a perfect place for a White House kingmaker to dine.

“I said, ‘Ken, we want to make it glamorous,’” Starr told me. “We want to make this the place where people go to be seen to have power lunches and power dinners. Intrigue, CIA affairs with a Russian spy—this is the narrative. This is the place.”

Or, there’s a chance things will all go back to the way they were during the first Trump term: the president dining every night in a hotel that bears his name, the US government putting up Secret Service agents in the suites alongside foreign dignitaries. We’ll all once again need intro-level courses on the emoluments clause. Last Friday, Eric Trump called up the New York Post and delivered a bombshell: The Trump Organization was looking into a way in which it could get its hotel back.

“Our family has saved the hotel once. If asked, we would save it again,” he told the paper.

Sources for the tabloid stressed that there hasn’t been any negotiations as of yet, but the Waldorf is primed for a takeover. The Trump Organization sold its lease in 2022 for $375 million, making $100 million in profit. Since then, it’s already exchanged hands. After failing to make payments on its $285 million loan, the original buyer of the hotel—an investor consortium backed by Alex Rodriguez, among others—got stripped of the asset, and it was bought at a foreclosure auction for $100 million by the bank BDT & MSD Partners, co-led by former Goldman Sachs hitter Byron Trott, who merged his company with the firm that functioned as Michael Dell’s family office. Seems like a deal is in the air.

If the Trump family does make an improbable return to the DC hospitality scene, it’s unclear what that means for Andrés, whose recent opening in the hotel was supposed to have capped a nine-year odyssey. After first announcing the space in 2014, Andrés told The Washington Post in July 2015 that the project was “impossible” after Trump’s rhetoric about Mexican immigrants early in the 2016 campaign. The Trump family sued the chef for $10 million. Andrés’s company countersued, and the case was settled in 2017.

While Trump’s name was physically removed from the premises, to my eyes on a recent visit, the place, with its vast marble lobby, still had a tinge of Trump gaudiness. Above the restaurant’s balcony, the Robert Irwin installation 48 Shadow Planes was still hanging in the center of the room, more than 40 years after it was installed. (Irwin, who passed away last year, once told me that “it’s a hell of a good piece, and it will live on—it will outlive Trump’s reign. I don’t know if I’m going to make it back, but it’ll be there after I’m done—and after he’s done.”) The food at The Bazaar was great—Maryland blue crab was featured in not one, not two, but five different tapas—but the vibe was a bit off, with fork taps echoing through a half-empty gigantic hotel lobby that still had a whiff of the 45th presidency to it.

That was not the case during dinner at Minetta Tavern on Thursday evening. A native New Yorker, who had been to the one in Manhattan weeks before, remarked that it was an uncanny replica of the original, but filled to the brim with DC folk. This is what I had been hoping for: the instruments of the Washington machine settling into plush booths with rounds of holiday cocktails, congressional staffers celebrating with their bosses that they’d snagged a clutch DC res in the days before said bosses had to return to their constituents in, say, Ohio or Arkansas or Arizona.

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But in the hours before my reservation, I came to the sad realization that it was deeply unlikely that I’d be crammed in next to a congressman. Trump’s DC had poked its head out early, with a vengeance. Elon Musk had spent Wednesday bashing the 1,500-page bipartisan spending bill set to fund the government through mid-March 2025, and the president-elect had later expressed support for torpedoing it in favor of a bill that would suspend the debt ceiling—a complete nonstarter, leaving Speaker Mike Johnson with the unenviable Scrooge position of leading the country into a government shutdown days before Christmas. Johnson had introduced a last-second bill—which Democrats would ultimately, gleefully doom to failure with the help of hard-right Republicans—and it was set to hit the floor late Thursday night. Any House member with a Minetta reservation would have to order takeout to Capitol Hill instead.

Still, there were trays of martinis floating through the room, Sinatra blasting out of the speakers, and dry-aged côte de boeuf going to nearly every table.

After dinner we decamped upstairs, where behind actual velvet curtains was the Lucy Mercer Bar, a Victorian-bordello-esque lounge concept unique to the DC Minetta chockablock with old paintings and funky lamps. Photos are strictly forbidden; nobody could snap a photo of McNally himself sitting in the corner, personally DJ’ing: David Bowie, Elton John, Taylor Swift.

“It took me three years to build this place, and it’s perfect,” McNally said, looking out wistfully into the crowd.

And then, while taking my seat with a cocktail, an honest-to-God Christmas miracle. As McNally amped up the volume of “All Too Well,” a real-life Democratic congressman sat down next to me, fresh off voting no on Johnson’s bill. He tucked into a cocktail, staff surrounding him, looking triumphant, unwilling to let his Minetta Tavern plans go to waste just because of some chicanery on the Hill.

McNally’s right. It’s perfect.

The Rundown

Your crib sheet for the comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…

…It may not surprise you that Tom Hanks—Oscar winner, best-selling novelist, America’s dad—is an avid collector of historic typewriters. He’s amassed a trove of more than 300 of them, and also has a habit of surprising small businesses with a typewriter if he feels they deserve one. “They’re just showing up on doorsteps unannounced,” Tom Furrier, owner of Cambridge Typewriter, said of the unprompted gifting of typewriters. To get a peek into this odd but endearing quirk of an extremely famous person, Sag Harbor’s The Church—the wonderful art concern started by artist couple Eric Fischl and April Gornik and run by Sheri Pasquarella—is opening a show next month called “Some of Tom’s Typewriters,” which will feature 35 of the typewriters, handpicked by Simon Doonan. And why not! “After all, the soundtrack of the 20th century is the magical clacking and pinging of a typewriter. Clack, clack, clack…ping!” Doonan said in a statement.

…Earlier this week, various outlets—Emily Sundberg’s Substack, Feed Me; the New York Post; and then Eater—reported that sources were saying the SoHo behemoth at 575 Broadway was being sold to Prada, which has occupied its storefront since 2001. Perhaps more alarmingly, these reports seemed to suggest that Prada, post-takeover, would be pushing out Lure Fishbar—Prada pushing out fashion’s cafeteria, the horror!—in favor of an outpost of the Prada-owned Pasticceria Marchesi. Cue uproar. Lure certainly counts as a classic SoHo spot at this point, and it’s a reliable power-lunch redoubt in a neighborhood lacking places like that. The problem is: The news is simply not true. Sources close to the situation say that 575 Broadway’s owner, the art collector Peter Brant, has no intention of selling the building, which he bought for $9.6 million in 1989. (Its appraised value in 2022 was $215 million—not a bad return, pal!) It’s steeped in art world history—the Prada store functions as a live-in installation by Rem Koolhaas; it was home to the Guggenheim Museum SoHo for nearly a decade; and last year Brant’s son Dylan Brant and Max Werner staged two marvelous group shows in a space on the sixth floor. As for Lure, its lease is up in 2026, so it’s certainly staying until then, and sources say there have been no discussions to kick the restaurant out. Spicy tuna crispy rice for everybody! Brant couldn’t be reached for comment, and Prada did not respond to a request for comment.

…Swiss watch brand Movado has a long history of collaborating with artists. Kenny Scharf has designed timepieces for the company, and Carmen Herrera made some Movado wrist candy in 2021…when she was 106 years old. The latest collabo is with Derrick Adams, who applied his signature bold-colored portraiture to the principles of watchmaking. I’m a fan.

…Holiday party roundup: Dealer Gavin Brown opened his home on Friday night, and dealer Gordon VeneKlasen opened his on Wednesday. Paula Cooper Gallery rented out the entirety of the extremely Whit Stillman–coded Old Town Bar for a holly-jolly rager on Tuesday, and on Wednesday the essential downtown gallery Reena Spaulings celebrated the holidays and two decades of programming at an artist’s fabulous West Village apartment.

…The two French luxury billionaires with private museums announced some pretty ambitious programming for 2025. At François Pinault’s Bourse de Commerce in Paris, there’s a group show focused around representations of the body, featuring dozens of artists who span generations. As the release puts it: “Auguste Rodin to Duane Hanson, Georg Baselitz to Michael Armitage, Ana Mendieta to Miriam Cahn, Philip Guston to Marlene Dumas, David Hammons to Kerry James Marshall, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami to Mira Schor, and from Arthur Jafa to Deana Lawson.” Pinault’s museums in Venice are slightly more straightforward, though entirely exciting on their own. There’s French artist Tatiana Trouvé at the Palazzo Grassi and German artist Thomas Schütte at the Punta della Dogana. And during 2025, at his Fondation Louis Vuitton, Bernard Arnault will unveil two sweeping surveys of perhaps our greatest living painters: David Hockney in the spring, and then Gerhard Richter in the fall.

Have a tip? Drop me a line at nate_freeman@condenast.com. And make sure you subscribe to True Colors to receive Nate Freeman’s art-world dispatch in your inbox every week.

The Year in Review

• Richard Lawson Ranks the Year’s Best Movies

• The Top TV Shows of 2024

• This Year’s 21 Best Books

• The Performances That We Couldn’t Take Our Eyes Off

• The Biggest Celebrities We Lost

• Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s Most Iconic Outfits This Year

• The 10 Books That Famous Bookworms Loved

• Meghan Markle’s Year in Style

• Plus: the 67 Best Christmas Movies of All Time

• From the Archive: the War Behind the Making of The Godfather

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