Shaking off winter slumber, the D.C. dining scene this spring is gathering steam. Just a taste of the openings and happenings are below:

Already Open

Pascual (732 Maryland Ave., N.E.): This modern Mexican restaurant is helmed by chefs Isabel Coss and Matt Conroy of Lutèce, and run by The Popal Group (which also owns Lapop and Lapis). Pascual gets its name from the patron saint of cooks and kitchens. The menu, which rests on fire-grilled dishes, is inspired by Coss’s Mexico City roots, and both chefs’ past work at top Mexican restaurants. Pascual plans to add a daytime bakery and coffee shop called Volcán.

Moon Rabbit (927 F St., N.W.): Chef Kevin Tien abruptly closed his Moon Rabbit restaurant on the Wharf a year ago during union negotiations by staff of the Intercontinental Hotel, where the restaurant was located. This reopening represents a welcome comeback of this fine-dining Vietnamese restaurant. The restaurant concept will be the same, but will have new dishes for the new space.

Joia Burger (3213 Mt. Pleasant St., N.W.): It’s smash patties and French fries that make up the entire menu of this fun-filled carryout spot. Run by Purple Patch chef/owner Patrice Cleary, she brings burgers (including veggie burgers) in a family-friendly and homey atmosphere, as well as vibrant ube soft serve as a nod to her Filipino heritage.

Coming soon

Press Club (1506 19th St., N.W.) is an intriguing new spot from industry old-timers including Will Patton (from Bresca and Jônt). Located in Dupont Circle, it will be a new bar and cocktail lounge based on the format of records (i.e. sides A and B). The a la carte “Track List” menu is a cocktail menu that rotates biannually featuring the team’s favorite spirits and techniques. The curated “Play List” menu is a bi-monthly rotating cocktail flights highlighting more seasonal ingredients, presented tableside with supplemental bites. The cocktails will draw inspiration from songs loved by the founders and are arranged to resemble the flow of a record.

Immigrant Food (4245 N. Fairfax Dr.): The restaurant group combining global dishes and advocacy is set to open a new spot in Ballston. Immigrant Food has three locations already: the Planet Word Museum, by the White House and in Union Market. The restaurant will feature both indoor and outdoor dining areas by the Ballston Metro.

 Bar Japonais (1520 14th St., N.W.): This restaurant is still forthcoming in the former Estadio space, set for later this spring. It will be a take on its sister restaurant Bar Chinois in Mount Vernon Square. Bar Japonais will bring together French and Japanese influences. Developed in the izakaya style, the restaurant will have Japanese-leaning food and French-leaning cocktails, and has weekly events in the works.

Dogon, at Salamander Hotel (1330 Maryland Ave., S.W.), is a highly anticipated opening from celebrity chef Kwame Onwauchi. The opening represents his return to D.C. with a concept inspired by D.C. Surveyor Benjamin Banneker and Onwauchi’s heritage to the West African Dogon tribe. Pronounced “Doh-gon,” the restaurant will serve vibrant cuisine through an Afro-Caribbean lens and draw from Onwuachi’s unique Nigerian, Jamaican, Trinidadian, and Creole background. 

Alfreda (2016 P St., N.W.): A pizzeria in Dupont Circle, named for the chef’s grandmother. The pizzas – made on a sourdough crust and including gluten-free options – are based on more traditional techniques, but using global flavors. The menu also includes salads, small plates, and a long wine list.

Beresovsky’s Deli: Gay-owned KNEAD Hospitality + Design is teasing a deli later this year. It will be located inside the preexisting Mah-Ze-Dahr Navy Yard location. 

Events

The Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington (RAMW), is expanding from its winter and summer Restaurant Weeks to give diners another opportunity to celebrate the change of seasons with Spring Wine Fling. Spring Wine Fling is a platform for local eateries to highlight their wine programs with creative pairings. Participating locations will showcase their wine programs through curated wines paired with two-course prefix $55 menu offered during dinner service. 

National Cherry Blossom Festival: RAMW is also working with the National Cherry Blossom Festival. The National Park Service has anticipated peak bloom dates for 2024 between March 23–26. The festival has developed a full list (called “cherry picks”) of where to eat as part of the celebration. Many restaurants, bars, and hotels have also set up activations and events across the city.

A decade as a decorated pastry chef in Washington, D.C., and Alex Levin knows how to create a global realm of desserts. But he also knows that the whole is tastier than the sum of its parts.

Levin serves as Executive Pastry Chef and as part of the executive team for Schlow Restaurant Group, where he’s worked since 2017. He’s crafted desserts for the group’s breadth of restaurant cuisines, from Spanish at Tico (recently rebranded as Japanese Nama Ko), American at now-closed Riggsby, Japanese at Nama and Nama Ko, and Italian at the several Alta Strada spots. He also throws an annual sold-out bakery pop-up for Thanksgiving and for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. “There’s something fun and so meaningful to spend nine straight days making food that will be a part of so many people’s celebrations,” he says.

Yet as a gay man, he also strives for representation and a focus on supporting the LGBTQ community.

After graduating from Yale and focusing on a career in management and finance, Levin fled that industry to attend the Culinary Institute of America to follow his passion for pastry and restaurant management. After graduation, he trained at restaurants like Jean Georges and Cafe Boulud in New York, and moved to D.C. in 2013 to open Osteria Morini as pastry chef. There, he made a name for himself, earning a spot on Eater’s Young Guns in 2015 and in 2016, he earned the title of Best Pastry Chef from the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington. 

It was a time of invention in the dessert space. Levin was deeply embedded in some of that boundary-stretching.

“When I first became a pastry chef, all of my mentors were pushing me to create deconstructed desserts. I really fell in love with that approach, because it challenged me to think very far outside of the box to have a guest really understand that a plate with five components on it could be considered a lemon tart.”

Yet at Schlow, running dessert programs across the city for an increasingly demanding clientele, his approach evolved. The deconstructed version might look more beautiful, but he realized that it also has to taste even better than its classic counterpart.

“I realized that sometimes there is no reason to alter a classic dessert but to add perhaps a modern shift. That’s where I feel most comfortable now. It allows me to continue to express creativity both visually and with flavor to create the best version of a classic dessert.”

At Alta Strada (which has landed in the Washington Post’s Dining Guide for several years), Levin leans in to the restaurant’s homey style, with a touch of his signature flair, in the several desserts he makes. Traditional bomboloni get a glow up, given depth and tang with ricotta, vanilla, and orange in the batter and receiving a liberal dusting of cinnamon sugar; they’re served on a platter with chocolate hazelnut crema (i.e. liquid Nutella). He also crafts a brownie-cheesecake mashup: a whipped ricotta (sense a theme?) cheesecake sits atop a rich brownie, the black-and-white dessert set off by a single Luxardo cherry on top.

At Nama Ko, Levin’s menu is more concise but takes some additional liberties. The star is the Miso Honey Black Truffle soft serve ice cream, drizzled in chocolate sauce and caramel, under a shower of chocolate and toffee (there’s also a passionfruit sorbet with ube shortbread crumble). Now an expert at adjusting his soft serve machine to the right ratio of sugar, dairy, and flavor, Levin matches the sushi restaurant’s entrees with the ice cream’s balanced umami. Speaking of matching: he also plates a matcha crème brulee.

“When planning the dessert program for Nama Ko, I wanted to do something totally different for dessert — something the restaurant could be known for all on its own. The program had to be fun and allow the guests to have a Japanese dessert but with a twist. Once we landed on soft serve, the proposed flavors needed to have a level of simplicity and complexity.” The rollout received accolades, including in Washington City Paper and Eater’s Soft Serve map.

Levin, though, also serves as director of Strategic Business Initiatives. He coordinates operations, recruiting, reporting, marketing, menu design, and photography. He is constantly rethinking: refining his rotating selection of chocolate bonbons for special events, using colored cocoa butter for visual effect. He stays up on cookbooks, YouTube, and Instagram as resources for explanations and demos, “even how to braid a challah dough using a new technique.”

After coming out in 2000, Levin says he never encountered much homophobia in the culinary industry. In D.C., he works to support LGBTQ groups, personally and through his restaurants. “That might mean making Thanksgiving desserts for SMYAL’s annual Thanksgiving dinner for the kids, or even transforming one of our restaurants into a destination for D.C.’s annual Pride.” Levin also picks up a shift at the special seated dinner tables at the annual Chefs for Equality event, one the largest (and most fabulous) fundraisers for Human Rights Campaign.

Levin won’t rest on his soft serve laurels, continuing to find creative space. Stay tuned to his latest project, going on three years: to create “the best chocolate chip cookie. The current version is pretty close, but I continue to make some small modifications to improve the outcome.”

D.C.’s nightlife and dining scene continued its post-COVID rebound in 2023. Here are our picks for the top five developments in dining and nightlife for the year.

#5 Gay Bar Renaissance

As the dual losses of Town Danceboutique and Cobalt fade, LGBTQ nightlife is experiencing an exciting expansion. The city celebrated the opening of several new gay bars this year. Back in February, co-owner Zach Renovates (of KINETIC parties) kicked off 2023 with a high-energy bang in his fallout shelter-themed subterranean club space, Bunker. Not far behind, longtime gay bar industry fixtures Dito Sevilla, Dusty Martinez, and Ben Gander partnered to open Little Gay Pub. This upscale indoor/outdoor cocktail lounge in Logan Circle is now infamous for its glitter-bedecked cocktails and a visit by Nancy Pelosi. 

Over the summer, owners Justin Parker and Daniel Honeycutt of Dirty Goose opened Shakers, a relaxed bar located near the 9:30 Club and known for its indoor/outdoor patio and bright-red Imperial Shaker to make cocktails. Finally, in December, owners Brandon Burke and Shaun Mykals opened Thurst just off U Street, N.W., that centers Black LGBTQ experiences; they say that this bar will help fill a gap for Black-owned-and-operated business for the gay community. As D.C. gets ready to host World Pride in 2025 (a mere 18 months away), these openings point to optimism and creativity for the local LGBTQ community and signs of preparedness for the crowds that will arrive.

H Street Hardships

The H Street Corridor suffered in 2023. Lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have taken a toll across the industry and city, but have been especially hard on this strip. In addition, business owners and residents have reported an increase in crime. Restaurateurs also mentioned unsustainable cost increases and inflationary pressures as reasons for closure. Just in the past couple months, Pursuit Wine Bar & Kitchen and Brine Oyster and Seafood House both closed. Earlier this year, mainstay and H Street classic H Street Country Club also shut it doors; it opened in 2009 and was one of the first of a new wave of bars and restaurants to open on the rapidly changing strip. Nevertheless, H Street is still a cradle of innovative restaurants, like the Afrofuturist Bronze and the combo retail-restaurant-cafe Maketto.

Breakfast Bonanza

Breakfast meetings may have taken a hit with the increase in remote work, but trendy breakfasts are having a moment. Both of the city’s new Michelin Bib Gourmand nods, which highlight “good quality, good value restaurants” went to La Tejana (Mount Pleasant) and Yellow (Georgetown and Navy Yard). La Tejana, a tiny Tex-Mex taqueria, was already making headlines with its long lines by early birds eager to get their hands on Ana-Maria Jaramillo and Gus May’s flour tortilla-wrapped packages. Yellow is a bakery helmed by Michael Rafidi, who brings his Middle Eastern background to his sweet-and-savory offerings like a za’atar egg croissant. His sit-down restaurant Albi won a Michelin star. Meanwhile, celebrated D.C. chefs Scott Drewno and Danny Lee’s pop-up I Egg You selling sandwiches and tots (and eggs) opened a brick-and-mortar spot in Capitol Hill, with a bigger menu, all-day hours, and a liquor license. Finally, longtime LGBTQ community ally Perry’s, famous for its drag brunch (more than 30 years old!), kicked off Japanese breakfast service from its new chef, Masako Morishita.

Union market continues to expand

While H Street grapples with closings, Union Market is hotter than ever. Retail, hotels, galleries, bars, and restaurants are opening at a dizzying pace, and the mixed-use area hosts everything from fitness classes to drive-in movies. Most recently, atop the new Union Market Hotel is Treehouse, a bar/restaurant/club with inspiration provided by Tulum’s nightlife. Philly-based restaurateur Stephen Starr (Le Diplomate) opened buzzy El Presidente, a Mexican restaurant spread over several lushly decorated rooms. Starr’s French restaurant Pastis is set to open nearby next year. Plus, FreshFarm, one of the bigger farmers’ market programs in the city, began operations in September on Sundays 9 a.m.-1 p.m. New vendors in and around Union Market itself continue to sprout; this year includes ice cream import Van Leeuwen and bakery Maman, among many others. The area is not losing steam: several big-name openings are in the works for 2024.

Food Halls Flourish

Perhaps with Union Market as the driving force (and historic Eastern Market going strong), 2023 was the Year of the Food Hall in D.C. Food halls offer benefits to the small-biz restaurateur (sharing resources and utilities) and to the customer (diverse options, one roof). Food halls are casual, well-priced, and social spaces. This year, we saw a bounty of new openings. One of the splashier ones was The Square, run by local hospitality veterans Richie Brandenburg and Rubén García, which opened in September on K Street. More than 25,000 square feet, the Square is an indoor/outdoor Spanish-inspired collection with more than 15 vendors and a sit-down restaurant. The long-awaited Love, Makoto also opened this year. The 20,000-square-foot “culinary love letter” to Japan offers a sushi spot, steakhouse, bar, and fast-casual café. Most recently, The Heights Food Hall, slightly smaller at 10,000 square feet in Chevy Chase, started serving in December. At least 10 vendors and a sit-down restaurant share space here. Finally, out in Vienna, The Kitchen Collective straddles the food hall as patrons can pick up from a window or order delivery from the several vendors.