Exile on Meat Street

Keith McNally Takes on Washington, D.C.

A note from Jason: Starting next year, we’ll have a few folks contributing from time to time here at The Melt. We decided to try out this new idea by dispatching Aaron Lefkove out into the night for a scene report on a new Keith McNally restaurant opening in our nation’s capital. I haven’t done a ton of subscriber-only content since we started taking on paid subscribers, and there will be things in the future just for people who shell out a few bucks for this little publication, but I’d like to keep the newsletter free to everybody while also getting to pay people like Aaron to write sometimes for The Melt. So if you haven’t spent all your money on gifts this season, consider paying for a subscription.

Going out on the town in any city worth going out on has become a competitive sport. Not going out to the place on the corner but going out. Yes, reservation snipers have made it impossible to nab a prime table and yes it’s a minimum 100 bucks a head commitment before tip once you do get there….but also? The ongoing tyrannical grip of mediocre small plates and the dying art of real hospitality have made it a dicey and not-at-all-predictable proposition. So when the invitation to dine as a guest of a well-seasoned restaurateur comes up you pounce.

Downtown’s most enduring holder of strong opinions—the king of the chaos follow—is taking the show on the road with the Washington, D.C. opening of an outpost of the West Village’s Minetta Tavern.

Fifteen years ago, Keith McNally rebooted the Jazz Age New York room into one of the city’s premiere chophouses, smack in the heart of NYU tourist hell. Frank Bruni gave it a glowing three star in 2009. Posting up solo at the bar for a black label burger is still one of the city’s great simple pleasures. Although the restaurants have never been chef-forward on the marquee the Minetta opening team–Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr late of Frenchette (three stars), Le Rock (three stars), and the rebooted midcentury Le Veau D’or (two stars but c’mon if we are being honest here that’s a three star restaurant don’t even play like I’m wrong)–have gone on to become the city’s heirs apparent of French Brasserie-inflected chic. You already found your way to The Melt substack, you don’t need me to spell it out for you.

Which brings us to Neal Place–an alleyway anchored by Minetta on one end and another NYC export, the steakhouse St. Anselm, on the other–on a chilly Friday evening in December; the corner of Meat Street.

D.C. is a company town. New York, in spite of all its glamour industries, is not. “Lawyers and lobbyists,” as another restaurateur with ties to the capital city told me over dinner. The scene at friends and family, when pre-opening cacophony hopefully congeals into a symphony, skewed a bit more glamorous than the D.C. suits and the food mirrors the New York original’s rich French—and that’s butter France, not olive oil France—leanings: marrow bones, terrines, and of course the Black Label Burger.

The room, however, is a real gem. Shoehorning a century of patina into a brick building in D.C.’s Union Market district—a neighborhood that doesn’t exactly exude West Village charm—is a tough bid to anyone but a noted hoarder of subway tile. The walls are adorned with Hirschfeld’s, pictures of old boxers, and most notably, photos of various presidents and their mistresses—a nod to the Lucy Mercer Room upstairs, a bar named for FDR’s jumpoff and a cozy place to tuck in for some Beltway buggery. The stiff cognac cut straight through the pied de cochon.

My own entrepreneurial journey in the restaurant world began not in a dish pit or behind a bar (though I have held both of those jobs at various times) but over a dinner at Balthazar in the mid-2000s as a then co-worker delivered an underminery shame lecture at me—the lowest ranking member in an office already planted firmly on the lower rungs of the publishing business—and my proclivity for European style lunch breaks because no job is worth sitting on you ass tied to a computer through a lunch break to appease a boss least of all one that has you drumming up press for an unauthorized biography of Jimmy Page. And they might’ve made a compelling case had the hostess that evening not—in what I can only describe as a night of a Tale of Two Keiths—seated Keith Richards and his wife two tables away. Nothing will make an argument for self-imposed austerity fall apart quicker than being thrust into Keef’s sphere of gravity; imagine someone telling you to sit down and eat your sad desk salad and Keith Richards is sitting right there. If you’re gonna go out in New York, D.C.—or any town for that matter—don’t chance it. Go where you at least leave open the possibility of being seated next to the guy responsible for some of the greatest riffs in rock history. Nothing will make you tell em to take this job and shove it with such haste, either…speaking from personal experience. Tip your drink at Keef, disregard your fellow dinner companions’ mindless conversations, walk out, open your own shit, don’t look back. Five years and on my own third opening later I’d clean up big, fully outfitting the buildout of a long-running Greenpoint cafe at the Pulino’s auction picking through the detritus of that great Bowery misfire. A lot of the action in the restaurant auction world has moved online now but an in-person auction if you can find one is a world class menagerie of hospitality parasites and bottom feeder all stars. To this day I regret not bidding on the Technics 1200 and cassette deck with a mixtape still inside—as with anything at auction it likely went for pennies on the dollar. What was on that tape? Answering machine messages from Lorne Michaels? The original Odeon playlist? 11 years later I’m still dying to know.

Minetta Tavern ain’t Balthazar (or, Pulinos, Lucky Strike, Nell’s or Pravda or The Odeon or the beloved and dearly lamented Schiller’s) but it’s impossible to consider one without considering a complete oeuvre.

To the plebes in the cheap seats watching one of the last of the greats to post to Instagram not for clout or to sell anything in particular but simply for a love of the game–witnessing the palace intrigue of public 86ings of Graydon Carter and James Cordon is hilarious. But Minetta isn’t the only New York transplant coming to the Beltway this season as America enters its croniest of crony capitalist eras the inevitable bad behavior noted in the nightly manager reports posted to the gram and the potential of a publicly 86ing one of the Kushners, RFK Jr., or really any number of appointees—I mean take your pick—now that just has the possibility to be absolutely iconic.