I spent a lot of time at the Tune Inn when I was on the Hill. Burger, a Natty Boh, dead animals staring down from the wall, somebody’s congressional staffer arguing about a markup three booths over. You walk three blocks from the Capitol dome and the marble drops away and you are in this narrow, dim room that feels like a country bar somebody dragged across the Beltway and shoved in next to the Hawk ‘n’ Dove.
The Tune Inn has been at 331½ Pennsylvania Avenue SE since 1947. Same family runs it, three generations deep. Same booths, more or less. Same deer butts hanging over the bathroom doors.
How a place like this survives in DC, where the cheapest bar in the neighborhood usually gets razed and replaced with a “concept,” is the story.
The narrow building had a few earlier lives
Before the Tune Inn moved in, the building was a candy shop around the turn of the twentieth century. A black-and-white photo of the storefront from that era used to hang over the bar. In the 1920s, during Prohibition, it ran as a speakeasy.
After Prohibition ended in 1933, the address became one of the first bars to open back up in the District, according to Tony Nardelli’s account in a 2005 Roll Call profile. Somewhere in the middle of all that it was a men’s tailor that catered to congressmen.
The bar wasn’t named the Tune Inn until 1947. That is the year on the sign, the year the second-oldest post-Prohibition liquor license in DC supposedly belongs to, and the year the modern story starts.
The building itself is older than all of this. The 300 block of Pennsylvania Avenue SE sits inside the Capitol Hill Historic District, which the city designated locally in 1973 and the National Register added in 1976.
The district’s period of significance is 1791 to 1945, and the predominant fabric is the rowhouse and small-commercial boom of the late nineteenth century, when Capitol Hill filled in with electricity and plumbing and a new generation of contractors. 331½ is part of that late-Victorian commercial pocket. The bar inhabits a building that almost certainly predates it by half a century.
West Virginia Joe arrives
The Nardelli era starts in the summer of 1955. That is when Joe Nardelli, the youngest of nine children in an Italian family, walks in and takes over management of the Tune Inn from the owner. Joe had come to DC from West Virginia during World War II. People around Capitol Hill called him “West Virginia Joe” for the rest of his life.
Five years later he bought the bar outright from his debt-plagued boss.
He worked the place for the rest of his life. He ran it in an era when Capitol Hill was a rougher neighborhood, “often referred to as a redneck joint” by his own son, Tony, who told Roll Call:
It was nothing to have three fights a day in the place.
Joe started filling the walls. He was an avid hunter and fisherman, and the deer heads, the fish, the dusty birds, the unidentifiable furry things on the high shelves are largely his trophies. The trio of mounted deer behinds over the bathroom doors became a Tune Inn signature. They are his sense of humor, in taxidermy form, still on the wall sixty years later.
In the early 1980s he bought the building. By then the place was institutional. The Hawk ‘n’ Dove had opened next door at 329 Pennsylvania Avenue SE in 1967, named for the Vietnam-era political camps. Together the two of them owned the block for a generation of Hill regulars.
The robbery he walked off
Sometime in the late 1970s, Joe Nardelli was shot six times in a parking lot near the bar during a robbery. He survived. Doctors couldn’t get all of the bullets out of him. He went back to work.
The detail Tony Nardelli told Roll Call about his father sticks with me. After the shooting, a guy supposedly broke out of jail just to come check on him.
“He attracted all types,” Tony Nardelli said.
This is the part of the Tune Inn story that gets papered over by the Esquire write-ups and the Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives shoutout. The bar that everybody now thinks of as cute Americana started in a Capitol Hill that was nothing like cute. Joe survived it. So did the bar.
A regulars list that goes on forever
The Tune Inn has been written up so many times by so many people that the patron list reads like a who’s-it-not-who’s-who of Washington since the Carter administration.
Janet Reno would come in regularly while she was Attorney General. She wore a baseball cap, sat down with her security detail, ordered a burger. There is a framed note from her on the wall near the back: “Thank you for the best hamburger in town.”
Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman dropped in during the filming of All the President’s Men, per family lore. Joan Cusack stopped by. Wolf Blitzer was a regular. Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley was a regular too.
James Carville brought Mary Matalin here for their first date. The bar was packed that night and they ended up retreating next door to the Hawk ‘n’ Dove, but the date started on Tune Inn turf. It is the kind of political-patron register the city specializes in, the kind Martin’s Tavern over in Georgetown has been collecting in Booth 3 for nine decades.
A 2006 profile in The Hill by Nancy O’Donnell ran through the eccentrics: a retired judge who came in dressed as NASCAR driver Bobby Labonte, carrying a framed photo of him; another regular who bought Easter hats for all his female friends and ran Easter egg hunts inside the bar. The waitresses, names like Bertha and Bonnie and Nelly, would stay on staff for decades.
Susan Mathers, who worked shifts at the Tune Inn for some fifteen years by the time O’Donnell interviewed her, gave a quote that has stayed with me:
We have marriage proposals made here. Once a regular put up a big banner that said, ‘I love you. Will you marry me?’ He said yes. Another time a nice couple wandered in with their three teenagers. They said, ‘We wanted to bring the kids to see where we had our first date.’ My son met his future wife here, and they had their first kiss right back there next to the telephone. They have an 8-year-old son.
A bar that produces grandchildren is a different category of bar.
Joe dies, Tony takes over, then Tony dies too
“West Virginia Joe” Nardelli passed away in 1998 or 1999, depending on the source. The Roll Call piece in mid-2005 puts it at nearly six years before, which lines up with the 1998 date documented by DC historian John DeFerrari in the streetsofdc Flickr archive.
His son Tony Nardelli took the bar over. By 1990, when the Capitol Hill History Project’s Lewis Nicholson photographed Joe behind the bar with longtime waitress Caroline, Tony had been working alongside his father for years. Tony was the guy in the room. He carried the place into the 2000s, kept the menu the same, kept the booths, kept the walls covered.
On June 19, 2006, Tony died of cancer at 63. A few weeks earlier his daughter Lisa had given birth to a son, Anthony. The Hill ran the story under the headline “Sad news at the Tune Inn.” Lisa told Nancy O’Donnell:
I stayed beside him as much as I could. He really loved a party. He was so much a part of the Tune Inn. I ran it for 10 years, but he was always there. He was my best friend.
The Tune Inn threw him a party.
The 2011 fire
Five years later, on the morning of June 22, 2011, a kitchen fire broke out at the Tune Inn. It moved into the ductwork above the kitchen and threatened the whole building. The DC Fire Department got it under control. Pete Piringer, the department spokesman, ruled the cause accidental and put the damage at $75,000 to $100,000.
That afternoon, Capitol Hill came to a stop in front of 331½. The Washington Post found a congressman, off-duty firefighters, an elderly couple with their dogs, and a longtime regular named James Forward, 68, standing on the sidewalk staring at the broken neon sign.
“We had our house burn down,” Forward told her. “Our house.”
Lisa Nardelli’s husband, Thomas Webb, a DC homicide detective, summed it up for the Post in one line: “The Tune Inn will get a tuneup.”
In July, a group calling themselves the Friends of the Tune Inn threw a benefit to support the bar’s staff while the kitchen was being rebuilt. They raised about $40,000. Howard Fineman wrote a HuffPost essay titled “The Tune Inn IS America.”
The bar reopened at 8 a.m. on Friday, November 4, 2011, four months and change after the fire. Two days later, on Sunday morning, the Nardellis threw a thank-you event for the firefighters who had kept the building from going down.
The kitchen was entirely new. The booths and tables, which had been pretty banged up, were reordered in the same make and model so nothing felt out of place. Lisa restored the room as close to its old self as she could.
A few of the deer butts, sadly, did not survive the fire.
Is it still a dive?
Once a place gets restored, the dive-purists start sharpening their knives. Six years after the fire, in 2017, two Washington Post writers ran a point-counterpoint inside the same article over whether the Tune Inn still qualified.
Fritz Hahn, who is a regular and will get a Natty Boh and a Jim Beam shot dropped in front of him before he sits down, said yes, of course it is. The other guy noticed the new draft lines, the bottles of Campari and Belvedere, the dudes pulling up Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” on the Internet jukebox, and said no, the edge is gone.
I see it both ways. The room is lighter now. There is no drop ceiling anymore, and the skylight is back. Some of the old menace went up with the kitchen.
But it is still a place where you can walk in at 8:30 a.m., order eggs and a beer, and not have anyone arch an eyebrow. It is still a place where you can sit next to a homicide detective and a Hill staffer and a Vietnam vet with a paperback, all watching the same Nats game, all leaving each other alone. That is not common in DC anymore. That part of the Tune Inn is still the Tune Inn.
And Graham Platner poured drinks here
The most recent footnote in the regulars register belongs to Graham Platner, the Marine combat veteran and oyster farmer who is now running for the Maine Senate seat against Susan Collins. Platner moved to DC in 2011, the same year as the fire. He took classes at GWU on the G.I. Bill and bartended at the Tune Inn for most of the next five years. He left DC in 2016 and moved back to Maine.
It was at the Tune Inn that Platner met Ryan Grim, then the HuffPost DC bureau chief, who would later give Platner some of his earliest national press through Drop Site News.
When Platner came back to DC during his Senate campaign, he did a guest-bartending shift behind the Tune Inn bar. Photos went around online. He pulled a few beers, posed with regulars, then left.
It is the kind of detail the Tune Inn collects without trying. Cabinet secretaries, congressmen, dive-bar laureates, attorneys general, future Senate candidates, all having a shift drink at the same counter on Pennsylvania Avenue. Lisa Nardelli is still pouring. The deer butts are still over the bathroom doors. The candy shop and the tailor and the speakeasy are all gone, but their building is still up, and at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning somebody is going to walk in for a beer with their eggs.
