Washington has always had a serious food and drink scene, even if most people don’t think of it that way. These posts explore the bars, restaurants, saloons, and breweries that fueled the city across the centuries.
Walk into the Everlane store at 3259 M Street NW today, all blond wood and folded denim, and you are standing in what used to be the rowdiest room in Georgetown. For about a quarter of a century, this three-story building was the Crazy Horse, a beer-and-boogie nightclub the neighborhood spent years trying to shut … Read more
Inside Dan’s Cafe at 2315 18th Street NW: the windowless 1911 building, the immigrant Dan family, and the six decades Clinnie ‘Dickie’ Dickens ran one of D.C.’s oldest dive bars.
At 3125 Mount Pleasant Street NW, the Raven Grill has been a Washington DC dive bar since 1935. The booths are still the originals.
How a Court House Oldsmobile dealership became the Plymouth-in-the-wall brewpub Bardo Rodeo, then Dr. Dremo’s Taphouse, then a condo tower.
For 43 years, Tom Sarris’ Orleans House held the corner of Wilson and Lynn in Rosslyn, complete with iron balconies and a steamboat salad bar.
A few doors south of Heaven and Hell, 2321 18th Street NW in Adams Morgan was the Blue Room lounge, then Bill Thomas’s Bourbon whiskey bar, and now Death Punch.
The Big Hunt opened in 1992 inside a 1928 storefront at 1345 Connecticut Avenue NW and closed for good in 2020. Inside Dupont Circle’s three-story dive bar with the safari kitsch, the hidden patio, and the Hell’s Kitchen basement.
Three blocks from the Capitol dome sits a 1947 dive bar with deer butts on the wall and a Nardelli behind the counter.
Three bars in 63 years at one Georgetown address: Shamrock 1952, Winston’s 1972, Rhino Bar 1998. The full arc of 3295 M Street NW before retail took it.
