A veal shank with grits and Castelvetrano olives at Butterworth’s.
Photo: Hawkeye Johnson
“Where are all the red hats — am I going to run into Steve Bannon?” asked one of my guests as we peered around the room at Butterworth’s, the buzzy, much-publicized MAGA hangout up on Capitol Hill. His voice was urgent, even kind of excited, and he spoke in a loud, hissing whisper, like an eager tourist out on safari for the first time waiting for the lions to arrive. It was the kind of tone that’s rarely heard around the placid, generally blasé Washington, D.C., restaurant scene, or at least I’d rarely heard it during my formative years growing up around the city, when I used to make regular visits to places like Duke Zeibert’s (a famous sports hangout), or the Yenching Palace on Connecticut Avenue (a Chinese restaurant favored by Henry Kissinger and assorted intelligence spooks), or a mercifully defunct downtown steakhouse called Blackie’s House of Beef, where J. Edgar Hoover and his cronies used to sit in the darkened banquets sipping their great fishbowl-size martinis.
Bannon was nowhere in sight on this steamy D.C. evening, but other creatures of the new Trump revolution were already crowding into the snug little dining room at Butterworth’s. There were pale-faced frat-boy interns dressed in crewneck shirts and Palm Beach–style matrons with great beehive hairdos making their stately way to the restroom clutching pickle-colored margarita drinks. Trump’s White House staff secretary, Will Scharf — “He’s the guy who hands all those proclamations to the president to sign” one of my safari guides for the evening explained — was at Bannon’s regular corner table wearing a red silk tie. Across the way, at the bar, a woman was offering loud, possibly drunken toasts to the assembled rabble of bloggers, influencers and mid-level Republican functionaries who have made Butterworth’s their own semi-private dining club ever since the MAGA faithful reclaimed the Capitol.
“We’ve been called the Elaine’s of the MAGA movement, which I suppose is fair,” said Raheem Kassam, one of the restaurant’s co-owners, who got his start working at right-wing blogs and then for Nigel Farage before going on to Breitbart in London and is now the editor-in-chief of a right-wing website called the National Pulse. The president hadn’t been in yet (“we don’t have a back entrance; the Secret Service isn’t wild about that”), but Bannon is a fan of the risottolike Carolina Gold rice, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is reputed to be partial to the lamb tartare. “I think MAGA One’s attitude was ‘Let’s go in there, let’s smash things up a bit, let’s leave the globalist apparatus a little worse than we found it,’” said Kassam, sipping on a martini variation called the Dirty Monkey (Monkey 47 gin, plus olive juice, plus a lemon twist). This new MAGA scene is younger, he said. People want to create lasting change; they want houses and careers. And they want regular spots to mingle with like-minded true believers while blowing off a little steam.
“I’m not MAGA, I’m a normal person,” our server offered with a slightly apologetic grin as dinner was served in the gathering din: a selection of smooth pâtés touched with brandy and red wine, a large helping of homemade merguez sausage set over mashed potatoes, Bannon’s favorite rice dish folded with mushrooms and taleggio cheese. Someone pointed out an influencer named Jack Posobiec (“he has 3 million followers on Twitter!”) and Rand Paul’s communications director, Drew Carmichael.
Butterworth’s isn’t the only new dining destination blowing up around the famously subdued, famously uneven Washington, D.C., dining scene these days. Assorted new canteens, brasseries, and political hangouts have been cropping up like pods of mushrooms, including an eerily accurate replication of Keith McNally’s New York steak joint, Minetta Tavern, in the newly redeveloped Union Market neighborhood that includes a bar upstairs named after FDR’s mistress, Lucy Mercer.
In the suddenly restaurant-mad capital, there are opulent new lobbyist hangouts where you can enjoy impeccably rendered slabs of prime rib under the somber portraits of dead presidents (Stephen Starr’s Occidental adjacent to the Willard Hotel) and private members’ organizations like Ned’s Club overlooking the White House and Treasury Building on Pennsylvania Avenue (the priciest “Founding Membership” initiation fee is reportedly $125,000). Donald Trump Jr.’s exclusive 200-members-only establishment, Executive Branch, costs a cool half-million dollars to join and opened earlier this year in a subterranean Georgetown mall space featuring, among many other things, a tech-bro-heavy members list (crypto czar David Sacks, the Winklevoss twins) and a state-of-the-art sushi bar.
“Washington is still extremely liberal, which means MAGA people are not welcome in a lot of places, which means they tend to gather in groups in venues where they know they’re not going to be harassed,” said Jessica Sidman, who has spent years covering the arcane dining habits of the city’s political classes for Washingtonian magazine. Over the decades, the city has seen many different restaurant styles go in and out of fashion, from the French-centric ’60s and ’70s, when local gastronomes frequented establishments like the Watergate restaurant Sans Souci (Eric Ripert’s first U.S. job was in D.C., and Mick Jagger was famously kicked out of Sans Souci for not wearing a dinner jacket); to the more eclectic, fusion-oriented Obama years, which were marked by the ascent of the great Spanish chef José Andrés; to the circus-party atmosphere at the Trump Hotel during MAGA 1.0 and the moribund Biden administration when, as Sidman says, “it was a lot of the same people from the Obama years who were now grown up.” (As one former D.C. resident I know puts it, “‘creative’ food in D.C. usually means balsamic squiggles on a square plate.”)
The D.C. dining trend that will never die is the steakhouse, which is why Sidman and I were sitting in a darkened corner booth at the Capital Grille on Pennsylvania Avenue, a place that Sidman merrily called “the swampiest restaurant in Washington.” It rose to prominence during the ’90s as a red-meat hangout for a group of young, upstart congressmen led by Newt Gingrich, and when Sidman recently dug into the campaign-spending filings, she found that Republican fat cats still outspend Democrats here by a ratio of 13 to one. The waiters wear long butcher aprons and the dark-wood-paneled walls are decorated with animal trophies, including the shaggy head of a large buffalo. As I gnawed on my perfectly acceptable 14-ounce New York strip, we were joined by a lobbyist named Mark R. Smith, a regular who speaks in the practiced off-the-record sound bites of a Beltway insider and reckoned he orders more or less the same meal at his favored hangout —“an eight-ounce filet cooked to 130 degrees with a little asparagus on the side” — close to 150 times a year.
“I’ve been here since 1984, when D.C. was still a sleepy southern town, and you really had some of the most horrid food that has ever hit a grill or a plate,” said Smith, who was sporting a pair of silvery Trump White House cufflinks on this bright afternoon and an Hermès tie festooned with little shepherds jumping over rows of tiny sheep. Smith said he’d been to Butterworth’s but hadn’t yet had a full meal there and sensed the staff was still finding their way. “My Democratic friends have a distinctly different and more global palate than my steak-loving Republican friends,” he said, his cufflinks glittering in the dark steakhouse gloom. The masculine, red-state, America-first traditions of the steakhouse still align with the tastes of many traditional Republicans around town, he explained, but there’s a sense that the younger MAGA 2.0 generation has begun to develop a palate of its own, which, if Butterworth’s is an indicator, includes a steady diet of seasonal vegetables and roasted marrow bones. “There are those of us who have been with the president from 2015 forward,” Smith said. “We’re still here and crushing it, and now there are a new generation of younger kids who are learning and doing some very good things. They have to eat too.”
Patrons and dishes at the Butterworth’s bar. Hawkeye Johnson.
Patrons and dishes at the Butterworth’s bar. Hawkeye Johnson.
“We recognize that the steakhouse is central to the D.C. mystique, but you’re always looking for ways to differentiate yourself,” said Gareth Banner, the genial Londoner who oversees the new Washington, D.C., branch of Ned’s Club, which occupies a network of hushed, carefully appointed dining rooms and leisure nooks on the top-three floors of an old bank building just off Pennsylvania Avenue, owned by the former junk-bond king turned megaphilanthropist, Michael Milken. Inside, a little green sticker was affixed to the lenses of my phone to prevent surreptitious postings from places like the Japanese-themed restaurant, Kaiya, or the Library, which was filled with members lounging here and there in large wingback chairs.
Unlike at Trump Jr.’s club, Banner emphasizes that people of all political persuasions are welcome at Ned’s Club, which has branches in London, New York, and Doha and is named for Edward “Ned” Lutyens, the principle architect for New Delhi under Britain’s Indian Raj. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins is a member, along with Milken himself, and I’ve heard one of the corner windows in the plush Founders Dining Room (cost of entry: $125,000, compared to $5,000 for a regular membership) is the favored seat of Treasury Secretary Bessent. The executive chef is a disciple of José Andrés’s, which means breakfast includes an eggs Benedict variation called Avocado Royale, constructed with fennel-crusted avocados instead of English muffins, and a fruit plate sprinkled with marigold blossoms. Tequila seems to be the club’s spirit of choice during this Trump era, Banner said, and while the kitchen strives for a bipartisan flavor, the dish that members of both parties clamor for, these days, is the jumbo Maryland crab cake.
Back at Butterworth’s, the restaurant’s chef-partner, Bart Hutchins, said he’s serving plenty of crab, too, mingled in the Scottish breakfast specialty kedgeree; or in soft-shell form, dressed with fresh peas as a dinner entrée, or as an excellent lunchtime sandwich squeezed with a homemade roulade inside a soft sesame-seed bun. Hutchins grew up in Jacksonville, Florida — his father was a priest and his mother was a cop — and told me he had dreams of becoming a writer before settling on the chef’s life. He described the simple, boxlike room as a “clubhouse kind of restaurant” and said the eclectic, slightly homey décor (a portrait of Queen Elizabeth on the wall, an antique coat rack purchased by Alex Butterworth at a rummage sale) was inspired by the kind of quirky, personalized brasseries he enjoys visiting when he’s in France.
Before hitting the big time with Butterworth’s, Hutchins presided over a series of dining concepts in and around D.C., including one that he described a little ruefully as a “French Canadian disco.” In 2023, he briefly abandoned the restaurant business altogether and moved with his family to a cabin in the wilds of Minnesota where he attempted one last time to write the great American novel. He was coaxed back to town by one of his partners who saw the Butterworth’s space was up for lease, and although he hasn’t necessarily been surprised by the restaurant’s success, the speed with which it was adopted by the MAGA masses came as a bit of a shock. “When you’re starting a restaurant, everybody’s inviting their friend, the first 100 customers are people you already know, so our partnership group all invited their friends,” he said. “It turned out that Raheem was better at networking than we were. He had more friends.”
Hutchins is a devotee of Alice Waters and the nose-to-tail evangelist Fergus Henderson. In the tradition of the farm-to-table generation of the early aughts, he procures his vegetables and chickens exclusively from Amish farmers, uses beef tallow in his fryer instead of chemically enhanced fats and oils, and performs all of his beef and whole-hog butchering in house. He worked for Obama during the 2012 election but would rather not say whom he voted for the last time around, and like most of the liberal-seeming staff, he doesn’t appear perturbed by the politics of the restaurant’s rowdy new customer base.
“I’m not interested in the horse-race version of politics — who’s the good guy, who’s the bad guy — because I’ve seen both parties bomb the shit out of innocent children in the Middle East,” said Hutchins as we took delivery of a cooling tomato-watermelon salad dressed in a sophisticated, non-D.C. way with a chopping of pickled watermelon rinds. When I asked whether an avowed Bay Area lefty like chef Waters would be dismayed to find one of her disciples spreading the gospel of local eating among a new generation of anti-immigration MAGA true believers, Hutchins furrowed his brow in contemplation for a minute or two. “Maybe, but if you do something well in a place like Washington, you should hope that the various powers that be will find their way to you,” he said. “The political compass is changing right now, and if you can steer both sides of the aisle toward a new way of eating, and possibly see some actual change, I’m willing to take a risk on that.”
Later on in the evening at Butterworth’s, however, after the fresh-scrubbed intern bros had ordered their second and third rounds of dirty martinis, there didn’t seem to be much discussion of whole-hog butchery or the even the lobsters that were raised in Baltimore harbor, of all places, and which Hutchins was plating on this night with rounds of puff pastry. My guests had drifted away without glimpsing Bannon or even a red hat (hats are famously not allowed on the premises at Butterworth’s). Rand Paul’s comms director was deep in conversation with assorted pink-faced MAGA enthusiasts over rounds of gin drinks and Guinness while I finished the remains of nice Paris-Brest pastry ringed with strawberries.
A little while later, Kassam and some of his associates — the influencer Jack Posobeic; a writer named Jim Proser who’s working on a biography of Pete Hegseth, dressed in a wrinkled denim shirt — were milling around outside the little restaurant in the clammy Washington air. It rained a little, then it stopped. A skinny man wearing a beaten MAGA hat wandered to and fro under the wet trees shouting at no one in particular. People talked about when they first bought bitcoin and their recently purchased gold Piguet watches.
Drinking another Guinness, Kassam ticked off the names of several of his political and cultural heroes, all of whose portraits are hanging in a row on the wall of his Capitol Hill apartment — Churchill, Thatcher, Barry Goldwater, Andrew Breitbart — but said he’s much less of “frothing-at-the-mouth right-wing hot head” than he used to be. I asked whether this feels like the beginning of something or a passing fad, and he shrugged his shoulders. “Look inside,” he said as he finished his beer. “The tables are heaving. I don’t see many familiar faces. The place is actually a success. It’s time to sell!”
Photo: Hawkeye Johnson
