“You have to keep going”: Washington’s best restaurants for Trump 2.0
“I said, ‘Ken, we want to make it sexy,’” Starr told me. “We want to make this a place where people can come to enjoy energizing lunches and dinners. Conspiracy, CIA’s relationship with a Russian spy – this is the story told. This is the place.”
Or, it’s possible that things will go back to the way they were during Trump’s first term: the president dining every night at the hotel that bears his name, the US government placing Secret Service agents in suites with foreign officials. We will all once again need crash courses in remuneration provisions. Last Friday, Eric Trump called up New York Post Office and gave shocking news: The Trump Organization is looking to take back its hotel.
“Our family saved the hotel once. If requested, we will save it,” he told the newspaper.
The tabloid’s sources insist that there have not been any negotiations yet, but that Waldorf is ready for a takeover. The Trump Organization sold the lease in 2022 for $375 million, making a $100 million profit. Since then, it has changed hands. After defaulting on a $285 million loan, the hotel’s original buyer – an investment group backed by Alex Rodriguez, among other assets—was stripped of its assets and acquired by bank BDT & MSD Partners in a foreclosure auction for $100 million, co-led by the former Goldman Sachs creditor. Byron Trott, who merged his company with a company that functions as Michael Dellfamily office of. Looks like a deal is being done.
If the Trump family is indeed returning to the DC hotel scene, it’s unclear what that means for Andrés, whose recent hotel opening is said to have ended a long odyssey 9 years. After first announcing the space in 2014, Andrés said Washington Post in July 2015 that the project was “impossible” following Trump’s rhetoric about Mexican immigrants early in the 2016 campaign. Trump’s family sued the chef for $10 million. Andrés’ company sued again and the case was settled in 2017.
Although Trump’s name has been physically removed from the facility, to my eyes during a recent visit, the place, with its vast marble hallways, still bore some of Trump’s flamboyance. Above the restaurant’s balcony is an installation by Robert Irwin 48 Shadow Plane still hangs in the middle of the room, more than 40 years after its installation. (Irwin, who passed away last year, once told me that “it’s a great work and it will last—it will outlast Trump’s reign. I don’t know if I’ll get it back it or not, but it will be there after I’m done—and after he’s done.”) The food at The Bazaar is great—Maryland blue crabs are not just one, not two, but year different tapas dishes — but the feel is a little different, with the taps of forks echoing throughout the giant, half-empty hotel lobby that still smells faintly of the 45th president.
That wasn’t the case at dinner at Minetta Tavern on Thursday night. One native New Yorker, who visited Manhattan a few weeks ago, commented that it was an uncanny replica of the original, but filled with DC folk. This is what I was hoping for: the tools of the Washington machine decked out in plush booths with holiday cocktails, congressional staffers celebrating with their bosses that they snagged a DC res in the days before said bosses had to return to their constituents in Ohio, Arkansas or Arizona.
But in the hours before booking, I sadly realized that it was unlikely I would be jostled next to an MP. Trump’s DC poked its head out early with a vengeance. Elon Musk spent Wednesday criticizing the 1,500-page bipartisan spending bill that would fund the government through mid-March 2025, and the president-elect later expressed support for repealing the bill This is in support of a bill that would suspend the debt ceiling—a completely unintelligent thing, leave the speaker alone Mike Johnson with Scrooge in the unenviable position of leading the country into a government shutdown days before Christmas. Johnson introduced a bill at the last second — which Democrats would happily accept defeat with the help of far-right Republicans — and it was set to pass. passed late Thursday night. Instead, any House members with reservations in Minetta will have to order takeout to Capitol Hill.
Still, there were trays of martinis floating around the room, Sinatra blasting from the speakers, and aged Côte de boeuf at most tables.
After dinner, we headed upstairs where behind the velvet curtains was actually the Lucy Mercer Bar, a unique Victorian-bordello living room concept with DC Minetta chockablock with antique paintings and lamps funny. Photos are strictly prohibited; no one could have taken a photo of McNally sitting in the corner, personally DJing: David Bowie, Elton John, Taylor Swift.
“It took me three years to build this place and it’s perfect,” McNally said, looking wistfully at the crowd.
And then, as I sat in my seat with a cocktail, a heartfelt Christmas miracle came to God. As McNally turned up the volume on “All Too Well,” a real-life Democratic congressman sat down next to me, fresh from voting against Johnson’s bill. He enjoyed a cocktail, the staff surrounding him, looking triumphant, unwilling to let his Minetta Tavern plans go to waste because of some trickery on the Hill.
McNally is right. It’s perfect.
Summary list
Your crib book of the comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…
…You probably won’t be surprised that Tom Hanks—Oscar winner, best-selling novelist, America’s father—is an avid collector of historic typewriters. He amassed more than 300 of them and also had a habit of surprising small businesses with a typewriter if he felt they deserved one. “They just show up at your door unannounced,” Tom Furrier, owner of Cambridge Typewriter, talks about giving away typewriters unintentionally. For a closer look at this quirky yet endearing trait of an extremely famous person, Sag Harbor’s The Church—a wonderful artistic concern started by a pair of artists Eric Fischl And April Gornik and run after it Sheri Pasquarella—will open a show next month called “Some of Tom’s Typewriters,” which will feature 35 typewriters, handpicked by Simon Doonan. And why not! “After all, the soundtrack of the 20th century was the magical clacking and beeping of typewriters. Click, click, click… ping!” Doonan said in a statement.
