La Vie

A Chef With Michelin-Starred Credentials Joins La Vie at the Wharf | Eater DC

"A celebrated D.C. chef from Shaw’s tasting room Causa exclusively tells Eater he’s the newly named culinary director of the Wharf’s sparkling Mediterranean restaurant, a glassy, high-end perch above the Potomac that helped christen the Southwest Waterfront development in 2018 but was almost immediately overlooked for its food after one eviscerating zero-star review from Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema. Delgado frames his involvement as a fun challenge to reverse its reputation as a sheer “tourist trap,” noting that the place “can be a nice restaurant — it needs to work on the backend and have people come here for the food, not [just] the view.” He isn’t leaving Causa — which was named one of Eater’s Best New Restaurants in America soon after opening in 2022, earned its first Michelin star, and helped land Delgado a 2025 James Beard Award finalist nod for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic — but has recruited Aseem Charan (a CIA grad who most recently worked at Zaytinya) to be chef de cuisine and mentor: “[Aseem] is killing it and on his way up,” says Delgado. The restaurant will keep its Mediterranean focus and in-house pastry program that travels through Southern Italy and Greece, but is beginning a gradual menu overhaul that starts with edits such as making its fluffy pita bread in-house and fine-tuning its burrata with peak spring ingredients; the revamped menu is “20-percent” different for now, with a mid-summer lineup expected to be largely new and leaning toward more small passed plates. The chandelier-adorned dining room also received a slight remodel ahead of the menu reboot, and the restaurant group behind it, Eaternity (which runs Nary-Ya and Kinfolk at the Wharf), is preparing to open a new Latin restaurant near Navy Yard." - Tierney Plumb