Willowsong Is the Latest High-Stakes Restaurant at an Iconic Wharf Address | Eater DC
"A newly opened lobby-level flagship at the InterContinental Washington, D.C. debuts Wednesday, February 12, serving breakfast, lunch, dinner, and weekend brunch (reservations went live on Resy). The Los Angeles transplant leading the kitchen was poached from Omni’s NOÉ Restaurant & Bar and arrives as a tenured chef ready to put his own stamp on a storied Southwest Waterfront space that had long awaited the return of star talent in the kitchen. “It’s always different coming to a new market but I’ve done it several times,” he says. “I am looking at it with a fresh set of eyes. To me, I am a newcomer to D.C., so it’s taking the pressure off.” For this third act as a modern American restaurant, he developed a hyper-seasonal menu that starts with wagyu steak and eggs in the morning and ends with duck tinga tagliatelle at night; other plated highlights include hamachi tartare, crispy prawns and calamari, Maryland littleneck clams, dry-aged striploin, braised pork shank, and house-made pastas such as cresto di gallo with crispy oxtail and squid-ink orecchiette topped with crab. “The first thing I started doing was reaching out to farms here on FaceTime,” he says; meats, seafood, and vegetables landing on plates hail within a 150-mile radius, with opening purveyors including Family Cow (Chambersburg, Pennsylvania), Ovoka Farm (Paris, Virginia), and Miller Farms (Clinton, Maryland). “One of the biggest points of moving back here is the seasonality of it all. California, you can get everything year-round,” he adds, and later: “I’ve been blessed to have worked all over America, and this menu is all little nods to the places I’ve lived.” The new 152-seat waterfront dining room received a modest makeover with soaring stone walls, live greenery, leather banquettes, brass finishes, and a large mural by Maryland-based artist Irene Pantelis; a 20-seat central bar looks out over boats at the Wharf and offers daily happy hour from 4 to 6:30 p.m. (3 p.m. start on weekends), with a bottle list that ranges from local breweries DC Brau and Right Proper to old-world labels like Barons de Rothschild and E. Guigal. A waterfront-facing patio and a purveyor-spotlight dinner series will arrive in the spring. The hotel’s recent history and staff context are notable: the space previously housed critically acclaimed concepts led by Top Chef alum Kwame Onwuachi (who earned a 2019 James Beard Award for Rising Star Chef of the Year) and chef Kevin Tien’s Moon Rabbit (named among Food & Wine’s 10 best restaurants in the country), and after Moon Rabbit closed the hotel faced a settled dispute that resulted in D.C. ordering IHG to pay Moon Rabbit employees $126,650 last year; hotel staffers ultimately won the right to unionize, and many employees who worked through those highs and lows stayed on for this new chapter. “They’ve seen the highs and lows and earned their stripes. It’s not often you get staff that has worked for two highly promoted chefs who know techniques that are easy to translate,” he says. Off the pass, the chef — a Food Network champ on Beat Bobby Flay who says he got the bug to cook from his grandfather, who opened a fish market in Philadelphia and ran a neighborhood gardening program — has personal ties to the region (living in Waldorf, Maryland, a 10-minute drive from the Clinton farm where the restaurant sources ice cream, produce, and eggs) and community-minded plans, including a gumbo event for Mardi Gras on March 1. “I want all these farms to shine so people can go buy [from them] and support the community,” he says, and he finishes with a pledge about the restaurant’s long-term identity: “I don’t want to be that standard restaurant that comes in looking for glitz and glamour and six months later they don’t remember who you are. I want you to come here twice a week and [we] know your name.”" - Tierney Plumb
