http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/22/dining/restaurants-in-dc-are-moving-into-residential-neighborhoods.html 2014-10-20 20:38:36 Restaurants in D.C. Are Moving Into Residential Neighborhoods The capital is rapidly gaining in cozy neighborhood dining spots with distinctive food. === WASHINGTON — On a scrubby block in a working-class neighborhood east of Rock Creek Park, plopped down among cheap hair salons, a dry cleaner and a sad-looking liquor store, the future of dining in Washington, D.C., has arrived. On one side of the street is On the other is For decades, Washington’s dining scene has been made up mostly of two kinds of restaurants. There are the expense-account steakhouses and hushed white-tablecloth hotel eateries catering to the political class with money to spend. At the other end are the cheap ethnic restaurants dotting the city and its outlying suburbs. Local restaurants like those in Philadelphia or Charleston, S.C., where the stroller set settles in with the small-batch-bourbon swilling groovesters for some solid roast chicken, were as rare as bipartisan budget bills. While those other cities were becoming known as food towns, Washington seemed to miss out. Restaurants like Washington has a growing number of small-scale neighborhood restaurants serving simple and often innovative fare in many parts of previously neglected Washington. Chefs — like Aaron Silverman behind the calescent “One thing that was always missing in D.C. were restaurants that were in your local neighborhood,” said David Chang, who grew up in the Washington area and next year here will open his first In the last few years, an improving local economy has reordered this city where government and politics used to be the driving engine. Washington has bounced back from the high crime rates and extensive municipal scandals of the ’80s, and has been largely impervious to the embattled national economy. It has been left with a population made up of fewer federal workers and more people employed in education, health care and hospitality. Many of those young new residents were looking for lower housing costs in areas once dominated by crime. Old townhomes became apartments; tiny bungalows have been restored. These younger residents were raised on the Food Network. And they are eager for good restaurants. There will always be a need for From 2000 to 2010, the city’s 18- to 34-year-old residents grew by roughly 37,000, and now make up 35 percent of the population, according to the Urban Institute. Last year, there were 2,111 restaurants in Washington, almost double the amount of a decade earlier, and a new one opens every week. As of Aug. 27, 878 alcoholic beverage licenses had been issued to restaurants in the district this year, a 10 percent increase over the total for all of 2013, which was larger than the previous four years. The “You are seeing a shift from boomers to young people,” said Mike Friedman, the chef at the Red Hen, who surprisingly opened in Bloomingdale last year in a building that had been empty for 30 years. His choice of spots came down to price, Mr. Friedman said. “It was a dangerous business decision in many respects,” he said. “We banked on the fact that we had built-in clientele in the community, and we hoped people would check us out.” One summer night, Senators Mark Warner of Virginia, Michael Bennett of Colorado and Charles Schumer of New York cozied into the industrial space with its bare, weathered brick walls and stacks of firewood, where one drink is a rye concoction called All the Best Diseases Are Taken. “Mark Warner is the culinary Cousteau for senators hoping to find new hip places in Washington,” Mr. Schumer said. More and more big-name out-of-town chefs like Mr. Chang are moving in. “We have a full crop of really top-notch restaurants, and we have probably never been to that level before,” said John DeFerrari, a historian of Washington and author of “ Two restaurants — Rose’s Luxury near Capitol Hill and Many restaurants are pulling their influence from Southern traditions that have long marked D.C. cooking; the Chesapeake Bay, now chic; and local purveyors. “We were slower here to develop homegrown traditions,” said Brian Miller, a senior designer at Streetsense, a design and strategy agency where his restaurant design team has grown to six people from two in six years. “But in the last few years, you have seen that grow rapidly,” he said, citing Little Serow and “We have had the fortune of getting immigrants from all over the world,” Mr. DeFerrari said. “The traditional profile of an ethnic restaurant is someone who had to leave their own country without much financial support so start a casual restaurant, but now we are seeing those roots established with people taking it to the next level.” Professional service has not caught up to the food. Waiters often can’t answer basic facts about wine. Oyster forks go missing; water glasses are not on tables until midmeal. “It is really hard to find good staff,” said Rose Previte, the owner of Some out-of-town chefs have answered this with importation. For Further, all the fresh action has increased rents and added some sharp elbows. Jeff Black, who has operated restaurants here since the 1990s, said that one chef tried to recruit two of his key staff members as he gave him a tour of one of his restaurants. “The prices have tripled per square foot over the last few years,” said While the Washington food scene has spun off from the nexus of politics and government, it’s hard to get away from it completely. Khalid Pitts, a pioneer in the once highly shady Logan Circle with