You’ll notice the windows first. Upon arriving at Butterworth’s, the restaurant currently anchored at 319 Pennsylvania Avenue SE, I caught a few patrons looking through the stunning bay windows. Those looking through were likely too young to have once stared through the same glass when the space was once The Pour House a decade ago and were certainly too young when it was Whitby’s in the ’70s. Still, the glances were likely similar nonetheless: trying to ascertain what exactly was happening inside.
Those bay windows were what caught the attention of Chef Bart Hutchins. While working at Beuchert’s Saloon, he used to come down when 319 Penn was Stanton and Greene. “[It] had the same interior designer as Beuchert’s,” Hutchins tells me. “When I was 23, 24 — somewhere in that range — I would come down and literally peek in the window and be like, ‘I’m gonna have that building one day.’ I always, always wanted this place. It’s almost a 200-year-old building. It’s a beautiful building.”
For a building that historic, it certainly doesn’t feel that way — especially on a swinging Friday night when I visited Butterworth’s for dinner. Even around 7 p.m., the restaurant’s cozy interior, complete with its perfectly mismatched furniture, was full, but not in a manner that felt crowded or overwhelming. As I melted into a sturdy yet comfortable booth seat in the middle of the space, it was private enough to feel like I wasn’t eavesdropping on anyone else’s conversations. Glancing upward, you could still see some of the original zinc ceiling above. It’s a feature Hutchins is sure to draw my attention to days later, in a tone and manner similar to how proud fathers talk about their children.
Butterworth’s is a labor of love. Hutchins, who was once involved in Le Mont Royal, was entirely out of the game (and D.C., for that matter). Living in Minnesota, the District’s dining scene was out of sight and mind — until he learned there was a chance at his white whale. Like Pacino in The Godfather Part III, he got pulled back in.
“I think I packed up and moved in less than a month,” he says. In the staffing of Butterworth’s, Hutchins found a kindred spirit on the chef side in Joseph Nardo. Having done stints at The Dabney and The French Laundry, Chef Nardo was finishing up working at The Inn at Stonecliffe.
“They found me while I was still in Michigan,” Nardo says. “The season was ending, and I was looking to return to D.C. Searching around online, I came across Butterworth’s and thought it was a cool project.”
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Have a side of history with your mealIt helps that Hutchins, Nardo and the other chefs speak a similar culinary language. While Butterworth’s bills itself as an American cafe, it’s rooted in European — read: French — cuisine. Hutchins rattles off St. John, Prune, Black Axe Mangal and The River Cafe as inspirations and immediately undercuts himself.
“None of them are French,” he wryly states. “But they all share a style, which is to say, really simplistic. One of the things we’re thinking about with this project is timelessness.” Or, as a patron I spoke with told me, “Fine dining without the snobbery that comes with fine dining.” There are no white tablecloths here, but you’ll find white-tablecloth food in skate wings, caviar eclairs, ratatouille, veal shank, rockfish and quail. Daiquiris pay tribute to Hemingway, and Queen Elizabeth’s favorite bottle of bubbly is around if you want a glass to toast to her portrait hanging nearby.
During my meal, the ethos of approachability comes across in spades. The food is elegant but welcoming. Flowery plates arrive with striking food that’s wonderfully simple. The focaccia is light and airy, bolstered by a whipped brown butter with rosemary that gives it just the right amount of earthiness. The veal shank comes over grits so good that they rival the ones I grew up eating in the South. On it goes. And this is just dinner. Butterworth’s is open for breakfast and lunch, too, where it’s not uncommon for patrons to sit down and have a meeting with their meal, according to Nardo.
As I sit with Nardo and Hutchins, the idea of the autobiographical space comes up. Hutchins talks a lot about how some spaces can feel like Disney World. “You’ll see a new French restaurant open up, and it’ll have the exact same decor you saw at Le Dip 20 years ago…. That’s great, and I love some of those places,” he says. “This, in and of itself, is closer to a Wes Anderson project than a Disney World project.”
The underlying idea here is that you can take a look at a place like Butterworth’s and see the variations of influence and riffing in the same way you can see tones of Hal Ashby or Pedro Almodóvar in a Wes Anderson movie. Yet those muses collide and coalesce into something unique, singular and exciting. That’s a hard story to tell from the outside looking in. But if you squint through those bay windows hard enough, you’ll catch a glimpse of it. Or just come on in.
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