ON A WEDNESDAY in late November, Keith McNally, the king of New York restaurants, was somewhat improbably in the outer reaches of Washington, DC. He was getting ready to open the world’s second Minetta Tavern, some 90 years after the first one debuted in the heart of Greenwich Village, in a neighborhood that has provided much of the District of Columbia with its meats for nearly 100 years. The area, Union Market, has been building since those “cool” Obama years, and the last decade saw the arrival of chic pour-over purveyors and high-rise luxury apartments.

The second Minetta Tavern possesses the same magic-glow, backlit, clubby feel of the original, with one crucial difference. The framed pictures at the Manhattan Minetta feature artists, musicians, and stars of screen and stage. In DC, it’s all about the politicians.

“I knew I wanted to bring my most serious restaurant here,” says McNally, who got an apartment nearby.

The steakhouse is just one of the anticipated restaurants to come to the nation’s capital from New York or LA restaurateurs in a busy and strange spell for the capital’s fine-dining scene. The powerful restaurateur Stephen Starr approached Nancy Silverton of La Brea Bakery fame to partner on her first East Coast restaurant, in the heart of Georgetown. In 2023, José Andrés opened a version of his The Bazaar at the Waldorf Astoria Washington DC, which had settled in the Old Post Office near the White House the year before. Kwame Onwuachi, the chef behind Tatiana at Lincoln Center, recently launched Dogon at the Salamander hotel.

All of these restaurants, years in the making, will now stare down a phenomenon unique to the District of Columbia: that quadrennial fit of unease brought on by the exit of one president and the arrival of another. Even under regular circumstances, these transitions can present vibe shifts of the highest order. And the transfer of power that took place in January, after Donald Trump’s nonconsecutive reelection, promises to be more than regular.

LAST TIME AROUND, Trump used his Trump International Hotel as a de facto clubhouse. BLT Prime was literally the only restaurant he visited in Washington in the four years he was president, and he always got the same thing: shrimp cocktail, well-done steak, and fries. His Diet Coke had to be opened in front of him, to prove it was free of germs. Same thing for the mini ketchup bottles, which, terrifyingly, were brought out to accompany the steak. Sometimes he got dessert, either apple pie or chocolate cake. That’s all he ever ate.

But the clubhouse is now the aforementioned Waldorf Astoria, and the old BLT Prime space is occupied by Andrés, who had planned to take the space all the way back in 2015 before becoming a vocal Trump critic. So Trump’s inner circle may have to fan out throughout the city, which went more than 90 percent for Kamala Harris. That could get awkward. A server and manager at Beuchert’s Saloon in Capitol Hill was fired after telling Washingtonian that she wouldn’t serve Trump people if she knew them to be “a sex trafficker or trying to deport millions of people.” (In a statement, the restaurant said her comments violated its “zero-tolerance policy on discrimination.”)

McNally, however, seemed unconcerned. He knows DC quite well. He spent years coming down on the Amtrak to check out the shows at the National Gallery of Art. His good friend Christopher Hitchens, the late Vanity Fair columnist, lived in the Wyoming on Columbia Road. McNally understands the DC mindset that usually only natives fully grasp. The town’s elites generally get along in private regardless of who’s in charge or what they’re saying about one another in public; everybody has to eat dinner.

“I said I WOULD SERVE Trump. He’s welcome to come.” —KEITH MCNALLY

McNally personally endorsed Harris and even bought cases of Champagne ready to pop once the election was called for her. “It’s all still there,” his business partner Roberta Rossini Delice says of the Champagne.

“I really thought she was going to win,” McNally says. “It’s not the outcome I would have wanted, but you have to move on.”

One upside of moving on was realizing he was opening a steakhouse just as a bunch of red meat Republicans would be coming to town.

“Somebody asked me what I would do if Trump came in here,” McNally says, looking around at the restaurant.

“I said I would serve him. He’s welcome to come.”

IF ANYONE CAN survive DC’s restaurant whiplash, it’s Starr. Born in Philly, he spent decades building out a nightlife-and-hospitality empire in his hometown before expanding to New York and Miami. But he always wanted to open a place in DC.

“New York gets all the attention, and LA, but this is the capital of the most powerful country in the world,” Starr tells me on the phone. “All kinds of shit is going on there. So people in Washington may think maybe it’s a little boring—but it’s not.”

He opened Le Diplomate in April 2013, bringing legit Gallic cooking and sophistication to the fulcrum between the two Obama terms. Michelle Obama took then French president Francois Hollande to Le Dip (as it’s known to locals) in 2014. John Kerry was early on the bandwagon, as were Susan Rice and Chuck Schumer. When the Trump people came to town in 2017, they embraced it as their own too. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump brunched there, and Newt Gingrich was a regular. EPA chair Scott Pruitt liked it so much that at least once he took advantage of the lights and sirens of his motorcade to get down traffic-clogged 14th Street. More recently, it was one of the few DC spots where Joe Biden would pop in.

Starr expects the restaurant will be as bustling as ever once Trump comes back to town. “It’s comfort food. It knows no ideology,” he says.

He also now has other reservation books to fill. Osteria Mozza, his collaboration with Silverton, opened in November. Weeks after the inauguration, he’ll open another potential hot spot—this one just steps from the White House. Built inside the Willard Hotel, the Occidental will be a fine-dining establishment designed by Ken Fulk, perhaps best known for designing Carbone in Las Vegas, with its Godfather-movie-as-dinner experience.

“We want to make this the place where people go to be seen to have power lunches and power dinners,” Starr says. “Intrigue, CIA affairs with a Russian spy—this is the narrative. This is the place.”

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OR, THERE’S A chance things will revert to Trump I: the president dining every night in a hotel that bears his name, the US government putting up Secret Service agents in the suites alongside foreign dignitaries. We’ll all once again need intro-level courses on the emoluments clause. In late December, Eric Trump delivered a bombshell to the New York Post: The Trump Organization was looking into getting its hotel back.

Sources for the tabloid stressed that there hadn’t been any negotiations as of yet, but the Waldorf Astoria is primed for a takeover. The Trump Organization sold its lease in 2022 for $375 million, making $100 million in profit. Since then, it’s already changed hands; the current owners bought it at foreclosure for $100 million. Seems like a deal could be in the air.

It’s unclear what that would mean for Andrés, whose recent opening in the hotel was supposed to have capped a nine-year odyssey. After first announcing the space in 2014, the chef told The Washington Post in July 2015 that the project was “impossible” after Trump’s rhetoric about Mexican immigrants. The Trump family sued the chef for $10 million. Andres’s company countersued, and the case was settled in 2017.

While Trump’s name was physically removed from the premises, to my eyes on a recent visit, the place, with its vast marble lobby, still had a tinge of Trump gaudiness. Above the restaurant’s balcony the Robert Irwin installation 48 Shadow Planes was still hanging in the center of the room, more than 40 years after it was installed. (Irwin, who passed away in 2023, once told me that “it’s a hell of a good piece, and it will live on—it will outlive Trump’s reign. I don’t know if I’m going to make it back, but it’ll be there after I’m done—and after he’s done.”) The food at The Bazaar was great—Maryland blue crab was featured in not one, not two, but five different tapas—but the vibe was a bit off, with fork taps echoing through a half-empty gigantic hotel lobby that still had a whiff of the 45th presidency to it.