About DC Restaurant Openings
A guide to the newest places to eat and drink.
Juneberry Garage. 6810 Cameron Dr., NW
The redeveloped Walter Reed campus is a funny kind of place: a Whole Foods and some sleek condos occupying a storied former military hospital in a quiet, mostly residential section of Northwest DC. Fittingly, Juneberry Garage, which opened in its new brick-and-mortar digs on Thursday in the development, is a funny kind of bar.
It’s housed in a former auto mechanic’s shop on the hospital grounds, with original garage fixtures and a retro Americana look. For the past year, Juneberry Garage had been housed in a vintage airstream trailer nearby while its owners built its permanent home in the space, which used to function as an automotive hobby shop for recovering veterans and a working neighborhood auto repair center.
“We wanted to make sure it still had the bones, so all the garage doors still work, and we tried to touch the outside of the building as little as possible to honor the history of the space,” co-owner Josh Saltzman told Washingtonian.
Saltzman and Chris Powers co-own Ivy & Coney, the hot dog-centric Midwestern dive bar transplanted to Shaw. For Juneberry Garage, they teamed up with Trent Allen and Robin Webb of Midlands, the Park View beer garden. But the four have actually known each other for years: they all attended the University of Michigan together, and the friends were also involved with the Columbia Heights barbecue spot Kangaroo Boxing Club.
Since opening in the garage space, Juneberry’s menu has almost entirely changed—one holdover is the $1 order of cheeseballs—and focuses on American comfort food like tavern-style thin-crust pizzas and crushable cocktails like the Juneberry spritz (vodka, prosecco, and house-made juneberry soda).
Now that the restaurant has settled into its permanent home, Saltzman hopes it will be a gathering place for the neighborhood that has sprung up around Walter Reed for years to come.
“It’s been a community place for a long time, so this is just its next iteration,” Saltzman says. “Instead of tuning up your car, you’re whetting your whistle.”
Ike Allen covers politics, food, culture, and transportation in DC and writes the monthly Hidden Eats column for the magazine. He grew up in DC.
