Osteria Mozza. 3276 M St., NW.
Osteria Mozza—the massive Georgetown Italian restaurant and market from Le Diplomate’s Stephen Starr and California chef Nancy Silverton—has been more than three years in the works. Now, we’ve finally got an opening date for the highly anticipated destination: Sunday, November 10.
“Most restaurants open before they’re ready,” Silverton says. “And Stephen really gives all the support and all the time to make sure that that restaurant is ready when it opens. There’s been intensive, intensive training for almost a month, both back of the house and front of the house.”
Silverton says she used to chat with Starr when he used to visit her Los Angeles restaurants over the years, but the two didn’t have much of a relationship beyond that. So when he called her and asked if she’d partner with him for a new restaurant in DC, she was at first taken aback, but ultimately, “I needed little convincing.”
While Osteria Mozza shares a name with Silverton’s Los Angeles restaurant, the menu also draws favorites from her “meat speakeasy” Chi Spacca and Pizzeria Mozza too. In fact, it was Chi Spacca’s focaccia di Recco—a cheesy, cracker-like bread named after a town in northern Italy—that wooed Starr to work with Silverton, who’s famous for her baking skills. “He’s creating this multimillion dollar restaurant so that he can have focaccia di Recco any time,” Silverton previously told Washingtonian. “That’s your $10 million focaccia.” You can in fact make the focaccia feel expensive with add-ons like caviar and black truffle.
Another Chi Spacca carryover is a spicy roasted chicken on toast—one of the restaurant’s most popular dishes. “Sometimes I joke about it and say, ‘You should order the chicken on the crostone, but hold the chicken,’ because that toast is so delicious. It just absorbs all of the juices,” Silverton says. “It’s our version of chicken and waffles.”
The menu also features a number of salads, including Nancy’s Caesar. Her famous deconstructed version of the classic is basically dressed lettuce accompanied by a fancy toast layered with garlic aioli, braised leeks, slices of hard-boiled egg, and anchovies. Handmade pastas will include orecchiette with sausage and Swiss chard, and tagliatelle with an oxtail ragu. For “secondi,” look for whole branzino with charred lemon, beef-and-bone-marrow pie, and a grilled porcini-rubbed ribeye. A wood-fired oven will turn out pizzas for lunch, which will launch (along with brunch) in the weeks ahead. To drink: spritzes, negronis, vermouths, and carafes of Italians wines.
Another big attraction is the marble-topped mozzarella bar, where diners can watch various cheesy dishes prepared. While the restaurant does not make its own mozzarella, the menu features an entire section of mozzarella-centric dishes, just like Osteria Mozza in LA. That includes Nancy’s Favorite Trio—mozzarella di bufala paired with Cantabrian anchovies, sun-dried tomatoes, and peppers—and served with a crispy, brown garlic bread called fett’unta. It also includes dishes like burrata with braised leeks and mustard vinaiegrette, or burratina Pugliese drowned in olive oil and sprinkled with dried-and-fried sweet cruschi peppers.
The biggest difference between DC’s Osteria Mozza and Silverton’s other restaurants is that this one is big. Really big: 20,000 square feet in the building that previously housed Dean & Deluca. The historic space, which dates back to 1865, has been reimagined with terrazzo floors, marble tables and bartops, dark woods, arched windows, a mezzanine-level private dining room, and a light-filled solarium.
The building’s lease also stipulated that it must include a retail component. And so Osteria Mozza will have a market featuring ingredients handpicked by Silverton and used on the menu—from Cantabrian anchovies to dried beans to jarred roasted long-stemmed artichokes. You’ll also find the Aracuna chicken eggs with deep orange yolks used in a ricotta and egg raviolo dish, as well as specialty vegetables from chef Dan Barber’s Row 7 Seed Company. “That’s not something that everybody can get,” Silverton says.
Outside California, Silverton has four restaurants around the world and one in Hawaii. She says she’d always wanted to have a presence on the East Coast, and she was already familiar DC because her son lives here and so did her late great-aunt, a prominent lobbyist.
“Anytime a restaurateur goes into a new city, it’s a little bit scary,” Silverton says. “I’m not going there to show Washingtonians what Italian food is like. I’m just going there to try to be part of the community.”
Jessica Sidman covers the people and trends behind D.C.’s food and drink scene. Before joining Washingtonian in July 2016, she was Food Editor and Young & Hungry columnist at Washington City Paper. She is a Colorado native and University of Pennsylvania grad.
