About DC Restaurant Openings
A guide to the newest places to eat and drink.
Itiyah. 1416 11th St., NW.
When Haitian-born chef Sebastien Salomon moved to DC about a decade ago, he remembered something his mother had told him years before: the nation’s capital had no Haitian restaurant.
That fact stuck with him through his gigs working in the White House, as a resident chef in the Haitian Embassy, and as a journeyman corporate chef. Now, he’s opening the first-ever Haitian fine-dining restaurant in the city.
Itiyah—the name is “Hayiti,” an antiquated spelling of the nation, written backwards—takes over a space on a largely residential block of 11th Street in Shaw, just off Logan Circle, this summer.
A cozy space with just 20 seats, the restaurant will serve a multi-course tasting menu inspired by Haiti’s 10 regions. Salomon also takes inspiration from the cooking approach of his grandmother, a celebrated private chef who couldn’t read or write, and so she relied on memory and observation.
Haitian cuisine has developed through colonization, slavery, and centuries of poverty, and Salomon wants to acknowledge that history while telling nation’s story through food.
“The most important thing for me is to highlight every part of our history, whether it’s beautiful or ugly, bad or good,” Salomon says.
Ingredients like corn and yuca, along with dishes like the hominy-and-bean stew tchaka, come directly from the Taíno people who lived on Hispaniola before colonization. There are also dishes that enslaved people brought to the island, like tom tom—mashed breadfruit served with a sticky okra, beef, and crab sauce—a kind of recreation of West African fufu and stew with Caribbean ingredients.
Salomon’s tasting menu, which incorporates those flavors, will start with warm coconut milk brioche and housemade focaccia served with truffle epis butter, roasted pepper-caramelized plantain butter, and epis oil. (Epis is the fresh seasoning paste that forms the backbone of many Haitian dishes.)
Other signature dishes will be a delicate raviolo inspired by a Haitian recipe for spaghetti—with smoked herring, peppers, tomato sauce, and epis—and a grilled pigeon dish with caramelized leek, breadfruit purée, sour cherry, and a culantro-watercress-lime gel.
Salomon, who moved to the US when he was 15, started working as a dishwasher before ultimately graduating from the Art Institute of Philadelphia and spending time in hotel and chain restaurant kitchens. After moving to DC, he cycled through short stints at the Haitian embassy in 2019, the White House Executive Office Building in 2018, and at Gravitas from 2021 to 2022, while working as a private chef and teaching cooking classes.
But this restaurant is more personal for Salomon. Joining a new class of high-end Caribbean dining rooms in DC (Isla, Dōgon, and St. James), it gives him a chance to bring attention to the unsung subtleties, roots, and regionality of Haitian cooking. Itiyah, Salomon says, will be“a love letter to every part of Haiti.”
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.
