About DC Restaurant Openings
A guide to the newest places to eat and drink.
Alfie’s, 1228½ 31st St., NW
If you were a DC foodie in 2016, you probably remember Alfie’s. Though the northern Thai pop-up lasted less than a year in Park View, opening in February and shuttering over the summer, Alfie’s entered the pantheon of memorable DC pop-ups. A decade later, chefs Alex McCoy and Justin Ahn are finally bringing it back.
On Wednesday, September 2, Alfie’s—now a northern Thai restaurant and natural wine bar—will reopen in a custom-built space in Georgetown. A soft opening kicks off the weekend before.
“It was such a special place in DC even though it was short lived,” McCoy says. “There are so many people—in the industry and not—that have a connection to the restaurant.”
The new permanent Alfie’s is in a fancier part of town (a redeveloped alley just off M Street and Wisconsin Avenue) but McCoy and Ahn are striving to recreate the feel of the scrappy pop-up. The chefs will be cooking and chatting with diners from an open kitchen, and will sometimes run food to tables. They want the place to become a regular hangout for restaurant industry staff.
“It’s got a bit of that feel of a hole-in-the-wall wine bar in Europe, but it also has the feel of a shophouse in Thailand,” McCoy says. “This wasn’t a restaurant before, but we worked really hard to make this place feel like it had been here for 40 or 50 years.”
They achieved the specific lived-in feel they wanted with tiled walls, brick breezeblocks, and a vintage oscillating fan that looks like it belongs in a Bangkok noodle shop.
Thai street food got a starring role at the 2016 pop-up, and some of those dishes—the grilled herbal sai ua sausage and the khao soi (coconut curry egg noodles with braised chicken and pickled mustard greens) for example—will reappear here.
But the permanent space also gives McCoy and Ahn a chance to focus on more local, seasonal ingredients. In Thailand, a certain dish might have dozens of variations depending on what ingredients are available nearby. Accordingly, the menu at Alfie’s will change three to four times per week, incorporating locally grown greens, foraged mushrooms, holy basil sourced from a farm on the Eastern Shore, and temperate ingredients swapped in for tropical ones— like tart sea buckthorn instead of tamarind.
The Alfie’s opening menu features some variations on dishes McCoy and Ahn have made at other pop-ups over the last decade, like local cockles stir-fried with chili jam, ‘nduja, makrut lime, and Sichuan pepper. One larb is made with smoked catfish and galangal; another is a mix of minced lamb, offal, and fish mint.
Some larger dishes are distinctly Thai, like fried “Hat Yai” chicken wings. Others just have a Thai sensibility. There’s a monkfish curry with cockles, charred fennel, and smoked tomato. A bavette steak is served with green pepper curry, sunchoke, dried plum, and hazelnut. Smoked crispy duck is paired with stonefruit hoisin, kohlrabi, and persimmon.
For dessert, you might order a pandan-scented milk pudding with gooseberry jam and passionfruit.
If you visited the original Alfie’s in 2016, you may have fought the fearsome chili heat with a cocktail or a Singha. The new Alfie’s is a wine bar instead. McCoy and Ahn have focused on natural, organic, and biodynamic offerings, often made with less common varietals. There are plenty of Virginia wines, and almost all are between $35 and $75 a bottle.
Apart from this departure though, McCoy and Ahn want to remind you of happy times in 2016.
“We want to make sure that it captures the heart and soul and feel of the original Alfie’s,” McCoy says.
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.
