About DC Restaurant Openings
A guide to the newest places to eat and drink.
Tommy’s Tacos. 227 Harry Thomas Way, NE.
Chef Thomas Stacy’s resume has spanned from Uchi in Houston to DC’s Pineapple & Pearls, but he’s spent much of the last several years serving 10-course fine-dining tasting menus out of his own apartment. His new venture is about as different as it gets—the Texas native has opened Tommy’s Tacos, a takeout Tex-Mex joint near NoMa, in Eckington’s Alethia Tanner Parka. And, yes, there are breakfast tacos all day, along with other tacos, queso, and margs.
“It’s not meant to be a super artisan, James Beard thing. I’m making pedestrian breakfast tacos with really good sides and salsas,” Stacy says.
Still, Stacy says he hopes to join the ranks of what he considers DC’s premier breakfast taco spots: Republic Cantina and La Tejana. He doesn’t have the space to make his own flour tortillas on-site, but he found a local tortilla manufacturer to produce his own recipe. “It’s kind of like a H-E-B tortilla,” Stacy says, referring to the popular Texas grocery chain. “I feel like there’s a nice little bit of chew, but it’s not too hard.”
The breakfast taco options ($4.75 each) include classic bacon, egg, and queso; chorizo, egg, and crispy tater tots; and migas with scrambled eggs, tortilla chips, pico de gallo, and queso. Each of the tacos is paired with a dedicated salsa, from a mild salsa roja to a jalapeno ranch crema (inspired by the version at Tex-Mex chain Chuy’s). And, by the way, Stacy has a PSA about the condiments: “You’re meant to put the salsa on the taco, and some people are not doing it. You can tell them: I will come for them.”
The lunch and dinner taco menu ($5.50 to $6.75) includes fajita-style beef, chicken, shrimp, and a pepper-and-onion vegetarian option. But Stacy says his true labor of love is the carnitas taco made from pork belly smoked with mesquite and stewed in Jarritos orange soda. Everything is seed-oil-free.
Stacy doesn’t want customers to sleep on the sides either. He’s making his own queso as well as esquites with blistered corn dressed in a “very vibrant” creamy, zesty dressing, chipotle aioli, pickled habanero-spiced onions, cotija cheese, and cilantro.
“I would rather [customers] order two tacos and a side than order three tacos and eat them by themselves,” Stacy says.
Tommy’s Tacos doesn’t have any indoor seats; Everything is served out of a takeout window. But there is a 50-seat patio where you can sip on a margarita (on the rocks or frozen), michelada, or Senate beer. Better yet, says Stacy, try the YooHoo YeeHaw, a frozen cocktail combining Yoo-hoo chocolate drink, vanilla vodka, and Kahlua that’s inspired by a Dallas bar called Double Wide.
Stacy caught the cooking bug young. When he was no older than 12, he watched a Guy Fieri Thanksgiving special and told his mom he wanted cook the entire Thanksgiving feast that year. Flash forward to the summer of 2020 when the pandemic put a halt to his line cook job at Uchi. A friend, one of the restaurant’s regulars, asked Stacy if he’d cook him and his friends a nice dinner. So, Stacy prepared an elaborate tasting menu. He began offering similar tastings on a weekly basis, first at other people’s homes, then his own. He called the supper club ReikiNa—a combination of the Japanese word sakana (a snack served with drinks) and reiki (“divine energy”) meant to mean “divine snacks.”
Eventually, he moved ReikiNa an actual restaurant space in Houston, which operated for about a year before Stacy decided he preferred running the dining experience in his home. When he moved to DC in 2023, he started as a chef de partie at Pineapple & Pearls before restarting his private dinners here in early 2024 for groups up to 12, three nights per week. The creative Asian-European menu featured dishes like a tom kha risotto with macadamia nut Thai pesto and oyster-mushroom compote or cold-smoked swordfish belly with wasabi and yuzu.
At the same time, Stacy says he’s wanted to do a Tex-Mex spot for at least a decade. When he learned the NoMa BID, which helped develop Alethia Tanner Park, was looking for a food operator, he figured this was the perfect opportunity.
Although Tommy’s Tacos just opened last week, Stacy says his goal is to open another as quickly as possible. He says he has a partnership lined up if this first location proves successful. Meanwhile, ReikiNa is on pause for now, but Stacy hasn’t given it up for good.
“I’m going to do it again,” Stacy says. “I can’t not do that thing.”
Jessica Sidman covers the people and trends behind DC’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.
