The Martin Luther King Jr National Memorial on the National Mall in Washington DC. Photography courtesy of Destination DC. High-ranking government types and thirty-something-year-old businessmen in the exact same tone of suit crowd the foyer of Washington DC’s oldest saloon as I push through its revolving doors but find no viable exit. Packs of tourists are presenting to the maître d’ too, ready for their bucket-list lunch. Old Ebbitt Grill, established in 1856, is a downtown DC institution; former United States presidents from Warren Harding to Grover Cleveland were reportedly regulars. “This isn’t crowded, sir,” I’m corrected as I’m escorted to my table. The steak’s tender, the oysters are fresh, but the history’s best: on the walls around me are animal heads reputedly shot and gifted by (former president) Teddy Roosevelt.
Across from downtown and into the heart of Georgetown — DC’s oldest neighbourhood, which predates DC itself by 40-odd years — the crowd’s smaller but the clientele’s the same at Martin’s Tavern. Here former president Richard Nixon ate meatloaf at booth number two and John F Kennedy proposed to Jacqueline Bouvier at booth three — the same spot five Supreme Court justices sat to debate Brown v Board of Education, which outlawed segregation in American schools.
As the sun sets across the Potomac River, I walk the National Mall — about 280 hectares of federal parkland in the middle of DC containing America’s most famous monuments. At one end is the Lincoln Memorial, a neoclassical temple featuring a marble carving of Abraham Lincoln and the steps where Martin Luther King Jr delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, at the other, the US Capitol building. I swing by the White House, the Washington Monument and the Franklin D Roosevelt Memorial and finish with a margarita (Obama’s favourite cocktail, apparently) at the Round Robin Bar in the Willard Intercontinental Hotel. As many presidents have drunk in here, I’m told, as they have at the White House on the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Washington DC is a great American city, but it’s often overlooked as a holiday destination. Most Americans have been here, though likely on a history excursion during their high school freshman year. The occasional Australian tacks it onto a New York City holiday, should they have the time. But this city has many layers worth seeking out that too few visitors bother to see.
A Black Gilded Age
I’m standing on the corner of U Street and 9th Street in DC’s Shaw neighbourhood, once one of the best places to be Black in America, my guide tells me. “The Harlem [New York] Renaissance gets most credit for the explosion of Black music and culture, but here in Shaw our Renaissance pre-dates it by 20 years,” former journalist Briana Thomas tells me on a walking tour she devised after years of researching the U Street Corridor, an area once known as Black Broadway. “This is where jazz started, there was no segregation here, we had the biggest Black theatres on the planet, we had the first and the only Black universities in America,” she says.
Black students who came to study at historically Black universities like Howard University didn’t return to their hometowns, where segregation laws forbid them from using their qualifications. So they stayed in Shaw, and, along with residents such as the jazz legend Duke Ellington, made it the most dynamic and affluent Black community in the United States. U Street was home to the largest number of Black professionals in the US — you wouldn’t walk down it without a suit on. By the 1950s, there were more than 300 Black-owned businesses on these few blocks, while each night, stars from Louis Armstrong to Billie Holiday and Miles Davis played in jazz clubs till dawn.
In 1968, riots in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination, combined with the overhaul of America’s segregation laws, left Shaw in ruins. But Black Broadway lives on here, if you know where to look. Sometimes it’s the small plaques outside renovated Victorian-era apartments and new businesses — part of the African American Heritage Trail — but the ghosts don’t lurk too far below the surface. There’s a Black Lives Matter banner draped across the 157-year-old Howard University (where Kamala Harris studied), and grand old entertainment venues like the Howard and the Lincoln theatres — where Franklin D Roosevelt held lavish birthday parties, Thomas tells me — stand tall alongside multigenerational Black-owned businesses like Ben’s Chili Bowl, which opened in 1958. I order a half-smoked chili dog (“half-smoked” meaning ground meat smoked before grilling) and eat it at the same booth where the Obamas ate in 2009. I stand outside America’s first Black owned-and-operated bank, which financed this Black version of the Gilded Age, the building which once housed the club Crystal Caverns, where John Coltrane and Miles Davis recorded albums, and the True Reformers Hall, where Duke Ellington played his first ever gig. “There’s many things that make DC great,” Thomas tells me. “But you have to dig a little deeper than the White House.”
Searching for Culinary Nirvana
Like food, for instance. Washington DC is fast gaining a reputation as the culinary capital of America for diners with adventurous palates. Nixon may have preferred Grandma Martin’s meatloaf with mushroom gravy and mashed potatoes, but today’s White House staff want more tang. Lucky for them, DC now has one of the most diverse restaurant scenes in the US. A recent report by the food and beverage industry research group Datassential shows that DC is the fourth most “food forward” city (being a measure of ethnic diversity, emerging trends and a broad variety of cuisines) in the US, behind San Francisco, Los Angeles and Miami. I’m five times more likely to find an African restaurant in DC than in the rest of America, according to Datassential, and of the roughly 350 Ethiopian restaurants across the US, nearly a quarter of them are in DC.
As the Shaw neighbourhood lost its lustre through the 1970s, Ethiopian immigrants began arriving in large numbers, especially after Emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown in a military coup. This section of DC, between 9th and U streets — not 10 minutes’ drive north of the White House — became home to the largest population of Ethiopian people outside Africa. In 2020, DC’s mayor officially named this area Little Ethiopia. At one stage, there were hundreds of Ethiopian businesses here, so many that there was an Ethiopian phone book.
Gentrification has forced many immigrants out, but some of America’s best Ethiopian restaurants remain. I’m sampling a few on a DC Metro Food Tour. It’s a seven-minute Uber ride from the lavishness of my hotel — The Four Seasons, where I’m staying the week after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, my driver tells me — to the hole-in-the-wall Habesha Market on 9th Street, as much a general store as it is a restaurant where diners stare at a television playing African music videos. My guide and I are the only non-Ethiopians here, and this is hardly standard western breakfast fare. We order ful, a mix of stewed and spiced fava beans, served with yoghurt, green chilli, onions and a fried egg. There’s no cutlery. Instead, I eat with injera, a traditional pancake-like bread made from teff, an ancient African grain.
It’s a short walk to the next eatery, Chercher Ethiopian. In addition to DC’s 25 Michelin-starred restaurants, the city is home to 29 of Michelin’s Bib Gourmand (denoting good food at good value) eateries. Until 2022, Chercher was one of them. I sit among exposed brick walls and the stark green, yellow and red colours of the Ethiopian flag on the top floor of a two-storey townhouse as Ethiopian women cook below me in an open kitchen. Hipsters on laptops sit at the bar, shrouded by smoky incense. Steaming platters of pan-fried tibs — pieces of lamb and beef seasoned with onion, herbed olive oil and spicy mitmita, a seasoning mix containing chilli pepper, cardamom, cloves and salt — are delivered to the table. Then comes lamb wat, a stew fuelled by a spicy, smoky sauce Ethiopians call berbere. And when I’m done, in just a few minutes I’m back near my hotel in Georgetown with its pretty cobbled streets and designer boutiques, but I feel like I’ve travelled continents.
Small But Mighty
There’s a serious juxtaposition of culture happening across this city, which is the precise quality that makes DC properly great. In such a compact space — you can ride a bike or even walk between many places — it’s easier to immerse yourself in heterogeneity than in larger American cities. If you’re bored, then try the next neighbourhood.
In the eclectic Adams Morgan district, I find a main street of restaurants and bars in converted historic brick terraces painted in mauve and baby blue. Rainbow flags flap in the breeze as al fresco diners crowd the footpaths beside tattoo parlours and second-hand bookstores. This is where DC’s hardcore punk scene originated, but I see as many green smoothie drinkers here as tattooed rockers.
I meander down to Dupont Circle with its bistros and its boutiques and bookstores and across to 14th Street, a much edgier version of Georgetown with its craft breweries, indie fashion stores, alternative art galleries and live music venues with extended happy hours. There are century-old Parisian-style cocktail bars here, where I drink under chandeliers. But when the sun’s shining, I like its rooftop gardens and outdoor patios, lit up by strings of lights after dusk.
And just a few blocks from the White House, I find one of the most exciting new African restaurants in the eastern US, according to Bon Appetit, tucked away in the lobby of a luxury hotel. Inspired by his West African Dogon background, the James Beard Award-winning chef Kwame Onwuachi opened the Afro-Caribbean restaurant Dogon at the Salamander Hotel in September. In Georgetown, five minutes’ walk from my hotel, I find America’s oldest continuously operated jazz supper club (Blues Alley) hiding behind fashion boutiques at the end of an alleyway. I line up outside for a seat.
At Vue rooftop bar inside the Washington Hotel in downtown DC — where I can see snipers on the roof of the White House from the bar — I meet an Australian who says he’s only now understanding DC after moving here 15 years ago. “Australians think DC is like Canberra,” he tells me. “It’s nothing like Canberra. This is the hub of the craziest political system on earth and DC reflects that. It’s as crazy as you need it to be.”
A group of artists, writers, musicians and curators gathered at the Villa Lena hotel in Italy’s Tuscany region to celebrate the end of the MQBMBQ residency for Black queer artists. Photograph by Enea Arienti. 
A new accommodation wing by Core Collective architects at the Georgian-era Leighton House in Evandale. 
The interior design of Hotel Hana, on the edge of Little Tokyo in Paris, blends Japanese restraint and maximalist French flourishes. Photograph by left: Romain Ricard. Right: Robin Le Febvre. 
Photograph courtesy of Rachael Tagg / Moraea Farm. 
Photograph by Anthony Ham. 
