Dupont Circle’s Greatest Tables
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The Top 5 Dupont Circle Restaurants
Sushi Taro
Sushi Taro occupies the second floor of a corner building at 17th and P, two blocks east of Dupont Circle itself, and has held a Michelin star in every edition of the Washington DC Guide since the guide first arrived in the District. Owner-chef Nobu Yamazaki — a Tokyo-born second-generation restaurateur whose family ran the original Sushi Taro on the same block for two decades before he refit the dining room into its current sushi-counter format in 2008 — runs the kitchen with chef de cuisine Masa Kitayama. The room is small by design: forty-two covers split between an eight-seat sushi bar, a pair of private rooms with sunken kotatsu seating, and a dining floor that the staff still wax between services.
The Pembroke
The Pembroke is the signature restaurant of the Dupont Circle Hotel — Doyle Collection's five-star property on the eastern arc of the roundabout — and the room that anchors the hotel's renovation completed in 2019. Interior designer Martin Brudnizki, whose Manhattan work includes The Beekman and Soho Beach House, built the Pembroke around plush velvet coral-toned banquettes, glossy marble tables, cream-panelled walls hung with playful contemporary artwork, and a seasonal terrace that opens directly onto New Hampshire Avenue with a clear sight line to the Dupont Circle fountain.
Iron Gate
Iron Gate occupies the original carriage house, livery stable, and courtyard of the Hotel Schafer at 1734 N Street NW — a brick complex built in 1869 that has been a restaurant address continuously since 1922, longer than any other location in the District. Chef Anthony Chittum's kitchen has held the dining room since 2013, when ownership relit the original cobblestone driveway through the wrought-iron gates and rebuilt the room as a single Eastern Mediterranean concept: an indoor carriageway with a curving bar and a year-round dining floor, leading to a courtyard with a protective awning, grapevines, and century-old wisteria that flowers white over the courtyard in May.
Obelisk
Obelisk has occupied the upstairs floor of a 1930s P Street rowhouse — three blocks west of Dupont Circle — every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night since the summer of 1987. The restaurant seats twenty-four covers across a single dining room of widely spaced two-tops and one banquette of four. Original owner Peter Pastan ran the room for thirty-five years; the kitchen is now led by chef de cuisine and partner Esther Lee, who has held the dining room continuously since 2014, with founding-team service captains who have been in the room since the Clinton administration.
Tabard Inn Restaurant
The Tabard Inn sits at 1739 N Street NW — the eastern half of the same block as Iron Gate — in a continuous run of three Victorian townhouses (1737, 1739, and 1741) linked internally and renamed for Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales by entrepreneur Marie Willoughby Rogers in 1922. It is the longest-continuously operating inn and restaurant in Washington DC, and one of the oldest continuously-women-owned hotels in the country — Rogers's original ownership line passed through three generations of family operators before transferring to the current ownership in 2002 with the operating format unchanged.