Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab (750 15th Street NW) opens its doors for business Friday, Jan. 31 in the DowntownDC BID area, offering up the stone crabs with mustard sauce and tuxedoed service Joe’s Stone Crab is known for as well as new elements tailored to customers in the nation’s capital.
“We’re so excited to be joining the Washington D.C. community,” General Manager Craig Garofalo told the DowntownDC BID. “The location that we found and the history that’s within this neighborhood is phenomenal.”
[Watch more of DowntownDC BID’s interview with Garofalo and Executive Chef Chris Morvis here.]
The restaurant, an offshoot of the original Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami, Fla., adds to the bustling 15th Street corridor and offers residents, workers and visitors alike a brand new, large capacity (450-500 seat) eatery complete with private dining rooms, event space, and what is sure to be one of the hotspot bars in the area.
“We love to think of ourselves as a private club that anybody can get into. We want this to be everybody’s neighborhood place. This is where we want everybody to meet,” Garofalo said.
The original Joe’s Stone Crab was started in Miami in 1913 by Joseph Weiss and his wife Jennie, who set up tables on their porch to serve stone crab—a crustacean many then believed to be inedible. The family restaurant quickly exploded into a legendary establishment so popular that gangster Al Capone and President J. Edgar Hoover famously dined there together in the same room.
Almost 90 years later in 2000, the Sawitz/Weiss family partnered with Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises (LEYE) to open a Chicago restaurant and added prime steak to the menu to round out their offerings during the stone crab offseason. A second Las Vegas location soon followed.
Now, Joe’s is in the nation’s capital located just steps from the White House.
D.C. patrons will now be able to enjoy day boat caught, hand-harvested stone crab claws from Joe’s fisheries. For those more familiar with the Maryland crab, stone crab is sweet and firm and served by the claw. And it’s also known as one of the world’s most sustainable seafoods: When a stone crab is caught, just one claw is removed and the crab is thrown back into the water to allow the claw to regenerate.
In addition to crabs, guests will find Joe’s traditional award-winning Key lime pie, signature cole slaw and creamed spinach sides, famous fried chicken, and their popular Midwestern grain-fed prime steaks as well as quality foods, wine, cocktails and other offerings. The restaurant prides itself on offering seafood and steak prepared equally well and overall serving simple but exceptional food.
Executive Chef Chris Morvis told the DowntownDC BID that the D.C. location has added an in-house bakery for breads baked daily, as well as regional specialties. “We’re also going to source local ingredients,” Morvis said. “Maryland rockfish, for example, will be featured on our market card, some local oysters, just to highlight some of the food in the region that we’re excited about.”
The D.C. location is housed in the original Union Trust Bank building and customers will notice much of the 1907 structure on display including intricate masonry, marble columns and stonework the restaurateurs preserved as an homage to Washington. Joe’s and LEYE built a mezzanine level where patrons will find a 120-seat private dining room, a private bar overlooking the expansive lounge below, and a swanky 36-seat South Beach room. The South Beach room features floor to ceiling frosted glass and wrought iron sliding panels that guests may use to see and be seen by patrons in the main room below or close for complete privacy.
An upstairs kitchen and dish room boost service for all private events such as corporate and social dinners, which are cooked to order.
The main floor includes the large 220-seat main dining room—which is traditional Joe’s from the wrought iron chandeliers to the linens—and the original wood-paneled bank president’s office, which Joe’s converted into a very Washingtonian private dining experience for eight.
But it’s the enormous 150-seat main bar/lounge area that stands out as the building’s main feature. The cavernous, marbled room is lined with leather banquettes and booths, filled with high top tables and chairs and capped off by a huge rectangle bar—all of which are first-come, first-served seating offering the full restaurant menu. The size, style and accessibility of the lounge virtually guarantees its future role as the new downtown hotspot for a business lunch, happy hour drink, and spur of the moment fine dining outing.
Joe’s opens its doors to the public Friday night for dinner only. The restaurant has hired 180 employees to service dinner, but plans to add lunch and weekend brunch in the coming weeks as they hire additional staff to round out the team of tuxedoed servers and bartenders, full-time doormen, maître d’ staff and other upscale service staff that have been a staple of Joe’s successful brand.
Doors open Friday, Jan. 31 at 4 p.m. for the bar/lounge. Dinner service begins at 5 p.m. The last reservation accepted will be 10 p.m. The lounge will be open until midnight Monday through Saturday and until 10 p.m. Sunday. Carryout service will also be available.