It’s the Symbol of MAGA Washington. All Is Not As It Seems.

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Butterworth’s isn’t the top Republican hangout in D.C., or even the most exclusive one. It is the most famous one.

The bistro is located just a short distance from the Capitol on a block that has long met the appetites of midlevel congressional staff for fast-casual food and dive bars. And in the way that Studio 54 is used as shorthand for the hedonism of 1970s New York or Moulin Rouge is the defining locale of Belle Epoque Paris, Butterworth’s has become the emblem of Washington in Donald Trump’s second term. Gone are the archaic days of 2017, when journalists had to comb Rust Belt diners in Pennsylvania and Ohio, asking patrons how they could support a man so loathed in the reporters’ own social circles. Instead, their biggest hardship to get to Butterworth’s from their Washington bureaus is (potentially) having to change trains on the D.C. Metro.

The result is that it has been featured in major publications ranging from El Pais to Politico and everything in between as reporters, both domestic and particularly foreign, swarm to the restaurant to capture both the MAGA clientele inside and the handful of protesters who sometimes congregate outside blaring sirens in an attempt to discourage people from patronizing the restaurant.

Some of this is cyclical. After all, a media tradition in Washington in every new administration is to try to find the hangouts and secret social life of the staffers who run the city: During Trump’s first term, it was the bar of his eponymous hotel. In the second half of the Obama era, it was La Diplomate, the trendy French restaurant that became a hot spot after its 2013 opening.

Some of this also is because Butterworth’s has made itself a shiny object. The restaurant opened just before the 2024 presidential election. When Trump’s win brought a wave of triumphant MAGA acolytes to Washington to celebrate the former president’s reelection, there were not a surplus of venues particularly excited to host such celebrations. Butterworth’s was booked solid with parties around Trump’s inauguration, and it became easy for regular partygoers to transition into regular customers.

It also helps that the restaurant’s ownership has its own MAGA ties. While its main investor and namesake, Alex Butterworth, is Uber’s chief legal counsel, its frontman is another investor, MAGA media personality Raheem Kassam.

On top of all this, its menu has made the restaurant even more of a shiny object for the media. Defined as “organ meats and organic wines” by Washingtonian, the sense of shock that people could ever even support Donald Trump is only amplified by the fact that Trump supporters could prefer a diet so different than that consumed by the president himself. (Even this aspect is unusual. No one ever thought that Obama voters precisely measured the number of almonds they ate every night or that George H.W. Bush’s supporters uniformly loathed broccoli.)

This particular melding of MAGA and bone marrow makes it the perfect combination to shock the preconceived expectations of readers. And based on the level of coverage from major news outlets, readers sure do like to be shocked.

New York Times Magazine’s Robert Draper found himself marveling at the restaurant’s “upmarket French proletarianism” as it became the center of bustling MAGA scene of some of Trump’s most zealous acolytes—noting the presence of patrons ranging from failed Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake to Steve Bannon, who exulted in the fact that Butterworth’s offered bone marrow on its menu.

The Washington Post provided a pair of pieces. The Style Section chronicled the party scene around Trump’s inauguration, including speciality “American Carnage” cocktails, whereas the paper’s food critic simply praised a menu which included lamb tartare and pheasant pâté and noted the political vibes were less pronounced than he had been led to believe.

Foreign outlets have been less friendly toward it. Part of this is in the rich tradition of European reporters sojourning in the United States who find casual grotesques about Americans far more lucrative and less taxing than actually trying to meet the natives. Perhaps the best example of this is a piece in La Monde that depicted a restaurant where the MAGA faithful dine with their agency badges around their neck while denouncing the cocktails as “syrupy.”

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All the publicity has made it occupy a strange place in the cultural cosmography of Washington. It has become an imprecise shorthand for where Republicans gather—one well known enough that the restaurant draws regular protesters who stand on the sidewalk outside shouting and blaring airhorns.

It’s not just that it has become a setting for scene pieces, but it has become a destination for a certain kind of cultural spelunking. The restaurant isn’t just treated as a scene but as a symbol. Butterworth’s isn’t the only restaurant in Washington with a right-wing patronage, but it’s one that gets treated as saying something about the American right. In the process, it says something about the journalists—and their readers—transfixed by it.

The reality of Butterworth’s is something very different. On a gray Monday evening, I sat down with the restaurant’s chef and co-owner, Bart Hutchins, and Raheem Kassam, a right-wing media personality and Butterworth’s co-owner. It was a quiet night. Congress was out and the streets of D.C. were still frozen over with the “snowcrete” left from the recent snowstorm. Over bottles of red wine while Elliott Smith and Georgie Fame played from the restaurant’s sound system, the two discussed just how odd their restaurant’s fame had become.

Hutchins, who serves not only as the chef, a co-owner, and a frontman for the mainstream media (his credentials working in Democratic politics make him a far more palatable interviewee for those who want to do MAGA tourism without actually mixing with those on the right), marveled “at the speed with which it became a scene. … It seemed like in the first half of last year, and it’s just continued to some extent … people were looking for a way to explain the Trump thing yet again.” He added, “people are trying to imprint on it and, like, use it as a way to explain our current politics.”

From Kassam’s point of view, when the first wave of publicity happened for the restaurant, “I wasn’t sure that we were ready for it. This place was in the works before the election. It was never supposed to be what it’s become.”

The former aide to Nigel Farage recalled, “I wasn’t sure whether we really did want to take a step into that world to be known as this. But quite frankly, the inauguration rolls around and all these people are asking me about party spaces or whatever. How can we not take that? It would have been financially retarded to not,” Kassam said in the parlance of our post-woke era.

“So that’s when that all started happening,” he added. “And of course, along with the mental parties came the mental reporters.”

The reporters, mental or not, have become a constant. Hutchins complained that the media attention was starting to be a bit overwhelming. “Every single day we get an email from a foreign press outlet. I was just starting to say no to all of them. I can’t put in the time and sit around and be on the record every day” for outlets ranging from Korean television to the Danish press, he said.

But the image that had been popularly painted of Butterworth’s sometimes presented its own problems, and not just because it became the rare restaurant with duck breast being prepared in the kitchen while someone screams into a bullhorn at the front entrance.

As Kassam noted, a lot of fans showed up, some of whom could be too grasping even by the standards of Washington. “ ‘Maybe Raheem can help me get a job.’ ‘Maybe he can help my boss get an article,’ ” were the characteristic types, he said. Kassam explained, “Hey, I’m here to talk about big-picture issues, maybe, but drink wine and eat good food and chitchat, and people come in here with, like, set expectations, like ‘Oh, I’m gonna present him my résumé.’ ”

The fans of Kassam, who wanted to hear all about how he helped Brexit happen when they were in high school, weren’t representative of the American right as a whole. Then again, it’s not like the steel workers drinking black coffee and eating crisp bacon who were interviewed by reporters doing safaris into the psyche of Trump voters nearly a decade ago were the perfect stand-in for the Republican base either.

Instead, it represents a specific slice of MAGA world. Kassam finds it a bit more diverse than his usual circles, marveling: “This place is the first time I ever interacted a lot with MAGA tech bros.” It was a major cultural change for someone who had come up on the British populist right, as the restaurant attracted patrons interested in blockchain and not just in Brexit. Certainly, though, that leaves a broad slice of the Republican electorate out.

And, in Washington, a MAGA patron and a Republican patron are very different things. Among Trump-friendly staffers and operatives in D.C., it has not exactly been a beloved destination. Younger staffers who wanted to mix with fellow conservatives would go drink at places like Scarlet Oak or Bullfeathers or do expense-account meals at the Capitol Grille. One zoomer Republican operative in Washington was befuddled at how Butterworth’s had become such a destination: “A bunch of conservatives just decided it would be our place and I don’t understand why.” The operative noted that going to Butterworth’s was “a career move” and said they preferred to go to the dive bar two doors down: “I’d rather just go to the Tune Inn and have a better time.”

Another plugged-in Washington Republican said it was a place to go to send a particular message; “I would never just suggest to go there.” After all, said the plugged-in Republican, Butterworth’s was too far from K Street for power lunches. Instead, its centrality in the imagination of the left existed simply in the minds of reporters who had spent months flocking there. It had transformed what could be the MAGA version of Cheers or the Star Wars cantina or (depending on your inclinations) almost into a lair of Bond villains.

This perception had driven away some customers on the left. One Democratic staffer who raved about the martinis at Butterworth’s said it was never a place that they could patronize at this point in light of what they saw as the excesses of the Trump administration in recent weeks. “I am extremely polarized,” said the staffer. But another Democratic operative shrugged it off: “It’s Washington and we’re in the minority. Every restaurant is Republican.”

However, Hutchins wasn’t exactly unhappy that it had been depicted as a MAGA hot spot; it’s what made Butterworth’s a viable business proposition. At a time when the restaurant industry is facing increasingly shrinking margins—when the industry is increasingly divided between those with tasting menus and those that simply just serve cheeseburgers—the attention helps Butterworth’s stay open as what he described as “a middle-class restaurant.” “The fact that it’s become a social scene, the fact that it’s become a tourist destination, is one of the only reasons that we can exist as sort of like a middle to upper-middle restaurant.”

He reminisced that in summer, there were days when almost every single reservation came from an out-of-town visitor excited to eat at the rare restaurant featured on Steve Bannon’s War Room.

But the visitors who go to Butterworth’s looking for something exotic are not just Midwestern tourists out for pork cheeks or dry-aged duck breast to sample on a patriotic vacation. They are the reporters who flocked to write about the place. No two journalists come there for the same reason, and certainly some have tried harder than others to capture the nature of the restaurant. But they are there because even now, more than 10 years after Trump announced his first presidential bid and after more than 75 million voted for him in 2024, there is still something that perplexes people about how anyone could support him—and a desperation for some easy way to sum it up.

For the owners, however, the calculus on all of this is quite different. In Washington, many things are perception. Often simply having the appearance of power can confer power. In the same way, Butterworth’s is not the center of the MAGA universe, nor is it the place you can discover the secret to Trump’s electoral success. It’s a nice restaurant that serves bone marrow. The perception may help at times—after all, there are few other restaurants in D.C. that out-of-town tourists flock to—and it may hurt. Despite the willingness that Kassam expressed to Slate to happily book a private function for La Raza (the immigrant rights group now known as UnidosUS), it’s unlikely they will fill out the form on the Butterworth’s website anytime soon.

But, on the whole, it’s better to be perceived as something. For some, it may be a place for MAGA pilgrimage. For others, it’s a place to vent righteous outrage at the state of American politics toward Capitol Hill staffers. But as long as it keeps customers showing up, it’s probably worth it for Butterworth’s, even if Dutch television won’t leave them alone.