A barrel-chested young man was just settling into his table with three companions near the bar at Butterworth’s, the buzzy Trump-friendly French bistro on Capitol Hill, when one of the establishment’s owners glided over to have a word. The young man listened, then nodded and removed his red Make America Great Again cap.
The owner, Raheem Kassam, returned to his corner table, personalized with a gold plate: “The Raheem J. Kassam Nook.” “It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t necessarily occur to a typical MAGA person,” he said, “that there is etiquette to these things.”
Kassam withdrew a small object from his blazer pocket. “I’m a big believer in conceal-carry,” he cracked. It was a tin of caviar, which he placed on the table beside an appetizer: New Hampshire sardines with pickled ramps. Kassam, who is 38, is the editor in chief of The National Pulse, a right-wing populist news site, and a prominent cheerleader of President Trump. As the restaurant’s de facto host, he provides instant confirmation to fellow Trump devotees who are entering Butterworth’s for the first time that they have come to the right place.
Indeed, more than anyone else, he is why it is the right place. Kassam, the child of Indian immigrants who grew up in the working-class west London suburb Uxbridge and whose father ran two fast-food restaurants, scrapped his way to serving as the chief of staff to the Brexit party co-founder Nigel Farage. And for Trump’s onetime pirate ship of a political movement, Butterworth’s represents an ostentatious new evolutionary phase: the deplorable as arriviste.
Surveying the patrons, Kassam turned his attention to a pair of attractive young women who had just stepped into the subdued lighting and pulsing soundtrack of the restaurant and now stood expectantly under the somewhat random deer-antler chandelier. “This is what happens when you have a beautiful place,” he observed almost dreamily. “Steve has a saying: ‘Victory begets victory.’ The same principle applies. Beauty begets beauty.”
By “beauty,” Kassam was describing his dining room, replete with fringed lampshades and chairs upholstered in French tapestry, the plastered walls lined with a hodgepodge of prints ranging from century-old bistro menus to Remington cowboy art. By “Steve,” Kassam was referring to the former Trump White House adviser and “War Room” podcast host Stephen K. Bannon, for whom Kassam worked a decade ago as the London bureau chief of Breitbart when Bannon was its publisher. Bannon lives a few blocks away from Butterworth’s and is its resident celebrity.
At a nearby table, Steven and Christy McInturff Huret, attorneys visiting from Johnson City, Tenn., giddily appraised their surroundings. Just two days earlier, The Washington Post’s restaurant critic, Tom Sietsema, had named Butterworth’s one of the city’s 20 best new restaurants. (In his review, he praised the “menu that shoots holes in the idea that conservatives tend to gather around steak and liberals eat more adventurously.”) But what mattered more to the couple was their discovery of a dining spot in Washington where fans of the president and the movement that has lifted him once more to the White House now unabashedly congregate. “We couldn’t wait to come,” Steven Huret said, adding, “We heard Steve Bannon hangs out here!”
Bannon wasn’t there — he typically sits in Kassam’s “nook” and orders the Carolina gold rice — but the crowd was laced with Republican lobbyists and midlevel administration officials. A reporter from the far-right Gateway Pundit sat at the bar, pecking away at his laptop.
The crowd was getting noisy, though not enough to drown out a sudden piercing blast from the front door. “Some lib in the neighborhood likes to come by and stick his air horn through the doorway,” Kassam said. “One time he did it, I just ran outside and stood there and shouted, ‘Loser!’”
Washington has long had its share of restaurants that define their political moment, from the Victorian-saloon masculinity of Old Ebbitt Grill to the ’60s-era lobbyist beehive of the Monocle to the 1980s hypersexualized antics of senators like Ted Kennedy at La Brasserie. When the founders of Butterworth’s opened their place three weeks before the 2024 presidential election, in a 19th-century storefront sandwiched between a liquor store and a marijuana dispensary, its prospects in Washington were not much greater than those of Trump eight years earlier.
The restaurant’s principal investor and eponymous owner, Uber’s senior legal counsel, Alex Butterworth, an Australian, spent a lot of time hanging out in Melbourne’s cafes but otherwise knew nothing about the business. The 34-year-old chef, Bart Hutchins, had worked on Democratic campaigns; he revered Alice Waters and envisioned a nose-to-tail menu replete with bone marrow and sheepshead fish. When Hutchins was introduced to Kassam by a mutual friend last July, three months before the restaurant’s soft opening, the investor group had already burned through most of its money and deemed his ideological baggage a lesser concern.
Kassam was eager to learn from Hutchins about the various French wine regions and where snails came from. But there was no pre-existing business model to suggest that his compatriots on the right shared the same curiosity. Hutchins’s French palate and Kassam’s Rolodex did not augur a sustainable marriage.
But the group had a few other things going in their favor. Hutchins’s wife is a former journalist for the conservative Daily Caller and is close friends with Nick Solheim, the chief executive of American Moment, a group formed in 2021 with the intention of staffing the next Republican administration with right-wing ideologues. American Moment booked the entire restaurant for an election-night watch party. Hutchins had also gotten to know a few senior staff members at the nonprofit conglomerate known as the Conservative Partnership Institute — its headquarters are across the street from Butterworth’s — which had plans to open its own restaurant nearby. Those plans were delayed, and C.P.I.’s staff members asked Hutchins if one of its sister groups, Stephen Miller’s America First Legal Foundation, could take over Butterworth’s for its Christmas party. In the immediate wake of Trump’s victory, meanwhile, Kassam convinced his friend Bannon to host several inaugural weekend parties, including a brunch for former President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and his family.
Word spread that a new restaurant on the Hill was only too happy to take in unabashed Trump confederates. After inclement weather forced the inaugural ceremonies to be moved inside the Capitol, leaving thousands of Republican visitors without a venue, Hutchins received more than a dozen requests from C.P.I., American Moment and Republican members of Congress to host watch parties. The restaurant also hosted an inaugural after-party put on by Passage Publishing, the publisher of the far-right ideologue Curtis Yarvin, which the pop star Grimes (also the mother of three of Elon Musk’s children) attended. Months after opening, Butterworth’s has already welcomed Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel; and Michael Waltz, Trump’s former national security adviser.
Amid Trump’s breakneck hostile takeover of Washington itself, eviscerating the federal work force, naming himself the chairman of the Kennedy Center, appointing loyalists to run the Library of Congress, nominating the former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro to be the city’s U.S. attorney and directing the Republican-controlled House to effectively cut $1.1 billion from the District of Columbia’s operating budget, the overnight success of Butterworth’s as a culinary MAGA magnet in the nation’s capital seemed inevitable. (Though it’s a small oddity that three of the four principal investors — Butterworth, Kassam and Julian Gagnon — are all visa-status U.S. residents.)
During Trump’s first term, it was easier to view him as a fluke — and, correspondingly, easier for Washingtonians to turn up their nose at his associates. Miller and other senior administration officials were harassed in the city’s restaurants. Today Miller is the senior policy director of a two-term president whose following constitutes the dominant force in American political life. It is a market to be reckoned with — and, inevitably, accommodated.
In March, after Trump announced that he was now in charge of the Kennedy Center, a rogue staff member there canceled several events at the last minute that the president’s supporters had booked. “We got a slew of calls from those groups,” Alex Butterworth told me. “And so, yes, we were beneficiaries of others saying no.”
At this point, Hutchins told me, “the group had conversations where we said, ‘This is our customer base, whether we like it or not.’ They weren’t going away. They were booking events. They were bringing us money. And so, yeah, it was a good business model.”
That a Washington restaurant might implicitly take political sides would have seemed perilous in an earlier, less-polarized era. There were and always will be expense-account power centers, from the Sans Souci and Trader Vic’s in the ’70s to Cafe Milano and Tosca today. But only in the last decade or so have some of them borne a distinctly partisan stamp. During the Obama years, it became widely understood that the place to bask in the hopey-changey vibe was Le Diplomate, or “Le Dip,” an artsy bistro situated along the transitioning corridor of 14th Street NW.
The culinary ethos, and most everything else, abruptly shifted with Trump’s arrival in 2017 to his downtown Trump International Hotel and its steakhouse, the only Washington restaurant where the president could be seen. It was frequented by MAGA acolytes and influence-seeking foreign diplomats alike (as his private club at Mar-a-Lago is now). Perhaps fittingly, the single term of Joseph R. Biden Jr. saw the closure of his predecessor’s Washington hotel while failing to spawn a venue of its own — a bridge-to-nowhere presidency whose cultural vacuum Butterworth’s now endeavors to fill.
But what has given Butterworth’s popularity among the right such plausibility is what Democratic strategists have come to grudgingly acknowledge about the MAGA movement overall. Its ambition has matured. Its operatives are more sophisticated than before. Its thought leaders espouse broader ideological pretensions, which happen to involve the American diet. (Yes to beef tallow; no to food dyes.) To Hutchins — who worked on President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012 and Terry McAuliffe’s winning run for governor of Virginia a year later but now sees himself as more inclined to working-class populism than anything else — the receptiveness on the right to Butterworth’s upmarket French proletarianism suggests that things are getting interesting in Washington.
“I’m always knocked out by the lack of — I hate to use the phrase — intellectual rigor in D.C.,” the chef said one Tuesday afternoon in May while sitting on a bar stool just after delivering a U-Haul full of used bistro-style chairs to the restaurant’s basement, which he has begun to rent out for private dinners. “When I first came to town, I thought I’d be meeting all these characters straight out of ‘The West Wing’: Everyone’s going to be really smart, and we can talk about the classic novels and Godard movies or whatever. And so for me, opening this place was like saying, ‘To those characters who do exist, please come here.’”
At the mention of Bannon, Hutchins immediately said, “Steve’s a character, absolutely.” The chef recalled being on a road trip with Kassam in December to New York, where Kassam was the emcee at the New York Young Republican Club gala, and visiting Bannon, who was holed up at the five-star Pierre Hotel, indulging himself after completing his four-month federal prison sentence for contempt of Congress (Bannon refused to comply with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021). “He’s locked in there like a monk, with a pile of books on the French Revolution. I mean, he’s serious. I’ll sit around with a guy like that.”
In an interview over the phone the same day, Bannon repaid the compliment. “Look, I’m a hermit — I’m not a restaurant or club guy,” he said. “But what I love about Bart’s menu is that it’s not effete.”
He added, almost as a battle cry: “Bone marrow!”
A few hours later, I would see Bannon in his usual spot with his usual order, posing for selfies with other customers while seeking to explain the virtues of populist nationalism to the Axios co-founder Mike Allen, an effort he would reprise two nights later with the ABC News chief Washington correspondent, Jonathan Karl.
Bannon’s omnipresence and the bone marrow notwithstanding, it may be a while before Butterworth’s achieves Hutchins’s vision as a full-blown, intellectually bristling Les Deux Magots-on-the-Potomac. For now, the restaurant offers a convivial and intimate (about 50 seats in all) see-and-be-seen fishbowl to Washington’s new elite. Reporters are an invariable presence at the bar, where conservative personages can be spotted and secrets overheard without having to pay through the nose for a similar experience at Cafe Milano. The MAGA influencer and “War Room” co-host Natalie Winters often turns up to nurse a bottle of sparkling water with lime. Republican members of Congress like Andy Ogles, Anna Paulina Luna and Brandon Gill are regulars.
Notably, one tribe deliberately frequents Butterworth’s, while the other tribe deliberately does not. After committing the faux pas of failing to recognize Gill during the Texas freshman’s first visit and not finding space to accommodate him, Hutchins designed a photo array of all members of Congress and administration appointees and kept it in the kitchen for a few weeks. It soon became apparent to the staff that there was little point in memorizing the faces of Democrats.
Across seven visits, I had no difficulty identifying numerous MAGA strivers — Anthony Sabatini, a former congressional candidate from Florida; John Fredericks, the former Virginia state chairman of the Trump campaign — but strained to pick out a single counterpart from the left. Hutchins told me that a few Bernie Sanders alumni from both his presidential campaign and his Senate office show up from time to time. The chef added that he had thrown out a few patrons for getting in one another’s faces over politics, “like what you’d see at Thanksgiving if your MSNBC aunt sat next to your MAGA uncle.”
It’s also safe to say that Hutchins’s culinary indoctrination of the far right remains a work in progress. The chef now spends several days working the floor — because, as he told me, “you need someone who can talk about the menu in a way that moves the needle.” What does moving the needle look like? Well, there are those who devour “caviar bumps” from their clenched fists and others who gaze balefully at the all-French list of wines by the bottle before ordering a martini. Curtis Yarvin once brought a companion who requested a children’s menu, then chicken nuggets and finally spaghetti before capitulating. After initially vowing never to have burgers and fries on his menu, Hutchins yielded to popular demand, at least halfway: Butterworth’s now serves a resplendent platter of beef-tallow fries. For acolytes of a president known for serving McDonald’s at the White House, these are new horizons — but it’s clear that the scene is the draw.
One early evening in mid-May, the table of five to my right consisted of the Republican fund-raiser Caroline Wren, who helped plan Trump’s Jan. 6 rally at the Ellipse, and four Kennedy Center staff members, including its president, Richard Grenell, who is also Trump’s presidential envoy for special missions. “This one’s on me,” Kassam said to them as he plunked down a bottle of Champagne on their table. To my left sat Nathan Simington, a Trump-appointed member of the Federal Communications Commission, and his chief of staff, Gavin M. Wax, a longtime right-wing activist and the chairman of the New York Young Republican Club, who had recently posted on his website an opinion column titled “Trump vs. CBS Is Just the Start. Here’s How to Hit the Fake News Where It Really Hurts.” Several Treasury Department officials huddled near the bar. Upstairs, the Heritage Foundation was holding a private event. There had been talk of a few staff members of Vice President JD Vance coming by later to drink pints of Guinness, as they had in the past.
The contrast could not have been clearer a few blocks south of the restaurant at the Capitol, where at that very moment Representative Shri Thanedar, a Democratic backbencher from Michigan, was introducing articles of impeachment against Trump on the House floor. “I’m not concerned whether this is the right time or if there are enough votes from my colleagues across the aisle,” the congressman said to a nearly empty chamber.
Washington remains, even more than most American cities, distinctly liberal. Kamala Harris won 92.5 percent of the vote in the District of Columbia last November. Hutchins told me that some of his servers had expressed misgivings about the restaurant’s MAGA-centricity. “I’m short two staffers,” he said, “and I’ve had, like, 30 applications. I call them, they say they can’t wait to come interview — and then they don’t show up. And I assume that’s because they Googled us. Also, I have some old-time industry friends who won’t come here. And that part sucks.”
After The Washington Post anointed Butterworth’s “MAGA’s new hangout” in late January, Hutchins promptly hired security: “I was terrified that someone would walk over and throw paint on a customer.” The only act of vandalism that followed was the pasting of a “[EXPLETIVE] TRUMP” bumper sticker on the bathroom wall.
But one recent Friday evening, a young man with a backpack and a cardboard sign around his neck that read “MAGA Is Un-American” stood on the brick sidewalk in front of the restaurant. Through a megaphone, he proceeded to chant the bumper-sticker epithet about Trump, along with “Do you hate trans people?” and “Everyone in this restaurant is a Nazi!”
The crowd that night, which included Kari Lake, the failed Republican candidate for Arizona governor and the U.S. Senate who is now Trump’s senior adviser for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, did not appear intimidated in the least. Hutchins believed the perpetrator to be the air-horn guy, now escalating his tactics. He called the police. The chef says he was told that it sounded like a free-speech matter.
Hutchins told me the next week that he had begun talking with Kassam about opening a second Butterworth’s in Palm Beach, Fla. “I do think it would make a lot more money than here,” Hutchins observed, “because you don’t have 90 percent of the city refusing to step foot in the place.”
He’d been thinking about the megaphone incident, in addition to his industry friends’ shunning of Butterworth’s. “That whole mind-set has put a chip on my shoulder,” he said. “I’ve become protective of the people who come here. And, I don’t know, maybe in the process I’ve ghettoized myself.”
Then again, Hutchins went on, he read recently that as many as 40 percent of the city’s restaurateurs predicted that they would have to close at some point this year. “Maybe that’s because you told half the population that you didn’t want them in your restaurant,” Hutchins said. The chef said he viewed Butterworth’s as “a cultural opportunity” — maybe even a necessity. After all, it took a Republican to nominate the first woman to the Supreme Court. In all likelihood, Hutchins said, the first female president would also be a Republican. “You can’t move the culture till you’ve moved the conservatives,” he said. “Because they’ve got the power to hold things back for as long as they want.”
Hutchins said he had just been talking with Nick Solheim of American Moment about how conservatives had been dumbed down by grifters who played to the lowest common denominator, offering cheesy products and sneering at anything halfway sophisticated. Butterworth’s wasn’t going to do that. “I’d rather fail,” Hutchins said, “than give half the country what they think they want. You do that, and you can’t win the battle anyway.”
Read by Robert Petkoff
Narration produced by Tanya Pérez
Engineered by David Mason
Robert Draper is based in Washington and writes about domestic politics. He is the author of several books and has been a journalist for three decades.
The post The Restaurant Where Trump Acolytes Go to See and Be Seen appeared first on New York Times.
