They came for the cheap wine. They arrived in quarter-zips and tasteful cross necklaces. One young woman wore fur (raccoon). One young man wore a fleece adorned with a golf club’s seal (Trump). They sang along with Journey, bopped along to the Spice Girls. They networked over cans of hard seltzer. And then they went out into the chilly spring air, fortified, at least temporarily, against whatever slings and arrows life in the nation’s capital was bound to bring.
It was a Wednesday evening at Scarlet Oak, a restaurant and bar in the Navy Yard section of Washington, D.C., that has come to serve as a social fulcrum for a certain kind of D.C. conservative, maybe too young to have voted for Donald J. Trump in 2016, but now working either in his administration or for one of his allies in Congress.
At one table, a woman grabbed a bottle of white wine by its neck and poured its contents down a friend’s throat before taking a swig herself.
Another woman, a Republican congressional aide not authorized to speak to the press, said cheerfully that the scene at the bar, which has the sleek but bloodless look of an airport lounge but aspires to something more sophisticated, with dishes like za’atar ahi tuna, reminded her of college.
If Butterworth’s is where MAGA luminaries like Stephen K. Bannon hold court as well-heeled patrons take caviar bumps and sip $100 shots of Van Winkle Special Reserve bourbon, Scarlet Oak is the kids’ table, where 20-somethings split a bottle of Federalist cabernet sauvignon. On Wine Wednesdays, it’s half-price, as are all wines on the menu except for the $75 bottle of Veuve Clicquot.
Republicans control all three branches of the federal government, but conservatives in D.C. are aware that most locals don’t share their politics. Sure, the young aides who pack into Scarlet Oak are not nearly prominent enough to be heckled at Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab, as Trump was last year. Still, one wants a place of one’s own — to flirt, swap Capitol Hill gossip and just relax.
“Every time I go, it’s like I’m running into 100 of my closest friends,” CJ Pearson, 23, a Republican influencer and strategist, wrote in a text message, having decided to spend this particular Wine Wednesday elsewhere. And, he added, for a group of young Republicans, “could it be any more on brand? What true fiscal conservative is turning down a half-priced bottle of pinot noir?”
It was 10:30 p.m., and a young man in a blue blazer and repp tie was in his second or third hour of holding down a corner of the bar. A Department of Transportation employee in a windbreaker adorned with the White House seal and Trump’s signature warily watched the crowd from a distance, seemingly hesitant to wade in.
As midnight approached, the music got louder. A blonde woman in a floral dress danced with a tall young man in a red turban. Busboys cleared High Noon empties.
Matthew Foldi, 29, regarded this scene from a banquet, sporting a bolo tie. Foldi, the editor of The Washington Reporter, the right-wing news outlet, who seems to speak with the president at least once a week, had stepped out briefly to take home a friend who appeared to have had a little too much to drink.
The bar’s patrons were “the coolest people on Earth,” Foldi said, “frat stars” from Southeastern Conference schools like the University of Alabama.
As far as he was concerned, this was very much a good thing. “I love this place,” he added. “It makes people feel better about how they are.”
The social terrain in D.C. is known to change as often as White House administrations, and some establishments don’t survive the changing political winds.
When George W. Bush was president, his daughters, Jenna and Barbara, patronized Smith Point, a Georgetown bar that a 2005 dispatch in The New York Times described as “a genuine velvet-rope hot spot” for young conservatives. Today, its former basement digs are a sushi restaurant.
“Scarlet Oak is fine, but if you came up in the Cap Lounge, Bar 201, Hill Country, Town Hall, SoHo, and Tortilla Coast era of D.C., you’re built different,” Ken Farnaso, a corporate adviser who formerly worked on Capitol Hill, wrote on X last month, after the news site NOTUS called Scarlet Oak the hangout for “MAGA’s next generation.”
The bars Farnaso enumerated were, indeed, all beloved institutions. Not one of them remains open.
Some restaurant and bar owners have tried to bridge the political divide, but most have failed. Political Pattie’s, on the popular U Street corridor, made a genuine effort at bipartisan comity in 2024, only to become “DC’s most hated political watering hole,” as Politico put it. It didn’t last three months.
For his part, Scarlet Oak’s co-owner Brian Schram, a 38-year-old restaurateur from Maryland, professed no political leanings. “We’re in the hospitality industry,” Mr. Schram said. “We welcome anybody who comes in.”
It’s a “normal bar,” said Foldi, the news editor, but it does end up “attracting a lot of people who are MAGA.”
This evening, though, a woman named Sophie — a nonprofit worker who asked that her last name not be printed — had been drawn to the bar for other reasons.
“Look at all these hot men talking to all these hot women,” she said. “And they’re all MAGA?”
She wasn’t a fan of the president herself, but the Sacramento native had been trying to understand his political movement for years, a quest that eventually brought her to Washington. For her, a trip to Scarlet Oak amounted to an anthropological foray into ideologically hostile territory. But the wine flowed, and no one seemed to mind.
The main reason to visit Scarlet Oak may be the one that George Mallory gave in 1923 when explaining, to this newspaper, his desire to summit Mt. Everest: “Because it’s there.” It’s certainly cleaner than some of the dives that welcomed previous generations of Capitol Hill’s worker bees.
That’s not a selling point for some. Kelly Chapman, a Washington-based culture writer, dismissed Scarlet Oak as “the kind of sports bar you’d walk into in a strip mall in the Dallas suburbs.” She compared it unfavorably with Butterworth’s, which she said was more “vibe-y” and “charged.”
The Butterworth’s co-owner Raheem J. Kassam piled on, recently disparaging Scarlet Oak on social media as “where poor interns drink.”
Several days later, though, he struck a more conciliatory tone.
“The industry is so difficult in general, and especially right now,” Kassam wrote in an email, “that I hope everyone goes there and spends a lot of money and tips the staff 40 percent.”
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