You spot the party from a block away, thanks to the spumoni colors of the awning on the patio. As you get closer, the sounds of laughter and mariachi act like a magnet, practically pulling you toward the latest restaurant to surface near Union Market. The first door opens to a smart icy-green foyer, a trailer before the main attraction. The second door, set off with fancy metal handles and frosted glass, leads to a host stand and a swarm of staff who look thrilled to have you for dinner.
Say hello to El Presidente, yet another spectacle from Stephen Starr, the Philadelphia-based restaurateur who introduced continually hot Le Diplomate and still-buzzy St. Anselm to Washington and says he has taken a shine to this slice of town in particular.
“I fall for gritty places that are a little off-center,” says Starr, whose restaurants include the long-running Pastis and Buddakan in New York’s Meatpacking District. The empire builder says “there’s no magical formula” to his projects, just that he has to like a space and fill it with what he thinks is missing: Mexican, in the case of El Presidente, never mind that Destino, Mezcalero and Taqueria Las Gemelas are around the corner.
Ever try to book a table at a new spot and find your choices limited to 5 p.m. or 9 p.m.? Then reserve early or late only to see lots of open tables during the time you’re there? That’s not the case with this highly anticipated restaurant, which fills as soon as the door opens and stays busy until the last check is dropped. Just entering El Presidente is exciting, like watching a piñata the moment it’s cracked open.
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It helps that the talent behind the food bring impressive résumés to the table. A native of New Mexico, Andres Padilla, a corporate chef with Starr Restaurants, counts more than a decade with Chicago chef Rick Bayless of the acclaimed Topolobampo and other Mexican standard-bearers. The executive chef at El Presidente, David LaForce, previously cooked with Janos Wilder at his eponymous restaurant in Tucson and at Starr’s Mexican-inspired El Vez restaurants in Philadelphia and New York.
But the designers are equally responsible for filling El Presidente’s more than 200 seats. Starr enlisted New York-based design group AvroKO to whip up one of the most eye-catching interiors now playing in Washington. Like the menu, the space was created to capture the range of Mexico found in its capital city. So the round bar, costumed with handsome fringed stools and a retro diorama depicting land and sea, summons an old-time Mexican social club, and a plush, red-and-wood theater room (picture the Stork Club via CDMX) is graced with a flotilla of chandeliers and a vivid painting of mountains as the sun sets. Quite the stages for comforts spanning chicken enchiladas and queso fundido — the best in town, a molten mass of cheese and mushrooms scattered with toasted quinoa and served with a scroll of excellent flour tortillas.
Starr says he cares about offering “great food, but I wanted El Presidente to be fun,” too. Following the pandemic, “people want to have a good time, get a little crazy.”
The drinks help. Frozen cocktails summon unfortunate cruises or lost weekends in Key West or New Orleans — or so I thought until I met up with El Presidente’s frozen pineapple margarita, a two-fisted, true-tasting slush of fruit juice and tequila. Sgt. Pepper lives up to the promise of its name with red bell pepper juice and chile liqueur, plus smoky mezcal. And what’s not to like about rum, coconut, lime and pineapple juice presented in a shark-shaped glass with a tiny palm tree umbrella on top?
Listening to some staff talk up the mezcals (there are about 50 from which to choose, including some with lots of age on them) feels like a master class. The drinks call for sponges, and the menu obliges with the expected guacamole and tortilla soup and the less common: oysters, monster prawns, crab and lobster displayed on ice in front of the semi-open kitchen and meant to evoke a marisquería, or seafood restaurant. One of the most beguiling combinations stars firm slices of raw yellowtail in a pool of cucumber juice, fennel and lime — an electric green foil to the buttery fish.
Taco time! The goodness starts with dried heirloom corn from Oaxaca that’s ground into masa and pressed by hand into tortillas, then filled with one of eight combinations. In three visits, I have yet to find a taco I wouldn’t want to repeat. Pork shoulder and belly, braised low and slow with citrus (and a splash of Coke), swells with the flavor of heritage meat, and I love how every bite is both fork-tender soft and crisp from a stint on a griddle. Silken black cod gets the al pastor treatment with juicy grilled pineapple and lime-splashed shredded cabbage, bright and light accents balanced by a swab of aioli.
Remove the crowd, delete the scenery, erase the server with the biggest smile this side of Julia Roberts. Now taste El Presidente’s fluke ceviche. Kind of tame, isn’t it? The menu tells us there’s charred habanero in the “spicy” guacamole, but the dip, punctuated to crisp effect with diced jicama, registers as racy as Gerber. I also prefer the churros at some of the competition, including Mi Vida, to the fat wands here.
That just means there’s more room for what the kitchen does well, which is plenty. Take the tlayudas, crackery, plate-size tortillas served like pizzas on raised stands and dressed for success with combinations including burrata and tomato: buttery, summery goodness on a veneer of smashed avocado. Just to see the Oaxacan staple from a distance (those colors!) is to crave it. Zesty, housemade chorizo, cheese and black beans fill the pliable, pie-shaped wedges of an enclosed tlayuda. Next stop, I’m springing for chopped clams, béchamel and mojo de ajo, or “garlic gravy,” a combination that sounds more New Haven than Mexico City but shows a kitchen having some fun.
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The prize among the main courses is snapper chicharron, chunks of fried fish nestled in the frame of the snapper and strewn with Fresno chiles and pickled onions for sass. I’m content spritzing the hot nuggets with lemon or lime, but for greater pleasure, plunge a bite into the accompanying salsa verde or chipotle aioli.
You’ll want some sides. A fan of sliced broccoli, showered with toasted almonds and splayed over a yogurt sauce fueled with chipotle, is a welcome companion to the heartier dishes, and a sweet potato the size of a softball comes with a liquid curtain of goat cheese, chipotle and pecans, and light crunch from salsa macha. Black beans acquire texture with the help of tiny plantain croutons.
Save for the acoustics, every detail seems to have been vetted. The menus are bound in red velvet, the Sabre Paris utensils and white linen napkins speak to substance and the hospitality … is it my imagination or has Starr wrangled every manager in his realm to report for duty at El Presidente, at least for opening month? A fleet of waiters in crisp white jackets can describe the dishes as if they had made them themselves. (Sitting in the main dining room, I went on a mental shopping trip; the ceramic birds on the shelves between the booths would make lovely hosts gifts.) And kudos to the supervisor who informed me my first wine selection was unavailable and a similar but pricier bottle would be offered at the same cost, a point I make because if a known critic is treated that way, so should strangers. Yes, I’ve been tagged here, but having eaten anonymously at Starr restaurants in other markets, bad service is more or less foreign to the brand.
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Starr says he struggled with a name. “It had to be relevant, not too corny, authentic,” and people had to be able to pronounce it, says the restaurateur. Check, check, check and check. Meanwhile, El Presidente is rolling off the lips of food lovers, tickled by the prospect of taking a big bite out of Mexico in a restaurant that doubles as a fiesta.
El Presidente
1255 Union St. NE. 202-318-4820. elpresidente.com. Open for indoor and outdoor dining 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday for lunch, 5 to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 5 to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday for dinner, and 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday for brunch. Prices: appetizers $11 to $24, tacos $14 to $21, main courses $23 to $120. Sound check: 81 decibels/Extremely loud. Accessibility: The restaurant has two entrances for wheelchair users, one on the patio, the other on Union Street; restrooms are ADA-compliant.
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