Eebee’s is the defiantly optimistic neighborhood bar D.C. deserves
To read the article in The Washington Post, click HERE.
Review by Elazar Sontag
(Photos by Scott Suchman/For The Washington Post)
At the new tavern in Shaw, time-honored American pub grub is dialed in and served with reverence.
★★★ (Outstanding)
My mind always wanders as I scan the paper menu at Eebee’s Corner Bar. With each of the 10 quintessential comfort foods on the list — a burger, onion rings, a Caesar salad — comes a flashback.
My mind always wanders as I scan the paper menu at Eebee’s Corner Bar. With each of the 10 quintessential comfort foods on the list — a burger, onion rings, a Caesar salad — comes a flashback.
The turkey club I see when I close my eyes is the one I devoured as a child on trips to Florida, where my grandmother would treat me to the towering sandwich and a virgin piña colada at a waterside restaurant before we went to the beach. When I order a banana split, I half expect to be served the overflowing mess of ice cream and chocolate syrup from Fentons Creamery, the site of so many birthday parties growing up in Oakland, California.
Eebee’s does not try to override whatever nostalgia you might bring to the table. Instead, it wraps you in it.
Take the restaurant’s cheeseburger. There are no sleights of hand. No proprietary umami-blasted sauce or layers of smashed patties vying for internet attention. Just salt and lots of black pepper; a nice, thick ring of onion; and a tall, dry-aged beef patty blanketed in American cheese and cheddar that melt into a two-tone yellow swirl. You’ve had some version of this burger before. It is not revelatory but humbly great.
Other dishes are similarly unadulterated and exalted. The double-decker club is packed tightly with veil-thin slices of turkey, thick-cut bacon and wedges of well-salted tomato. To ward off the dryness turkey can attract, it is spread with what seems like an entire jar of mayonnaise. The white bread is toasted enough to stand up to fillings, but not so crunchy as to scrape the roof of your mouth. Any Florida clubhouse would be lucky to put a toothpick through this sandwich.
A Caesar salad is covered in so much parmesan that if you don’t eat it promptly, it wilts under the sheer weight of cheese — a good problem to have. Even a banana split has been quietly improved, the banana bruleed so it gleams reflectively like polished ice. Eebee’s owner Emily Brown does something harder than reinvent: she fine-tunes.
In 2009, Brown, a D.C. native, moved to New York and bartended at Old Rabbit Club, a punk rock speakeasy in Greenwich Village. It was there that she began to develop a passion for beer, and in her off hours, fell in love with the sorts of neighborhood institutions where she could linger over drinks and a burger. Not quite dive bars, less fussy than full-blown restaurants.
When Brown returned to Washington in 2018 to help her cousin Andy Brown open Andy’s Pizza and put together its beer program, she felt the absence of these places. “There’s no middle ground. It’s Stoney’s or Le Diplomate. It’s Exiles or Osteria Mozza,” she reflected, referencing some of the city’s beloved bars and upscale restaurants. Slowly, she started to build her own middle ground. Eebee’s, whose name is a play on Brown’s initials, opened on a corner along Florida Avenue in Shaw in November.
“I obviously am quite inspired by many things in New York, but this is for D.C.,” she says. “I think people in D.C. wanted something for them.” That seemed like an understatement on a Thursday night in early December. “Two people,” I told the host when I walked in. “Hour and a half,” she replied apologetically. So I waited. Just after 10 p.m., I returned to find my place at a high-top in the front window. The room was still packed.
Friends crowded the bar to watch a hockey game playing on a TV surrounded by sports posters, vintage beer signs and a dignified painting of a hound. I sipped my Negroni and edged my stool further toward the window as the crowd swelled. The jostling didn’t bother me;I was too immersed in my mozzarella sticks to mind the friendly push and pull for space.
They come three to an order, each baton nearly as thick as a spring roll. Early on, the breading was too thin and the cheese seeped out. On return visits, they had been perfected. The exterior is durable and snappy with the faint taste of garlic and parmesan. The mozzarella is molten hot, milky and squeaky, as if plucked straight from the salty waters of New Jersey’s finest Italian deli.
Three months in, Eebee’s has settled into a groove, with service as warm and lived-in as its food. Brown is a constant presence, introducing herself to every table and seeming to find genuine pleasure in getting to know her newfound regulars. Her staff follows her lead, making rounds to take orders and re-up drinks, but never overbearing in a way that suggests there is a time limit on your table. And boy, do people linger.
The bar is already a late-night favorite of chefs and sommeliers, servers and bar folk who are proud to see one of their own take a big leap — and relieved for someplace fun whose kitchen is still open when they get off work. This has the sweet and occasionally riotous effect of everyone knowing everyone. “The best bartender in the world!” a woman at a corner table shouted recently as she pointed to a friend who had just walked in. The whole room exploded in cheers, and I wondered if I should recognize this famous bartender, too. Shots were poured.
Even when you don’t know a soul, it’s nice to feel like part of something so joyous. And while I have never experienced a quiet moment at Eebee’s, my first visit was the only time I waited more than a few minutes to sit.
I cannot imagine skipping an opportunity to eat the silliest appetizer in town, a spartan “cheese plate” consisting of cheddar slices, raw onion slivers and fried saltines, but plenty of people at Eebee’s observe a liquid diet. The pride of Brown’s tightly curated beer list is what she calls the Light & Dark. Like the cheese plate, it is a tribute to McSorley’s, New York’s oldest Irish bar. Order it, and you will be served two 10-ounce mugs of beer. One a light, peppy pilsner from New Hampshire’s Schilling Beer Co., the other a dark and brooding lager from Lost Generation in D.C. Both are poured from Czech Lukr taps that leave a dramatic, cappuccino-like foam. A perfect offering for those of us too indecisive to pick our poison.
Brown worked with bar director Chris Donovan (formerly of the Green Zone, where Brown developed the beer program) to put together a cocktail list that reads in turn whimsical and serious. You can order a Negroni or a martini, but why not a grasshopper? I am not sure the unnaturally green cocktail tingling with crème de menthe and rimmed with chocolate syrup is ever good, exactly, but it sure does feel right. The same goes for the Dirty Shirley, made a little more grown-up with homemade black cherry soda.
Between the reasonable prices (most cocktails cost $13) and the fact that Eebee’s is open every night until 2 or 3 a.m., it is a defiantly chipper outlier in an industry struggling to stay optimistic and affordable. It feels good to support a place like this at an undeniably heavy time for D.C.'s independent restaurants. I reckon some of us feel heavy these days, too. Less so in the presence of gushing mozzarella sticks and a banana split, cherry glowing chemical-red, as sweet as any memory.
Eebee’s Corner Bar
1840 Sixth St. NW. eebeesbar.com. 202-506-5711. Hours: Monday through Thursday, 5 p.m. to 2 a.m.; Friday 5 p.m. to 3 a.m.; Saturday noon to 3 a.m.; Sunday noon to 2 a.m. Sound check: 88 decibels/Extremely loud. Accessibility: No barriers to entry; ADA-compliant restroom; exceptions to the no-reservation policy are made for diners who need special accommodations and reach out in advance. Dietary considerations: Allergens are not listed on menus, but gluten-free substitutions are available; several meat-free dishes are available.
