Michelin-Starred Reverie Rises From the Ashes With a Striking New Look

Reverie, Georgetown’s treasured tasting room that was forced to go dark in August 2022 after suffering extensive fire damage, makes its long-awaited comeback to D.C.’s Michelin-starred dining scene later this month.

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Chef Johnny Spero’s resurrected flagship, hidden in a cobblestone alleyway since 2018 (3201 Cherry Hill Lane), maintains its same one-star status achieved just months before flames ravaged the fine dining destination. At the completely rebuilt restaurant, modernist meals stretching 16 courses long continue to draw culinary influences and techniques from Nordic countries, Japan, and Spero’s native Maryland.

“We don’t want to start over; we want to continue where we left off,” he says, of the seafood-centric reboot. “We say Reverie’s trashy but classy — we take food seriously but give the guests a great time.”

Reverie 2.0’s revised look takes a dramatic turn, swapping slick white-and-blue subway tiles for a completely recalibrated palate full of pitch-black finishes that literally reflect on the reason it closed. Columns around the dining room are wrapped in torched wood, a Japanese preservation technique that speaks to Reverie’s resilience. A sophisticated floor comprised of large charcoal-colored slabs replaces a light wooden pattern.

Spero happily reports his shiny new granite countertop passed his so-called “Duke’s of Hazzard” slide test: being able to successfully deliver dishes all the way across the 20-foot showstopper.

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Dinner this time around will run $255 per person, with service Tuesday through Saturday from 5:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. Reservations go live on Resy in mid-March, with an opening scheduled for the third or fourth week of the month.

Reverie will come back to life with a new D.C. sibling to meet. Bar Spero, a stunning tribute to Spain’s Basque country where he formerly staged, debuted downtown shortly after Reverie shut down.

“They were always meant to exist at the same time and build each other up. Reverie and Spero are different but there’s synergy between two,” he says. Both share the same Inland Seafood purveyor, and Reverie will edit its dishes based on fresh shipments of East Coast bivalves and fish.

“If they can’t get mackerel out of water that day we can do something with mussels or oysters,” he says. “We’ll reimagine the menu based on what’s available — that’s more fun than doing the same thing every day.”

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To stay busy and engaged while Reverie underwent renovations, the ever-restless chef embarked on a months-long “test kitchen” world tour, popping up at top-ranked restaurants in the Bay Area to Kyoto, Japan, with stops in Portland, Maine and Seoul along the way.

It was in South Korea’s capital where he stepped outside of his comfort zone like never before by getting his first-ever tattoo. Spero went on to get five in all, immortalizing his lifelong love for seafood with fresh ink of squid, mackerel, and crawfish, to name a few.

Meanwhile, some Reverie employees spent the off-season cooking at another Michelin-rated kitchen in D.C. Superstar chef and humanitarian José Andrés — Spero’s former boss at two-starred Minibar — personally phoned him a day after the fire, inviting his out-of-work staff to do a residency there.

With Spero’s vast cookbook collection, knives, and recipe notebooks all destroyed inside, it only made sense to rewrite Reverie’s menu from scratch. He couldn’t quite let go of two Reverie originals, however. One salvaged course — crab meat buried under Carolina Gold rice and yolky egg — is a “hug in a bowl,” he says. The savory rice porridge of sorts is one of many difficult dishes he constructs behind the scenes.

“We’ve always said there’s a veiled simplicity blanketing this wildly complex thing. No one needs to understand it, just enjoy it,” he says.

Rice also happens to play a starring role in the other returning favorite. Koshihikari rice is cooked, caramelized, and smoked inside a young coconut to produce a pudding-like dessert. “It’s like putting a warm blanket on you before transitioning into the real world,” he says.

Strawberry gochujang sorbet is one fresh finale to look forward to, featuring frosted geranium, lemon verbena, and green juice.

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A newly created runway to Reverie, now illuminated in matte-black Japanese lanterns, leads diners into a zen stone garden in the back where the relocated entrance now stands. The open kitchen is the first thing diners see upon walking through the door.

“We have nowhere to hide. We feel like we’re more part of the show than before,” says Spero, who’s appeared on Netflix’s cooking competition series the Final Table and is no stranger to being on display.

The mature makeover speaks to Spero’s current chapter in life as a married father of three. “It shed its old skin and came back differently, but still feels like Reverie,” he says, joking he’s traded in his on-the-clock Birkenstocks for a “boot phase.”

Dining at the reinvented Reverie is a much more intimate affair, with room for half as many patrons (36) than before. “The first Reverie tried to be everything for everyone,” he says. “Somehow we managed to cram 70 seats into that space.”

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The reimagined layout deleted all kitchen-facing counter stools, as well as the standalone bar where the old entrance up front used to be. A tight cocktail list will include two or three options at a time, with nonalcoholic options fueled by his go-to brands like NON and Unified Ferments.

“Even through I don’t drink anymore I still love making cocktails,” says Spero, who worked at Shaw’s now-closed drinking institution Columbia Room. “It’s fun translating the kitchen into a glass.”

Reverie is outfitted with dedicated wine fridges for the first time. The beverage directors at Reverie and much-bigger Bar Spero will work in tandem to build bottle lists and wine pairings, with a focus on low-intervention varietals.

In a perfect permitting and construction world, Reverie was hoping to reopen last summer. But the symbolism of a spring reawakening seems meant to be.

“Reverie’s taking its first breath after a very long, 18-month hibernation,” he says.

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