Martin's Tavern

Martin’s Tavern sits at the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and N Street NW, in a wood-paneled building that has been there since 1933. The walls have the particular darkness that comes from decades of candlelight and conversation. The booths have names. Booth Three is where a young senator named John F. Kennedy proposed to Jacqueline Bouvier on June 24, 1953, and the booth is still marked. President Truman played poker here. Kennedy came here to write speeches at the bar, and in later years the staff would catch glimpses of him working on the first draft of his inaugural address. Those facts are not promotional language. They are the architectural record of a room that has been at the center of Washington social life for most of a century.

William Gloyd Martin, a former Major League Baseball player, opened the tavern in 1933 with the help of his father. The family has been running it since, across four generations. William A. Martin, the third in succession, started behind the bar in 1949 after serving in the Navy during World War II, attending Georgetown Medical School, earning Golden Gloves status as a boxer, and competing as a Pro-Am golfer. In 2001, Billy Martin and his wife Gina became the fourth generation to own and operate the restaurant. The tavern has served every president from Harry Truman to George W. Bush, along with the range of Washington figures, diplomats, journalists, athletes, and actors who have been passing through Georgetown for ninety years.

The menu is American tavern food executed without complication: burgers, sandwiches, eggs Benedict at brunch, shepherd’s pie, Guinness mussels, chicken pot pie, seafood, and a raw bar. The hamburger has been made the same way for as long as most Georgetown residents have been alive, and the regulars who order it are often the children or grandchildren of people who ordered it before them. The prices are fair for what they are and for where they are. The bartenders have tenure measured in decades rather than years. The value is in the room itself as much as in the food, which is a quality that most restaurants cannot manufacture and very few have sustained across any comparable span of time.

Sunday brunch is an institution of its own. Georgetown families three generations deep come in beside Georgetown University students on their first Sunday in the neighborhood, and the dining room holds both without effort. The specific pull on Sundays has something to do with the Kennedy history: he came here every Sunday after mass at Holy Trinity, which is a few blocks away, to read his newspaper in Booth One. People who come for brunch now are doing something not entirely different.

The bar fills early on weeknights. For a bar seat, arriving before 7pm gives you the best chance. Weekend brunch lines can reach the sidewalk at peak hours. The staff know the history of the room and will tell it if you ask, which is both a service and a reflection of how deeply embedded the place is in its own story.