Tabard Inn Restaurant

The Restaurant

The Tabard Inn sits at 1739 N Street NW — the eastern half of the same block as Iron Gate — in a continuous run of three Victorian townhouses (1737, 1739, and 1741) linked internally and renamed for Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales by entrepreneur Marie Willoughby Rogers in 1922. It is the longest-continuously operating inn and restaurant in Washington DC, and one of the oldest continuously-women-owned hotels in the country — Rogers's original ownership line passed through three generations of family operators before transferring to the current ownership in 2002 with the operating format unchanged.

The dining room is a townhouse-parlor sequence: a small reception hall, a windowed dining room around a working wood-burning fireplace, a side garden that opens in season, and the wood-paneled bar that the Washington Post once described as the most-photographed bar in Dupont Circle. The kitchen serves a seasonal New American menu — a roasted-chicken pot pie with biscuit crust, a wood-grilled hangar steak with chimichurri, a daily fish on the chalkboard from a small mid-Atlantic dock rotation, and a doughnut-and-honey breakfast plate that has been on the menu for forty years. The wine list runs to about a hundred and twenty labels — old-world heavy, fairly priced.

The Tabard's identity is the room itself: eclectic art, candle-lit evenings, live jazz on Sunday nights, a fireplace that the staff still lights from October through April. Breakfast and brunch are the longest-running formats in Dupont — regulars hold the same Sunday booth for years. The Washingtonian once described an evening at the Tabard as 'spending the night at an old friend's slightly bohemian aunt's house,' and that frame still applies. For a Dupont Circle birthday that wants warmth more than glamour, the parlor by the fireplace is the city's standing answer.