A Deep Dive with Neighborhood Restaurant Group's Greg Engert & Aged Fish with Chef Chico Dator, Recorded at Modan

The man who taught this city to care about beer is watching a generation drink less of it.

I have been doing this long enough to remember when you could not get a decent beer in this town, and Greg Engert is a big reason that changed. So when I sat down with him at Modan, our newest partner for the series, I did not want the victory lap. I wanted to know what it actually feels like to run twenty concepts right now, when happy hour is dead, labor costs what it costs, and there is a new restaurant on every corner.

If you care where the DC dining scene is headed, this one is for you. Greg has watched the pendulum swing since 2006, from farm to table to hyper local to the craft beer boom, and he is blunt about the fact that what a Gen X diner wants is not remotely what the Gen Z diner walking in behind them wants. Any Washington DC restaurant insider will tell you the double turn is gone. Greg will tell you what he is doing about it.

Greg Engert is the Beer Director and Managing Partner at Neighborhood Restaurant Group, the group behind Church Key, Bluejacket, Rustico, Josephine, Iron Gate and Snallygaster, the biggest beer festival on the East Coast. He came to DC for grad school to become an English professor and ended up waiting tables at the Brick Cellar instead. I also pulled Chef Chico Dator out of the kitchen, an old friend from his Nobu days, who runs the only dry aging fish program in the region right here at Modan.

Key Takeaways

• Greg Engert walked away from an academic path in modernist literature and fell for hospitality while waiting tables at the Brick Cellar around 2004.
• Neighborhood Restaurant Group now runs about twenty concepts and roughly as many locations, nearly all in the DMV, with Junebug in New Orleans as the outlier.
• Moving away from happy hour toward low price points available all day is a deliberate answer to the fact that people no longer go out early or late.
• Younger drinkers are not abstaining more than previous generations did, they are drinking less per visit, and inflation and healthcare costs drive that more than wellness trends do.
• Chef Chico Dator calls his process conditioning rather than aging, because he does not want a guest to think they are being handed old fish.
• Greg Engert said, “This question energizes us every day when we get up and keeps us up at night every night.”
• Chef Chico Dator said, “There is this one guy that says fresh fish is boring.”

Timestamps

00:00 Welcome to Modan in Tysons
01:27 Meet Greg Engert of Neighborhood Restaurant Group
02:56 From English grad school to the Brick Cellar
07:45 Four restaurants in 2006 to twenty concepts today
12:02 Church Key, Birch and Barley, and 14th Street in 2009
13:24 How 2008 reset the hospitality business
15:42 Real estate, competition, and the end of the double turn
21:44 Keeping long running restaurants relevant
23:50 Columbia Firehouse, Josephine, and a reconcept that worked
27:27 The constriction in beer and in alcohol generally
29:36 Why the next generation of diners is different
33:18 Killing happy hour and rethinking price points
35:49 Feedback, reviews, and the us versus them problem
41:38 What is opening next in Del Ray
46:46 Snallygaster, fourteen years in
48:22 Rapid fire with Greg Engert
52:44 Chef Chico Dator on Nobu and landing in DC
55:16 Inside Modan’s dry aging program
58:55 Closing thoughts

Connect with Greg Engert

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sonoffreng