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Now Open is a yearlong series celebrating some of 2026’s most exciting new restaurants. Throughout the year, we’ll check in with teams in Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C., to hear what it’s really like behind the scenes of a buzzy opening. Then, we’ll host exclusive meals at these restaurants as part of Dinner Party, presented by Capital One. Read along for challenges, candid reflections, and advice from the proprietors behind some of the country’s hottest new openings.
When chefs Justin Ahn and Alex McCoy opened Alfie’s as a pop-up restaurant in 2016, they didn’t expect the road to a brick-and-mortar location to last nearly a decade. The temporary D.C. location where the duo served northern Thai cuisine to the city’s tight-knit service industry and other regulars was open for just a few months. After that, Ahn and McCoy began operating it as a roving concept all around the world, but now they’re finally returning to D.C. with a permanent venue in Georgetown.
Now the team is settled into a new 25-seat venue tucked in an alley off of Georgetown’s M Street serving Thai dishes made with Mid-Atlantic ingredients and natural wine produced just over the river in Virginia. Still, elements of the pop-up — like its run-and-gun service and chalkboard menu that shifts based on what local purveyors have in season — remain. We caught up with McCoy to learn more about how the team has shifted this scrappy pop-up model into a brick-and-mortar concept while keeping that dynamic energy intact.
Liz Provencher: Why did you decide to launch Alfie’s in a pop-up format?
Alex McCoy: We [already] had a permanent space in Petworth that we were building out [for our brick-and-mortar restaurant]. There was another restaurant space down the street that was slated to be demolished, so we talked to the landlords and they were like, “It’s yours until your space is ready or our project starts.” We thought it was a great opportunity to train our staff, test the food, and work through the menus while our spot was in construction.
It was in a quiet part of town, and we just really wanted to have fun with it, but it ended up becoming this cult sensation. We were packed for months in advance. We had Vogue writing about us. Bon Appetit called it one of the top new restaurants in America. But it was really only about six months total that we had the place open, which is kind of wild.
We closed the pop-up in 2017. That Petworth space didn’t end up working out for us, so we had to look for a new space. In the meantime, we were doing pop-ups in New York, D.C., London. We spent a lot of time overseas and some of the bigger pop-ups were in London with our buddies at Carousel. In that time, we were always looking for a new venue, and it was the time in Europe that really evolved the brand into what it is now.
How did that time on the road shape the concept and operation plan?
After COVID… everyone was struggling to try to figure out how to make restaurants work. With operating and staff costs going up, people were coming up with these creative service styles with [fewer] servers and less table service and more QR codes. The math isn’t mathing, you know?
It seemed to me that the model should be similar to the way things operate in Europe with these little hole-in-the-wall places in Paris and London. Chefs don’t own six or seven restaurants; they’re in there [in one place] with one or two people. Not only was that the heart and soul of what Alfie’s always was, but it felt to me to be the way forward with the brand.
After we did our last pop-up in London, we found this funky little spot in Georgetown, which is a neighborhood that feels the most European of anywhere in D.C. to me. It’s this incredible 25-seat space in an alleyway behind the hustle and bustle of M Street. It’s a little gritty. You step down into the alleyway and you have to dodge cars. It’s a really cool, funky space with a lot of character. So immediately it was like, this is the spot. This encapsulates the vibe and the ambiance and the feeling and the energy of what we’re trying to do.
Have things changed since running the restaurant as a pop-up?
It’s very much still a pop-up mindset. Justin, myself, and Ian, who is our sous chef, we’re 90 percent of the staff at this restaurant.
From a cooking perspective, twenty-five seats is perfect because it gives us this opportunity to really [pore] over small batches of food. If we’re making a curry for the day, we’re [only] making 30 orders. We’re able to look at the menu on a daily basis and assess based on what ingredients come in. If our local fishmonger has five beautiful seabreams that he’s bringing in, we’ll just throw them on the menu because we have that ability to be scrappy and change things up and make adjustments and not have to retrain the staff and everything.
That also plays into Thailand’s market culture, which is the ethos of our brand. We want to challenge ourselves to make dishes utilizing what’s available around here: rockfish, soft shell crab, foraged asparagus from the Eastern Shore, morel mushrooms, things like that.
Does your drink menu also play off of local ingredients?
When you go to France or Italy or another wine-producing region, you go to a bar or restaurant and you’re drinking what was made in the town or right around it. You don’t often see that in D.C., even when Virginia wineries are making spectacular stuff, literally 15 to 20 minutes away by car. The majority of our wines by the glass are from Virginia and we have more than 2,000 local producers by the bottle too.
Our bottles, for the most part, are between $35 and $75. We only have a couple that top that. I think a lot of people go out to eat dreading the check. But I want people to come in and just get lost in the experience and not have to worry that they can’t take a chance on something that they haven’t tried before because it’s too expensive. They don’t have to be thinking about the price of everything they’re eating and drinking while they’re here.
Alfie’s also has a wine club. How does that work?
Alfie’s has always [drawn] a lot of regulars, and we’ve always tried to facilitate this vibe of being your other living room. If you love wine, we want this to be a place that you want to spend a lot of your time and cater that a little bit more. Our wine club has 19 spots, and for a monthly fee of $150, you basically get a rack of your own [in the restaurant]. If you have a great collection at home, you can bring it in. Or if you have specific tastes and things that you enjoy when you come here, we can curate the wine locker for you so you can actually purchase wine at a steep discount that we don’t have on the list. If there are special selections that are too expensive for us to put on the menu, we can get those for you, and you’ll pay 50% less than standard restaurant prices.
After releasing the first few days of reservations, you immediately had 700 bookings. Were you expecting that kind of reception?
I wouldn’t say I expected anything. [But] I was hoping for it, and I kind of felt it. Sometimes in this industry, you can feel when something is gonna hit. Leading up to [opening] and seeing some of the interest on social media, it seemed like it was gonna go that route so we were trying to plan for it.
Alfie’s scratches an itch that [D.C. diners] haven’t been able to scratch at least since 2020. The city is getting burnt out [by] small businesses being replaced by big corporate restaurant group spots, and we’re very much the antithesis of that. You walk in, and Justin and I are in the kitchen, so we can say hi to you and run food to the table. I think it’s a vibe that D.C. hasn’t had in years.