Mashama Bailey and Johno Morisano are opening The Grey on Penn at DC’s JW Marriott near the White House next spring, after Diner Bar by The Grey opens in December at 1331 Pennsylvania Ave., NW. The project puts Bailey’s Southern cooking, Morisano’s dining-room instincts, and Danny Meyer’s Union Square Events on Pennsylvania Avenue.
This is the rare hotel-restaurant news in DC that should matter to locals as much as overnight guests. Diner Bar by The Grey gets the first swing: an all-day Southern restaurant replacing 1331 Bar & Lounge, with breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a late-night bar snack menu. The Grey on Penn follows as the more upscale play next spring. Diner Bar offers the first read on how Bailey translates Savannah to Washington, while The Grey is positioned as the dinner reservation with the bigger culinary ambition.
Should You Book The Grey on Penn?
The Grey should be the more deliberate reservation of the two openings. Morisano has described it as casual fine dining and a bit more adventurous culinarily, which puts it above Diner Bar for a dinner anchored around Bailey’s cooking rather than the all-day rhythm of a lobby-adjacent restaurant. The Grey is positioned as a spring DC weekend reservation. Diner Bar offers the first winter preview.
That matters for DC because The Grey is adapting a Savannah menu for a federal corridor. Bailey has described her cooking as Southern food on the move, and the first Diner Bar details already show a split between Savannah carryovers and DC-specific dishes. The Grey is likely to draw the more reservation-driven crowd, while Diner Bar will handle breakfast, lunch, dinner, cocktails, and late-night snacks.
Inside Diner Bar by The Grey at 1331 Pennsylvania Ave., NW
Diner Bar by The Grey is the first of the two openings. It arrives in December at 1331 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, replacing 1331 Bar & Lounge inside the JW Marriott. The format includes breakfast, lunch, dinner, and late-night bar snacks. The restaurant also serves travelers staying near the White House.
It's a great city, aka Chocolate City back in the day. Really multicultural. Just like a good fit, I think, for us1
Mashama Bailey, Chef
Savannah favorites planned for DC include fried red rice balls, fish and grits with Creole gravy, and buttermilk chess pie. The DC-specific breakfast side brings a barbecued salmon biscuit sandwich, chicken and waffles, and a Southern fry-up with eggs, beef sausage, baked beans, and potatoes. Lunch and dinner add a Miss America sandwich riffing on fried bologna and cheese, plus a burger with comeback sauce, caramelized onions, cheddar, and American cheese on a potato bun.
Diner Bar is the better pick than The Grey for a low-friction meal with a group, especially if your timing is awkward: breakfast meeting, late lunch, pre-theater bar snacks, or a cocktail after a White House-adjacent event. The Grey should be the better fit for a planned dinner once it opens next spring. Diner Bar and The Grey have different formats.
The bar program also gives Diner Bar a reason to work after dark. The restaurant is planned to shift toward a cocktail lounge in the evening, with vintage and house cocktails. Listed drinks include a frozen gin rickey, a classic gin martini with a sidecar, and Double Occupancy, a gin drink with citrus, fennel, and green apple. The crab cake becomes a fritter here, which is the right bar-snack move for DC: easier to share, easier to pair with a drink, and less formal than a plated entrée.
The room is designed to echo The Grey’s bus-terminal roots. The room is planned as an Art Deco space with curves, deep blue tones, round mirrors, and tufted bar tiles made to read like leather from a distance. Windows in the bar area look onto the hotel’s grand atrium, which should make Diner Bar feel more active than a sealed-off hotel lounge. The design and all-day format are central to Diner Bar’s appeal for DC locals wary of Pennsylvania Avenue hotel restaurants.
Why This JW Marriott Partnership Matters
The partnership with Danny Meyer’s Union Square Events raises the stakes. Union Square Events is not a small footnote here; it connects Bailey and Morisano’s Southern restaurant project to one of New York’s most closely watched hospitality operators. In a hotel setting, that partnership should matter most in the parts diners notice quickly: pacing, greeting, bar flow, breakfast execution, and whether the room can handle hotel guests without making locals feel like outsiders.
The JW Marriott location cuts both ways. Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House gives Diner Bar and The Grey a high-visibility address with steady visitor traffic, but the same address can scare off locals who hear hotel dining and think expense-account blandness. Morisano is already pushing against that read. “I don’t want to be sitting in a power scene. That’s not what Mashama and I desire out of our restaurants,” said Johno Morisano.
If Diner Bar fills with only badge lanyards, lobby traffic, and tourists avoiding a cold walk, the project has missed its own stated audience. If locals use it for cocktails, breakfast, and dinner before The Grey opens, the two-restaurant setup starts to make sense. The property owner is putting the dining refresh inside a multi-million-dollar investment, so the restaurant spaces have to do more than service rooms upstairs.
Bailey and Morisano have taken this split-format approach before. In Savannah, The Grey grew from a bus-terminal dining room with a diner-bar lineage; in Austin, Diner Bar and Grey Market translated parts of the group’s Southern lunch-counter and bar identity into the Thompson Austin. DC gets the higher-profile address and the White House-adjacent audience. Diner Bar is positioned for access and flexibility, while The Grey is positioned for a more composed night out.
How to Use the Two-Restaurant Setup
Diner Bar by The Grey is the first opening for winter DC trips. Breakfast is the sleeper meal because the announced dishes include the barbecued salmon biscuit sandwich, chicken and waffles, and the Southern fry-up. Lunch and dinner are better if you want to test the Savannah-to-DC translation through the fried red rice balls, fish and grits with Creole gravy, Miss America sandwich, burger with comeback sauce, or crab cake fritter. Late night is the bar-snack play.
The Grey is planned as the spring dinner opening. The opening is planned after Diner Bar, and the positioning is more upscale. That makes it the better reservation for a client dinner, a weekend built around restaurants, or a local anniversary meal where you want Bailey’s cooking without the all-day traffic of Diner Bar. Diner Bar has the looser format of the two restaurants.
The reservation difficulty will depend on how DC responds once Diner Bar opens in December. Bailey’s résumé will pull food people early: James Beard Awards, including Best Chef: Southeast in 2019 and Outstanding Chef in 2022, a featured-chef turn on the sixth season of Netflix’s Chef’s Table, a guest appearance on season 14 of Top Chef, four years at Prune, and The Grey’s Savannah reputation. The White House-adjacent address adds hotel guests who may book for convenience before they know the chef attached. Diner Bar’s run begins before the spring opening of The Grey (Wikipedia2).
Do not treat this as a substitute for a trip to The Grey in Savannah. That restaurant’s setting in a restored 1938 Greyhound terminal is part of its identity, and DC cannot recreate that origin story inside a JW Marriott. Treat the DC openings as Bailey and Morisano applying the same Southern framework to a different city, with Union Square Events helping manage the hotel scale.
What to Watch Before The Grey on Penn Opens
The next useful signal will be how Diner Bar performs across the full day. A dinner-only restaurant can hide weak points behind a narrow service window; an all-day restaurant has to handle coffee, breakfast, lunch, cocktails, dinner, and late-night food without losing its center. If the crab cake fritter, frozen gin rickey, fried red rice balls, and breakfast sandwiches all feel connected rather than assembled for different audiences, The Grey gets a stronger runway.
Also watch who uses the room. Bailey and Morisano say they want local restaurants, not a power scene, and Pennsylvania Avenue will test that promise immediately. DC has enough expense-account rooms near federal power; it has fewer hotel restaurants with a chef’s identity strong enough to draw diners who are not sleeping upstairs. Diner Bar by The Grey opens the door in December. The Grey is the spring reservation to track if the first act proves locals want Bailey and Morisano on Pennsylvania Avenue.
