Some chefs build a restaurant around a signature dish. Mashama Bailey has built a career around a bigger idea: food is always moving. It travels with people, changes with geography, absorbs new influences, and carries memory into rooms that have never smelled quite like home.
Now Bailey and business partner Johno Morisano are taking that philosophy to Washington, D.C., with two new concepts planned for the JW Marriott Washington, DC. First comes Diner Bar by The Grey, an all-day restaurant expected to open in December 2026 at 1331 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. A second, more upscale restaurant, The Grey on Penn, is expected to follow in spring 2027.
For anyone who has followed the story of The Grey in Savannah, the expansion is more than another hotel restaurant announcement. It is a new chapter for a chef whose cooking has made the history and complexity of Southern food feel vivid, contemporary, and gloriously alive.
Southern food is not standing still
Bailey’s relationship with Southern cooking is personal and layered. Her mother is from the South; Bailey herself is from New York City, where she developed her professional foundation and worked at Gabrielle Hamilton’s celebrated restaurant Prune. She later became known for The Grey, the Savannah restaurant she opened with Morisano in a restored Greyhound bus terminal.
That story matters. The Grey’s cooking has never been interested in treating Southern cuisine as a fixed collection of dishes or a sentimental postcard. It understands the South as a place shaped by movement, trade, migration, and the cultural contributions of African Americans. The food reflects that history without becoming trapped in a museum case.
Bailey has described her approach as “Southern food on the move.” It is a useful phrase because it resists the idea that tradition must remain unchanged to be authentic. A cuisine can honor its roots and still make room for new ingredients, new audiences, and new expressions.
A D.C. menu with a point of view
Diner Bar is planned as a 100-seat, all-day restaurant serving breakfast, lunch, dinner, and late-night bar snacks. The menu is expected to include dishes familiar to Bailey’s repertoire alongside items developed for the capital. Reported breakfast offerings include a barbecue smoked-salmon biscuit sandwich, chicken and waffles, and a Southern fry-up with eggs, beef sausage, baked beans, and potatoes.
Lunch and dinner are expected to bring a “Miss America” sandwich—a playful take on fried bologna and cheese—and a burger with comeback sauce, caramelized onions, cheddar and American cheeses on a potato bun. Bailey is also giving Washington’s beloved crab cake a different form: a crab fritter designed for the bar-snack menu.
There are Savannah favorites in the mix as well, including fried red rice balls, fish and grits with Creole gravy, and buttermilk chess pie. The menu sounds less like a greatest-hits collection than a conversation between places. That is a distinction worth making. A restaurant that simply exports a familiar menu can become a replica. A restaurant that listens to its new city has a chance to become part of it.
The city is part of the recipe
Washington is a city with its own food memory and its own complicated relationship to Southern identity. Its history is shaped by migration from the South, Black entrepreneurship, neighborhood institutions, political power, and the everyday rituals of people who live and work around the capital. The nickname “Chocolate City” is not merely a nostalgic slogan; it speaks to a cultural legacy that still shapes the city’s sense of itself.
For Bailey, the opportunity is to cook in a place where those histories are present without assuming that one menu can speak for everyone. The most interesting restaurant openings are not those that arrive with a claim to have discovered a city. They are the ones that arrive curious, prepared to learn, and confident enough in their own point of view to make something new.
There is also something appealing about the all-day format. A restaurant that moves from breakfast to lunch to dinner and late-night snacks becomes part of a city’s rhythm. It can be a place for a first coffee, a working lunch, a family dinner, or one last drink after the evening has gone on longer than expected. The room changes as the day changes.
Beyond the opening-night photograph
Restaurant openings are often reported as if the ribbon-cutting were the whole story. But the real test comes later: whether a neighborhood returns, whether a menu develops a life of its own, whether the staff and guests create rituals that cannot be manufactured by a launch campaign.
Bailey’s work invites a more interesting standard. Can a restaurant tell a story without reducing it to a slogan? Can it make the familiar taste newly considered? Can it carry the influence of one place into another without pretending those places are interchangeable?
The Grey on Penn, planned for spring 2027, is described as a more adventurous, casual-fine-dining concept. Details are still developing, so the sensible approach is to wait for the menu and opening announcement rather than invent a preview. For now, Diner Bar is the first invitation—and its reported menu offers plenty to think about.
What makes Bailey’s next chapter compelling is not simply that a celebrated Savannah chef is opening in Washington. It is that her work continues to ask what Southern food can become when it is allowed to travel, adapt, and remember where it came from. The answer, if the kitchen delivers, may be found somewhere between a biscuit sandwich, a crab fritter, and the first bite of something that tastes familiar but not quite like anything you have had before.
Opening watch: Diner Bar by The Grey, JW Marriott Washington, DC, 1331 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, expected December 2026. The Grey on Penn is expected in spring 2027. Timing and menu details remain subject to change.
Sources: Food & Wine; Washington Business Journal.
QUESTION OF THE DAY
What makes a Southern dish feel authentic to you: the recipe, the memory, the people, or the place where it is served?
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