Michael Mina's Bourbon Steak, the Place to Be for D.C.'s Power Players and Hollywood Celebrities

In the year since celebrity chef and restaurateur Michael Mina opened Bourbon Steak, the restaurant has become one of the see-and-be-seen places in Washington, D.C. Bourbon Steak is always packed with those who want to see celebrities in town, glad-hand high-ranking officials and be written about by reporters.

Located on the lobby floor of the Four Seasons hotel in Georgetown, Bourbon Steak has been on a parallel course with President Obama's making Washington cool and hip and young.

Chatting with me recently after the lunch rush, Mina recalls his shock one day during Obama's inauguration last January: "I look around the room at lunch and there's Oprah, Denzel Washington, Cher, Samuel L. Jackson, Steven Spielberg."

"All the tickets were VIP tickets," he says, using restaurant lingo for the orders coming from tables where VIPs sit -- tables that get special attention and visits from the chef. "So I just tore up the VIP tickets and went to every table. . . . To kick all this off with that inauguration energy and the energy of the city created a great momentum."

Since opening on Dec. 19, 2008, Bourbon Steak has attracted such Hollywood celebrities as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Owen Wilson, Julie Andrews, Cuba Gooding Jr., Jane Seymour, Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Powerful politicos dining on what Mina calls an "extensive but simple menu" include White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, former VP Al Gore and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

Wearing his white chef's uniform, Mina was younger than I expected, endearingly humble and surprisingly as detail-oriented about the business of operating a restaurant as he is about the food.

Before the political landscape in D.C. changed from conservative Republicans to free-wheeling Democrats, Mina saw an opportunity to put his latest restaurant in popular Georgetown and use a hotel as a base with built-in diners.

For many years, the Four Seasons bar has been the scene of many celebrity sightings because the hotel is a favorite of the Hollywood set (political or business visitors tend to stay in hotels closer to the White House or Capitol Hill).

But the restaurant in the hotel -- Seasons -- was out of the central hub and on a lower level, and people-watching was made difficult by the twisted layout of tables. So Mina wanted to remake the hotel layout to create a hip, modern and vibrant bar and restaurant.

Though opening a restaurant at the same time as a Wall Street collapse and the start of an economic free fall would normally be too risky, Mina went ahead with his plans because his two-part business model remained intact.

First, the hotel remodeled extensively, bringing the restaurant to the lobby floor to attract incoming guests and to join it with the bar, which had a "built-in . . . business that created a charged energy to the restaurant."

Second, he says he decided to go ahead because the Four Seasons address is "great," referring to the Georgetown neighborhood where many wealthy Washingtonians live; it's also on the edge of town but convenient for those working in the heart of the city. (Mina has a soft spot for the Four Season chain because his first job 20 years ago was as a pastry chef at the Four Seasons in San Francisco.)

He also correctly assessed that Washingtonians "know good food," as evidenced by the number of successful restaurants in the city, indicating that the "clientele would support great chefs."

As a chef first, restaurateur second, he put even more thought into the food served at Bourbon Steak. He hired head chef David Varley to help oversee what is, primarily, a great steak restaurant, with a unique style of slow-poaching the beef in butter and then cooking it over wood coals. (Surprisingly, though, people order fish as often as steak for lunch and dinner, he reports.) Prices range from $12 to $32 for lunch and $14 to $48 for dinner.

In designing the space, Mina says he "broke the mold" from the old Seasons restaurant by making Bourbon Steak "high-energy, less formal, more modern." He took away the starched white table clothes, added modern but a warm décor, opened up part of the wall linking the bar to the dining area and opened the space so patrons could view the whole room.

No detail was too small for Mina to consider. He made the menu one page and minimalist. He chose the brown leather for the ceiling of the bar. He chose where to put the carpets that are carefully placed on the hardwood floors. The "old world tavern" uniforms worn by the wait staff were also hand-picked by Mina.

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