Johnny Spero on rebuilding Reverie

In August 2022, an electrical fire sparked in the dish room of Washington DC’s one-Michelin-starred Reverie, engulfing it. Nothing of chef Johnny Spero’s restaurant was salvageable. After an 18-month-long closure, during which Spero took Reverie on the road and all over the world, the restaurant is back, completely redesigned and rebuilt in the same tucked away corner of Georgetown, down a cobblestone alley.

I dined at the old Reverie, which felt bright and evocative of a seaside restaurant, back in 2019. There was an exquisite grilled fish collar, bowls of mussels swimming with silken tofu, toast laden with ikura, and a whole sea urchin, simply opened for service, with little else done to it. It was casually refined.

The new Reverie is sleek and moody. When I emerged after its tasting menu, I had lost my sense of direction, even though I live in Georgetown, just a few streets away. In the darkness, I had no idea where I was, like I had stepped into a different reality. The dishes at Reverie were sculptural and precious, laden with layers of unacknowledged technique. It was a meal that haunted me, that I couldn’t stop thinking about for weeks afterwards, so I sat down with Spero to dig into the chasm between the two Reveries, to try to understand how and why he reimagined Reverie in the same space after the fire.

KA: You’ve cooked all over the world, why did you settle upon DC?

JS: I’ve been in and out of the city since 2007 and am originally from Baltimore. DC was the city I cut my teeth on. I staged at Noma like everyone else when I was in my early 20s. I worked at Mugaritz and was the head chef of Jose Andres’ Minibar from 2013 to 2015. The best thing I ever did was leave DC, to get a global perspective, and then come back to continue to push the scene here.

KA: But why the Georgetown neighborhood?

JS: DC has grown a lot but I think Georgetown, more than any other part of the city, has stayed the same, for better or worse. Nothing here is getting torn down and rebuilt. The restaurants around us, like Philomela (an Italian-American red sauce joint), have been here since the [19]70s or 80s. They’ve been in existence since before I was alive. Georgetown has a reputation of cutting itself off from the rest of DC, full of beautiful houses I could never afford. Georgetown has always felt like an island, but being here for six years, I have seen a shift. There’s been an influx of new dining, a restoration project for the canal. When I said I was going to open in Georgetown, people were surprised. But it was more about the space than anything else. I moved back to DC from Spain at the end of 2015 knowing I wanted to open a restaurant and I wanted it to have history. When I walked down the historic cobblestone to a half demo-ed office space which was never meant to be a restaurant, I knew it was it. I knew this was going to be Reverie, like I was lost in a daydream. Everybody told me not to do this. But I knew I could make it mine. I enjoy the challenge of making something work to a fault.

KA: What was it like in the beginning? 

JS: We started off with a different format. We had a tasting menu, à la carte menu, and the bar and we were trying to be something for everybody. We tried to make everyone happy, and not so much myself. But we were an escape, you could come down and hang out with us, let us talk to you. We opened October 6th and then October 16th, my daughter was born, so we had 10 days to train our staff and we jumped in. I had partners in the beginning, but after Covid, we split off because we all had different goals. I wanted Reverie to open, then transition into a tasting menu restaurant. Covid set us back but pushed us in that direction. During Covid, we did burgers and ducks to keep the doors open. It was me and one cook for the longest time. We cooked and packed all the food. I was the delivery driver. And it connected me to the neighborhood. Guests were like, oh yeah, we ordered burgers from you and now we’re sitting here having a completely seafood-based tasting menu, and both are great. That really spoke to me. I’m trashy but classy and that has always been my approach.

KA: But what is up with Georgetown and all these fires? And what happened to Reverie? (For context, the restaurant my husband works in is in Georgetown and was closed for many months due to a fire, and the same has happened to several others in this small neighborhood).

JS: The day that we got the call was August 11th. I left the restaurant and we had a freak electrical fire. It was nothing we had done. I’m still very much f-ed up from that experience. I got there the morning after at 4.30am, and the restaurant was gone, destroyed in a matter of four hours. I lost everything. An outlet in our dishpit sparked and took out the entire restaurant.

We got a star in May that year. I finally thought I would be able to pay myself and pay back some of my investors. I didn’t pay myself during Covid. There was never a moment I had any room to breathe. And yes, this is the third recent fire in Georgetown.

I gave myself a day to mourn and then was like well, I have a family, a staff, I can’t just give up. This is my only thing. I don’t think I ever tried walking away from it. I think some people were surprised that I came back and came back in the same space. But there was never a moment I thought I’m not going to rebuild it.

The day after the fire, I already sketched out Minibar residency and Reverie on the Road dinners all over the world. We had to keep moving. If I lose the momentum I’ll never start back up again.

KA: How does Reverie 2.0 differ from the original Reverie in terms of the food? Have any of the dishes remained?

JS: Well there’s no more burger on the menu, we are 100% seafood. My style of cooking has always veered towards the ocean. We decided when reopening that we were going to be all seafood, no more duck supplements. We still have dairy and eggs but now we have cycled out all beef and pork gelatin.

We have also moved in a direction of being more refined. Our food is much more focused than it was before. The only thing that survived the fire was our Carolina Gold rice dish. We always had rice in some form or another on the menu. Porridge with egg yolk fudge with a rotating seafood ingredient. It’s a very comforting dish. It’s not meant to be a modernist take on congee or risotto. And also a dish where we take a young coconut, saw the top off, reserve the water, fill it with koshihikari rice, seal it back up and roast it in fire until the rice is cooked. It’s smoky and sweet, caramelized from the coconut and served with a marshmallow made with curry leaf.

KA: Other than those rice dishes, it’s a completely different menu.

JS: We use the same ingredients. Mackerel and lobster, and we just got some spiny lobster in. We bob and weave with whatever the ocean gives us. You can tell that it comes from the same place but we cleaned it up. The kitchen still delivers all the food. We never really had FOH service, but now we have a front of house team that truly focuses on the guest experience. That’s what we were missing before. I loved that version of the restaurant, but I wanted more. We were spread really thin. Food is the easiest part of what we do.

I go through moments where I want to tear the whole restaurant apart and start anew. Even from when you came in a couple weeks ago, we’ve already changed a lot of stuff. I get frustrated with nobody else other than myself. I feel like we’re in a good place, creatively pushing to present new ingredients, and have fun. We change so much more frequently now. If I’m not having fun, there’s no sense in doing this.