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Itiyah is the Haitian tasting menu DC has never had, and it's on 11th Street in Shaw

Chef Sebastien Salomon spent years cooking for diplomats and White House officials before opening his 20-seat restaurant at 1416 11th Street NW. The menu works through Haiti's ten regions, one course at a time.

Itiyah is the Haitian tasting menu DC has never had, and it's on 11th Street in Shaw

Walk north on 11th Street NW past the row houses and you will find nothing that announces itself as a destination. No marquee. No valet cone in the road. Itiyah occupies a quiet stretch of Shaw just off Logan Circle, and its 20 seats fill a room that feels more like a private dining parlor than a restaurant. That is deliberate. Chef Sebastien Salomon built this place to hold the full weight of Haitian culinary history, and he didn't need a big room to do it.

What he built instead is something DC has not had before. This 20-seat restaurant in Shaw is the city's first-ever Haitian fine-dining spot. The category isn't a novelty play. Haitian cuisine is old, regionally complex, and almost entirely absent from the American fine-dining conversation. Salomon is here to change that, one multi-course sitting at a time.

Where it came from

When Haitian-born chef Sebastien Salomon moved to DC about a decade ago, he remembered something his mother had told him years before: the nation's capital had no Haitian restaurant. That fact stayed with him through gigs working in the White House, as a resident chef in the Haitian Embassy, and as a journeyman corporate chef.

Salomon moved to the United States when he was 15, started working as a dishwasher, and ultimately graduated from the Art Institute of Philadelphia. He later worked as a sous chef at Gravitas DC, which holds a Michelin star, and competed on the Food Network. The resume is long and deliberately varied, but it all pointed toward one project.

Salomon's culinary thinking is rooted in early memories of his grandmother's kitchen, where dishes were passed down through observation and memory rather than written recipes. A private chef for foreign leaders and prominent families in Haiti, his grandmother shaped his understanding of food's emotional core. She relied entirely on memory and observation. That approach is still visible in the way Salomon builds his menus: nothing academic, nothing detached.

The room and the name

Itiyah takes its name from 'Hayiti,' an antiquated spelling of the nation, written backwards. The restaurant sits at 1416 11th Street NW, on what PoPville described as a largely residential block. Warm terracotta tones evoke the Haitian countryside, while accents of teal nod to Port-au-Prince's historic gingerbread houses: ornate 19th-century wooden homes known for steep roofs, intricate fretwork, and vivid colors, all framed by exposed brick. The interior is doing real conceptual work. Every material choice is a reference.

What's on the table

The format is a multi-course tasting menu that moves through Haiti's geography. The menu draws inspiration from Haiti's ten regions. It opens simply and immediately. A warm bread service sets the tone with coconut milk brioche and housemade focaccia, accompanied by truffle epis butter, roasted pepper-caramelized plantain butter, and cold-pressed epis oil. Epis, for the uninitiated, is the fresh seasoning paste that forms the backbone of many Haitian dishes.

From there the menu builds toward dishes that tell specific stories. Signature preparations include grilled pigeon with caramelized leeks and breadfruit puree, and a smoked-herring raviolo with epis. The smoked-herring dish reimagines Haitian spaghetti as a raviolo. It's comfort food run through fine-dining technique without losing what made the original meaningful.

The menu incorporates breadfruit, a once-marginalized staple of survival, now reclaimed and transformed into elegant purees, composed desserts, and ice creams. Ingredients like corn and yuca, along with dishes like the hominy-and-bean stew tchaka, come directly from the Taino people who lived on Hispaniola before colonization. Salomon isn't softening any of that lineage.

'Haitian cuisine has developed through colonization, slavery, and centuries of poverty, and Salomon wants to acknowledge that history while telling the nation's story through food,' he says. 'The most important thing for me is to highlight every part of our history, whether it's beautiful or ugly, bad or good.'

Where it fits on the DC map

Shaw and the immediate Logan Circle corridor already carry a serious dining identity. Causa, the Michelin-starred Peruvian tasting-menu room, sits nearby. Supra has held down 11th Street's Georgian corner for years. Itiyah joins a small class of high-end Caribbean dining rooms in DC that includes Isla, Dogon, and St. James. But Salomon's focus is narrower than any of them. The name signals a tight national lens, not a broad Caribbean catchall.

Twenty seats is both a feature and a constraint. Reservations will be hard to get. The room has no space for walk-ins or lingering. You go because you planned to go, and you plan early.

Salomon has called Itiyah 'a love letter to every part of Haiti.' The bread course lands on the table. The truffle epis butter softens. The evening begins.

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