Reverie closed Saturday. Here's what seven years on Cherry Hill Lane meant for Georgetown.
Johnny Spero served his last tasting menu at 3201 Cherry Hill Lane NW on October 4. The Michelin star, the fire, the comeback, the cobblestones, this is how Georgetown lost its only starred restaurant, and what Spero is doing next.
In brief
Reverie closed Saturday. Here's what seven years on Cherry Hill Lane meant for Georgetown.
The alley is quiet now. Cherry Hill Lane NW, a narrow cobblestone slip tucked just south of the C&O Canal, has a blank door at number 3201. Reverie served its final meal there on Saturday, October 4, ending a seven-year run that survived a pandemic, a kitchen fire, an 18-month rebuild, and the general brutality of running a fine-dining tasting room in a neighborhood not known for discovery dining.
Georgetown has no shortage of money. It has always been harder to find ambition there. Reverie was the exception.
How it started
Reverie opened in October 2018, more than ten years in the making for chef Johnny Spero. The room held 32 to 36 seats, set inside a historic brick building on a secluded cobblestone alleyway, and you had to know it existed to find it. That was half the point. Spero had spent his formative years training at Noma in Copenhagen, Mugaritz in Spain, and José Andrés' Minibar in D.C. Reverie was his first wholly independent project, a place to cook the way he wanted, for the number of people he wanted, without compromise.
The restaurant gained recognition for its intimate, multi-course modernist menus, drawing from Nordic, Japanese, and Maryland culinary traditions, initially with a seafood focus before evolving into an entirely meat-free format in 2024. Signature dishes rotated seasonally. One recurring anchor: Anson Mills Carolina Gold rice with crab and egg yolk.
Reverie earned its first Michelin star in the spring of 2022. It was Georgetown's only starred restaurant. Reservations, predictably, became scarce.
Then the fire
Just shy of its four-year anniversary, and on the heels of receiving its first Michelin star, a fire broke out on August 12, 2022, from an unused electrical outlet in the kitchen. The destruction was total. Spero lost not just his newly starred restaurant but his personal belongings he kept there: his book collection, his knives, his recipe notebooks.
"I lost everything," Spero said. "I collapsed on the cobblestone alleyway at 4:30 AM staring into the window."
He did not walk away. Friends launched a GoFundMe to cover employees' final paychecks, and Spero eventually received a substantial enough insurance payout to reopen Reverie in its original historic brick building. After 19 months, Reverie relaunched with a mature new look and a re-concepted open floorplan. He downsized from 70 seats to just 32 and removed his chef's counter.
The rebuilt Reverie held its Michelin star. The cobblestones were still there. So was the door that required a bit of intention to find.
The decision to close
Spero announced in July 2025 that Reverie would close. He gave no specific reason other than deciding to "end this chapter on my own terms." There was no landlord drama telegraphed publicly, no debt spiral disclosed. He posted that September would close with a final tasting menu "that celebrates everything Reverie has stood for: creativity, connection, and a relentless drive to just cook really good f*cking food."
The restaurant's August menu was a $190, 10-course vegetable tasting menu. The final weeks brought back iconic dishes from the restaurant's seven-year journey.
The practical math of a place like Reverie is unforgiving. Operating a prix-fixe-only, 36-seat restaurant in a hidden location, amid rising labor costs and inflation, requires every single seat, every single service, to carry weight. Spero left no hints as to what might be next for him, though he indicated that the Reverie space, on tiny Cherry Hill Lane just south of the C&O Canal, has a future.
Bar Spero, his more casual Basque-inflected project in the Capitol Crossing development near Mt. Vernon Triangle, had already closed in September 2024 after two years of service. Spero was, by last fall, running on a single table.
What Reverie actually was
Spend enough time in Washington and you learn to be skeptical of fine dining rooms that lean on their setting as a selling point. The alley could have been a gimmick. It wasn't. Reverie was, at its best, a restaurant where the location amplified something rather than substituting for it. You walked down a lane you'd never have stumbled onto by accident, pushed open the door, and found a chef cooking with the kind of focus that does not survive distraction.
Not every chef is as doggedly passionate as Spero, who kept his upscale restaurant alive through the pandemic by cooking burgers and pizza. That detail says something. The instinct, when everything collapses, was not to close. It was to feed people differently until things opened back up.
Georgetown has lost restaurants before and will again. What it has lost this time is its only Michelin-starred kitchen, and with it, a 36-seat argument that the neighborhood could sustain something genuinely demanding of its diners.
Where Spero is going
He is not staying in Washington. According to the Seattle Times, Spero shuttered Reverie and moved with his family to Whidbey Island, Washington, in 2025 to get settled and begin menu research. He is set to helm the Inn at Langley's new restaurant, called Passage, when the waterfront property reopens after renovations on May 17. The restaurant will roll out a multicourse tasting menu.
Whidbey Island sits in Puget Sound, about 30 miles north of Seattle. It is, in geography and temperament, about as far from Georgetown as a Michelin-starred chef can land while staying in the continental United States. Whether Spero takes the star with him in spirit or earns a new one on the Pacific is a separate story. What matters now is that the door on Cherry Hill Lane is shut, and the lane itself, if you were to walk it today, gives nothing away.
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CAN I KICK IT? screens New Jack City at the Sylvan Theater, Washington Monument, on Aug. 22. (Courtesy SHAOLIN JAZZ)
The live-cinema series CAN I KICK IT? returns to the National Mall this month with what its producers are calling the "Gangsters on the Mall" chapter of their free outdoor summer run. On Saturday, August 22, the SHAOLIN JAZZ production brings the 1991 crime classic New Jack City to the Sylvan Theater at the Washington Monument for a night of film, music, and community under the DC summer sky.
What sets the event apart is the sound. As the film plays, DJ 2-Tone Jones builds an original score in real time, reimagining one of the most iconic crime movies of the ’90s through hip-hop, soul, funk, and more. It is less a movie screening than a live performance built around the film.
The details:
Film: New Jack City (1991), with a live soundtrack by DJ 2-Tone Jones
When: Saturday, August 22 — seating opens at 7:30 p.m. (bring lawn chairs and blankets); film begins at 8:30 p.m.
Where: Sylvan Theater at the Washington Monument, Independence Ave SW & 15th St NW
A parking note from the organizers: expect road closures and restricted parking east of 14th Street NW due to a separate race event in the District. Roads west of 14th Street NW will be accessible and available for parking.
New Jack City is the second of three screenings in this year’s free CAN I KICK IT? outdoor series, which opened with Black Panther at Skyland Town Center and concludes with Scarface at the Lincoln Memorial on September 5. Produced by the Washington, DC-based multimedia arts company SHAOLIN JAZZ, the series has presented more than 150 live cinematic experiences at venues across the country, from Lincoln Center to SXSW.
"I wanted to be able to tell good stories with substance and remove the ‘ego’ out of the art," said Andrew Huang during a recent interview. Now, he’s building his career at the intersection of discipline, creativity and innovation.
Andrew Huang, founder of New Place Studios. (Courtesy photo)
As a Chinese American, Huang was reared with a deep respect for hard work, consistency and excellence. He describes his childhood as "not so affluent" and later attended college to hone his passion for videography. "In college I tried to do something I loved, which was video, but along the way I knew that I had to find a job. And so I thought, ‘what was the low hanging fruit to get to that stable 9 to 5 job?,’" he stated.
Later in life, Huang found himself working for corporations where his creativity was often limited, eventually leading to burnout. "I worked in a corporation for a long time and there were a lot of missing pieces. I wanted to fill in gaps missing in corporate video production," said Huang.
He later described how his upbringing and a mindset of "survival" led him toward a corporate career. However, his desire for balance and authentic storytelling ultimately pushed him to take the entrepreneurial leap.
"I founded a new place where you can create video and film with ‘substance and style,’" said Huang. His desire for work-life balance and passion for storytelling naturally evolved into a small business based in Virginia. With the launch of New Place Studios, the entrepreneur quickly found himself reconnecting with the values that would become the foundation of everything he creates behind the camera.
Huang said being a business owner has allowed him to first embrace himself. While others may see video as simply capturing moments, he sees it as a way to preserve stories that inspire, connect and leave a lasting imprint.
By combining cinematic visuals with cutting-edge production techniques and a keen understanding of branding, Huang helps organizations and individuals communicate their vision with purpose. He said understanding a client’s "why" serves as the compass for delivering the services they need.
One benefit of working with a small business, he said, is that clients get to see the production process unfold through a micro lens while working with the same faces throughout the entire project. "The work feels personal," said Huang.
Huang does not regret leaving behind the flash-over-substance mentality and corporate hustle culture. That does not mean the Asian American entrepreneur has been without challenges in the industry. "It’s relatively hard to find other Asian American creatives or people who would want to work with me in the DMV," said Huang.
He identifies the industry culture in which everyone is trying to blend in, creatives may fear displaying their Asian identity and some feel pressure to adopt an American corporate persona. He also points to what he describes as a level of gatekeeping within the industry. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration’s 2024 statistics, Asian American and Pacific Islander entrepreneurs own more than 3 million businesses and employ 5.2 million people in the United States.
After tapping into organizations such as SCORE, which offers free small business mentorship, New Place Studios has become a trusted creative partner throughout the DMV (Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia). The company produces a range of creative services, including commercials, corporate branding, documentaries, film, 2D animation, motion graphics and photography.
For Huang, entrepreneurship has become more than a departure from corporate life. It has given him the freedom to create with intention, build meaningful connections and tell stories that go beyond the surface.
The 2026 CAN I KICK IT? outdoor series. Poster courtesy of SHAOLIN JAZZ.
For three Saturdays this summer, some of Washington’s most familiar public spaces will do something they rarely do after dark: fill up with blankets, lawn chairs, and the sound of a movie being scored live, in real time. CAN I KICK IT?, the traveling “live cinema” series produced by the DC-based multimedia arts company SHAOLIN JAZZ, is bringing a free outdoor run to the city — pairing three era-defining films with an original soundtrack performed on the spot by DJ 2-Tone Jones.
The premise is what sets it apart from a normal screening in the park. Rather than simply pressing play, 2-Tone Jones builds a score as the film unfolds, pulling from hip-hop, soul, funk, jazz, rock, electronic music, and sounds from around the world. The result, the organizers say, is less a movie night than a one-time performance — the same film you know, wired to a soundtrack you have never heard and will not hear again. Guest DJs warm up the crowd starting at 7:30 PM before each 8:30 PM screening.
The 2026 outdoor schedule
All three events are free and open to the public.
Saturday, August 8 — Black Panther at Skyland Town Center. A pop-up marketplace and community activities kick off the evening; guest DJs at 7:30 PM, film at 8:30 PM. Marvel’s superhero epic gets a one-night-only live score in Southeast DC.
Saturday, August 22 — New Jack City at the Sylvan Theater, Washington Monument. Seating begins at 7:30 PM; the film starts at 8:30 PM. The 1991 crime drama plays out at the foot of one of the country’s most recognizable landmarks.
Saturday, September 5 — Scarface at the Lincoln Memorial. Seating at 7:30 PM; film at 8:30 PM. The series closes with Brian De Palma’s crime saga against the backdrop of the Memorial, scored live from start to finish.
First up: Black Panther at Skyland Town Center on August 8. Poster courtesy of SHAOLIN JAZZ.
A DC company with a national footprint
SHAOLIN JAZZ describes itself as a Washington-based arts company working at the intersection of music, film, art, and culture, and CAN I KICK IT? is its signature production. According to the organizers, the series has staged more than 150 live cinematic experiences around the country — at performing arts centers, museums, festivals, and cultural institutions including Lincoln Center in New York, SXSW, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Republic Square in Austin, the Tacoma Armory, and The Cary Theater.
“CAN I KICK IT? has always been about creating a shared experience,” said Gerald Watson, co-founder of SHAOLIN JAZZ. “When you combine iconic films with live music in public spaces, something special happens. People aren’t just watching a movie — they’re experiencing it together. That’s what makes these nights so memorable.”
Cinema as a community event
The DC run lands as cities across the country look for new ways to activate public space through arts and culture — and this series is a straightforward pitch for how to do it: take a landmark everyone already knows, add a film everyone has an opinion about, and let a live soundtrack turn the evening into something neighbors experience shoulder to shoulder. Families, film buffs, and music fans are all invited, and admission won’t cost a thing.
The CAN I KICK IT? outdoor series runs August 8, August 22, and September 5. All events are free; check SHAOLIN JAZZ (shaolinjazz.com) for the latest details and any weather updates before heading out.
