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The Tail Up Goat team's next act is cheaper, calmer, and somehow better

Jon Sybert and Jill Tyler closed their Michelin-starred Adams Morgan restaurant in December, took a breath, and reopened in the same room with a completely different idea about what a great DC dinner can look like.

The Tail Up Goat team's next act is cheaper, calmer, and somehow better

There's a bar that used to run along the left wall of 1827 Adams Mill Road NW. It was a good bar - the kind you perched at for a glass of something orange and something salty while you waited on a table. It's gone now. In its place: a long ordering rail where, on any given Tuesday evening, you walk up, tell a cheerful person in an apron what sounds good, hand over a card, and go sit down. That's the whole transaction. No hovering server. No four-course tasting logic. No ceremony at all.

This is Rye Bunny, and it is one of the more quietly radical things to happen in DC dining this year.

Jon Sybert and Jill Tyler - the husband-and-wife team who spent a decade running the Michelin-starred Tail Up Goat in this very space - closed that restaurant on December 20, 2025. The explanation was frank. "A lack of financial sustainability for the restaurant's business model," as Sybert put it. They had made something beloved. Beloved didn't pay the rent the way it used to.

After a decade at Tail Up Goat, they weren't sure whether they wanted to stay in DC or even in restaurants. "We really wanted to push that reset button," Sybert told Washingtonian. They recognized they'd changed a lot in 10 years, as had the city and the business. "We knew what we were doing wasn't working the same way it did. I don't want to be a business owner to run a nonprofit, and that's kind of what Tail Up Goat was quickly becoming," Tyler said.

They stayed. Same address. Different idea entirely.

What changed, and why it matters

Rye Bunny is a hospitality-driven counter-service restaurant featuring seasonal fare from Tyler and Sybert, sourcing its food thoughtfully and locally and presenting it "with minimal fuss." The 84-seat dining room keeps things intimate, with quilts lining the space, patchwork tile underfoot, and string lights overhead, while the former bar has been rebuilt into the ordering rail that anchors the new format.

The counter service isn't a downgrade. Guests place their orders at the rail, then staff circulate through the room with refills and add-ons instead of hovering tableside all night. It's a small but real distinction. You feel looked after without feeling managed.

The economics underneath are the bigger story. Every team member earns at least full minimum wage - not the sub-minimum tip credit common in restaurants - participates in a shared tip pool, and receives fully covered health care and paid time off for full-time staff. In a city where restaurant workers routinely piece together a living from tip fluctuations and no benefits, that's not a footnote. It's the whole premise. When they imagined Rye Bunny, they kept returning to one word: sustainable.

A filing from the DC Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration shows the ABC Board approved transferring the license to Rye Bunny LLC on December 10, 2025. The same action amended the previous settlement to allow a summer garden with seating for up to 16 people, open through 10 PM. Come warm weather, there's a small outdoor option along the Lanier Place side of the building - not enormous, but a real asset on Adams Mill Road in August.

The food

Chef Sybert's menu features hyper-seasonal, craveable dishes with unexpected twists, shaped by relationships with Mid-Atlantic farmers and purveyors he's cultivated over two decades. The comfort-food menu runs 10 to 15 dishes at any time. It changes weekly. That means the exact plate you read about may not be there when you arrive, which is either thrilling or annoying depending on your temperament.

Early dishes have included fennel focaccia with housemade ricotta and honey-poached beets, tagliatelle Bolognese, wild-greens-stuffed ravioli, and shareable mains like fried chicken and chermoula-sauced rockfish. The Washingtonian review, published in July, flagged anchovy toast, frico, pork croquette, halibut with asparagus, steak, fried chicken, chocolate angel-food cake, and cardamom crème brûlée as best dishes - a list that spans snack-counter pleasure and serious technique in about equal measure.

On the anchovy toast specifically, Sybert's lightly toasted spears of perfectly pillowy milk bread, slathered with blood-orange jam and draped with a long slender fish, were, in his hands, "as harmonious as a Fleet Foxes ballad," per Ann Limpert's review. That dish alone is reason enough to go once. The frico - montasio cheese and Kennebec potatoes with crème fraîche - is $16 and will occupy your mind for days afterward.

Share plates run $12 to $46. Wine by the glass starts at $12. The wine program is led by Audrey Dowling, a longtime DC sommelier and Tyler-Sybert collaborator, whose list is "meant to be both accessible and exciting, a showcase of the classics and an introduction to more modern, esoteric makers."

Getting in

Walk-ins take priority, with two tables per night available via OpenTable. The restaurant is open Tuesday through Thursday from 5:30 to 9 PM and Friday through Saturday from 5 to 9 PM. Sunday and Monday: closed. No lunch service. They are primarily a walk-in restaurant, but do accept two reservations per evening via OpenTable.

Those two nightly reservations go to charity partners - organizations chosen by the team - who receive the table to use however they see fit. It's a small-scale, consistent community commitment that doesn't require a gala or a press release.

And the name. Rye Bunny is named after Jill and Jon's two rescue dogs, Charlie and Rigel. Come in more than once and you're pretty much guaranteed to be shown a picture of them by one of the owners. "Adopt, don't shop" is printed right on the FAQ page of their website. That, too, is the restaurant in miniature: a place where the values aren't decoration, they're operating procedure.

There is no reservations-required mystique here, no tasting menu to navigate, no sommelier performing a ceremony over your table. Just a quiet, quilt-lined room in Adams Morgan, a weekly menu built around whatever's good right now, and anchovy toast that converts skeptics.

Sources

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