Uniontown Bar and Grill

A long-awaited Anacostia nightspot
By Fritz Hahn
Friday, May 20, 2011

Talk to the people who are sipping colorful rum cocktails or snacking on crab balls and crispy catfish pieces at Uniontown Bar & Grill after work and you hear the relief in their voices: Finally, finally, there is a bar in Anacostia besides Player's Lounge. And it is good.

"I've lived in Southeast all my life, and we've never had an establishment like this," says May Wood, 40, who works at Washington Hospital Center. "When you come off work, you come in here and it's so comfortable. It's wonderful that you can just have dinner in a nice atmosphere in the neighborhood."

She and her 21-year-old daughter, Laquata Lynch, who also works at Washington Hospital Center, are enjoying happy hour on a Thursday afternoon, and they've got two of the best seats in the house, right by the front door. Sunlight streams through the tall glass windows facing west toward Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and the river, illuminating the wood tables, buttery yellow walls and the chairs filled with laughing, smiling people.

Lynch recently purchased a condo nearby, but she hadn't heard about Uniontown until a co-worker mentioned it. "It's so calm and mellow. I'm so surprised that I have somewhere I can walk to in the neighborhood," Lynch says.

"Neighborhood" comes up again and again here in conversations with the customers at the next bar stool, and it's not just because that's where they're from. It's the feeling that comes from the friendly, chatty staff, the way customers greet other folks walking through the door, and how it's not uncommon to find three generations of a family sitting together around a table on one side of the room while co-workers sip Patron margaritas ($5 between 4 and 7 p.m. on Mondays) at happy hour at the bar.

The scene: As a one-room corner bar with a small kitchen, Uniontown is not going to set the culinary world on fire, but it's good at what it does. Happy hour brings crowds for $5 baskets of crispy, panko-coated pieces of catfish, or small plates of bite-size broiled crab balls, which are tasty without a lot of filler, but for $6.95, I should get more than four. The selection of bottled beers is small and ho-hum (Heineken, Budweiser, Corona, etc.), but they're only $3. Spend more time checking out the "Hip Sip" cocktail menu, which seems designed for the ladies (berry vodkas and fruit juice were the first clue). The Bubble Berry is a champagne cocktail made with Bacardi's sweet, vaguely citrusy Dragon Berry rum and garnished with seasonal berries. For dessert, there's the Blueberry Cobbler, which stars both vanilla and blueberry vodkas and fresh blueberry juice. Too much? The margaritas are solid and strong, and the bar staff agilely crafts strong drinks on request if you don't find anything on the list.

As for happy hour, Tuesday's karaoke party would make a good after-work gathering since it begins and ends on the early side: The first singer is on around 6 p.m. and it winds up by 9, which is when the bar closes on weeknights.

Given the good food and drink and the dearth of competition in the neighborhood, it's no surprise that the crush around the bar is serious on Thursdays and Fridays and that the wait for tables or a barstool is lengthy - to say nothing of how long it can take for your food to arrive. But these kinks are also proof that there's a market for entertainment on historic Anacostia's main strip.

Uniontown has the makings of a local success story: It's owned by Natasha Dasher, a fifth-generation Washingtonian. A third of the bar's employees are from Ward 8, which has the highest unemployment in the city.

"Bloom where you're planted!" says Judy Dean, a specialist at the International Trade Commission who lives three blocks away and proudly boasts that four generations of her family live in Anacostia. "It's a great attraction for the neighborhood. It will bring other businesses to the community.

Dean says she has also noticed an increase in diversity at the bar and on the streets outside. "I'm really pleased that all walks of life are coming here and making a contribution," she says. "Change has come to Anacostia!"

Need to know: Uniontown is a one-room operation for now, but Dasher is planning to give it a second-story addition that will be "more of a lounge" as well as a rooftop terrace. If all goes well, she says, it will open this summer.

Nice to know: In the 1850s, parts of Anacostia were developed as housing for the soldiers who worked at the Navy Yard across the Potomac. The neighborhood was officially called Uniontown, but the name didn't stick.