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Butterworth’s isn’t the top Republican hangout in D.C., or even the most exclusive one. It is the most famous one.

The bistro is located just a short distance from the Capitol on a block that has long met the appetites of midlevel congressional staff for fast-casual food and dive bars. And in the way that Studio 54 is used as shorthand for the hedonism of 1970s New York or Moulin Rouge is the defining locale of Belle Epoque Paris, Butterworth’s has become the emblem of Washington in Donald Trump’s second term. Gone are the archaic days of 2017, when journalists had to comb Rust Belt diners in Pennsylvania and Ohio, asking patrons how they could support a man so loathed in the reporters’ own social circles. Instead, their biggest hardship to get to Butterworth’s from their Washington bureaus is (potentially) having to change trains on the D.C. Metro.

The result is that it has been featured in major publications ranging from El Pais to Politico and everything in between as reporters, both domestic and particularly foreign, swarm to the restaurant to capture both the MAGA clientele inside and the handful of protesters who sometimes congregate outside blaring sirens in an attempt to discourage people from patronizing the restaurant.

Some of this is cyclical. After all, a media tradition in Washington in every new administration is to try to find the hangouts and secret social life of the staffers who run the city: During Trump’s first term, it was the bar of his eponymous hotel. In the second half of the Obama era, it was La Diplomate, the trendy French restaurant that became a hot spot after its 2013 opening.

Some of this also is because Butterworth’s has made itself a shiny object. The restaurant opened just before the 2024 presidential election. When Trump’s win brought a wave of triumphant MAGA acolytes to Washington to celebrate the former president’s reelection, there were not a surplus of venues particularly excited to host such celebrations. Butterworth’s was booked solid with parties around Trump’s inauguration, and it became easy for regular partygoers to transition into regular customers.

It also helps that the restaurant’s ownership has its own MAGA ties. While its main investor and namesake, Alex Butterworth, is Uber’s chief legal counsel, its frontman is another investor, MAGA media personality Raheem Kassam.

On top of all this, its menu has made the restaurant even more of a shiny object for the media. Defined as “organ meats and organic wines” by Washingtonian, the sense of shock that people could ever even support Donald Trump is only amplified by the fact that Trump supporters could prefer a diet so different than that consumed by the president himself. (Even this aspect is unusual. No one ever thought that Obama voters precisely measured the number of almonds they ate every night or that George H.W. Bush’s supporters uniformly loathed broccoli.)

This particular melding of MAGA and bone marrow makes it the perfect combination to shock the preconceived expectations of readers. And based on the level of coverage from major news outlets, readers sure do like to be shocked.

New York Times Magazine’s Robert Draper found himself marveling at the restaurant’s “upmarket French proletarianism” as it became the center of bustling MAGA scene of some of Trump’s........

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