1230 Restaurant Wants to Make Champagne an Everyday Affair

"I don’t want champagne to be something you have on an anniversary or a birthday," said restaurant co-owner Hakim Hamid. "I want you to have it because it's Wednesday."

Sounds like the right person to open a champagne lounge.

Hamid is one of several partners behind 1230 Restaurant & Champagne Lounge, opening this fall at 1230 9th St. NW. He's enlisted chef Malik Fall, who has worked at such restaurants as Del Posto and Le Bernadin in New York, to design the menu for the restaurant (it will be Fall's first D.C. project).

The restaurant will have more than 100 champagnes and sparkling wines on the menu (Hamid's goal is to have the largest selection in the city). Champagne will make its way into cocktails as well. Expect dishes such as an Earl Grey salmon, grilled branzino, fennel-dusted sweetbreads, and squid ink linguine on the menu. Find it all in a restaurant that used to be a 100-year-old townhouse in Shaw.

A mid-November opening is the goal. "I really want people to know that this is where they should come to celebrate," he said.