St. Anselm

Wood, Fire, and the Northeast Corridor

The stretch of Northeast D.C. around the Union Market district has spent the better part of a decade pulling serious restaurant energy away from the city's traditional power-dining corridors. Where Penn Quarter once held a near-monopoly on destination dining, the blocks around 5th Street NE now host a different kind of room: less formal, more ingredient-driven, with kitchens that tend to let heat and smoke do the argumentative work. St. Anselm, at 1250 5th Street NE, belongs squarely to that shift. Approaching the building, the register you pick up is charcoal and woodsmoke before you're through the door, the kitchen's principal tools announce themselves in the air outside.

Inside, the room reads working rather than decorative. The aesthetic cues are spare: wood, exposed structure, the kind of lighting that suggests the fire itself is doing some of the illuminating. It is the kind of space that American steakhouse culture has been quietly moving toward as the genre reconsiders the old-guard mahogany-and-white-linen model, a format that still defines rooms like A Cut in Taipei or, at its most theatrical, Capa in Orlando. St. Anselm represents the counter-argument: that the steakhouse format works better when stripped of ceremony and rebuilt around the actual process of cooking over fire.

The Kitchen and the Collaboration Behind It

American fire-cooking has developed a reasonably codified set of conventions, wood selection, temperature staging, the relationship between char and internal temperature, and the better kitchens in this category treat those conventions as a technical discipline rather than a rustic gesture. Chef Ryan Payne runs the kitchen at St. Anselm, working within a program that chef Marjorie Meek-Bradley helped establish. That kind of layered kitchen development, where an original culinary direction persists across chef transitions, tends to produce more coherent menus than single-author programs that reset with each change in personnel.

The editorial angle that matters here, though, is less about any single kitchen figure than about how the whole team operates as a system. General Manager Kelsey Thacker holds the front-of-house, and the wine operation is a two-person sommelier structure: Wine Director Ian Cruz and Sommelier Jonathan Stow, alongside Eli Pine. That staffing model, a dedicated wine director supported by named sommeliers, in a room priced at the casual mid-range, reflects a deliberate positioning decision. The operators, Stephen Starr and Joe Carroll, have built a reputation for restaurants where floor execution punches above its price tier. At St. Anselm, the wine program is the clearest evidence of that philosophy in practice.

D.C.'s dining scene has increasingly bifurcated between high-concept tasting-menu formats, places like Jônt and minibar at the technical end, or Albi and Causa at the ingredient-focused end, and casual rooms that trade on hospitality and accessibility. St. Anselm operates in the latter category but with a wine program that belongs in a different conversation entirely. A list of 1,100 selections backed by an inventory of 3,985 bottles is not typical infrastructure for a casual steakhouse. For comparison, the focused vegetable-driven program at Oyster Oyster takes an opposite tack, short list, high intentionality. St. Anselm's approach is accumulation: depth across California, Italy, France, and Madeira, with corkage set at $45 for guests who arrive with something specific in mind.

A Wine List That Earns Its Own Discussion

The geographic spread of the wine program, California, Italy, France, Madeira, mirrors the range of what works alongside fire-cooked protein and char-heavy cooking. California's structure-forward Cabernets and Zinfandels are an obvious fit. Italian reds, particularly those with tannin grip and acidity, hold against fat and smoke better than most alternatives. The French inclusions presumably lean toward Rhône and Burgundy given the cuisine style, though the Madeira category is the more telling signal: a steakhouse that runs serious Madeira is one where the wine team has an actual opinion about the beverage program rather than a checklist.

The pricing tier sits at the middle mark, described as offering a range rather than defaulting to either the sub-$50 or the $100-plus end. A 1,100-selection list at mid-range markup with nearly 4,000 bottles in inventory suggests the program is built for real-world use rather than as a trophy display. The $45 corkage reflects the same pragmatism: high enough to discourage casual BYOB economics, reasonable enough not to alienate guests with a specific bottle in mind. That balance is harder to strike than it looks, and front-of-house teams that manage it well tend to get repeat business from the kind of guests who treat wine as a reason to return.

Recognition and Where It Sits in the Category

Opinionated About Dining, the crowd-sourced critical guide with a particularly strong signal for casual American dining, has tracked St. Anselm consistently. The restaurant entered OAD's Casual North America list as a recommendation in 2023, moved to a ranked position of #111 that same year, adjusted to #642 in 2024, and returned strongly to #248 in 2025. That kind of variance in OAD rankings is not unusual for casual rooms, the guide's scoring reflects recency and visit volume, but the trajectory across three active years confirms the restaurant as a sustained participant in the ranked tier rather than a one-cycle appearance.

Within the D.C. steakhouse category, that combination of OAD recognition and wine program scale is a differentiator. The city has no shortage of formal steakhouse options in the traditional mode, but casual rooms with serious cellar depth are rarer. For readers building a D.C. dining itinerary across multiple formats, St. Anselm occupies a specific gap: the fire-driven, wine-serious casual dinner that the heavier tasting-menu rooms don't offer. See our full Washington, D.C. restaurants guide for the broader picture, and our guides to D.C. hotels, bars, wineries, and experiences for planning context. Comparable fire-driven American programs at a national level include Lazy Bear in San Francisco, though that room operates at a significantly higher price tier and in a tasting-menu format. The casual American fire-cooking category that St. Anselm inhabits sits at the opposite end of the formality spectrum from rooms like Le Bernardin in New York, Alinea in Chicago, The French Laundry in Napa, Single Thread in Healdsburg, or Emeril's in New Orleans.