The One Who Keeps the Book Washington D.C.
How to Get Into Albi in D.C.
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Michael Rafidi has something of a culinary empire in Washington, D.C.
The Palestinian American chef and restaurateur who won a James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef in 2024 has been a mainstay in the culinary scene of the nation’s capital for nearly a decade. Today, he can boast of four restaurants under his belt — Albi, Yellow – All the Kebabs, Yellow, and La’ Shukran — with each attracting hundreds of adoring diners a week.
But if there’s an OG in the Rafidi portfolio, it’s undoubtedly Albi, which earned its first Michelin star in 2022 and is a love letter to Rafidi’s roots in Ramallah, Palestine.
While Albi will celebrate its sixth birthday this year, the restaurant still feels like a breath of fresh air. Sure, that’s due in part to its recent major renovation, but perhaps more so to the earnestness of the food itself.
The very word, Albi, means “my heart” in Arabic, and touches upon chef Rafidi’s family kitchen as a young child. These impactful childhood experiences of his are evident throughout the seasonal menu’s rotating dishes in everything from manti (lamb dumplings served with urfa chili crisp and garlic yogurt) to the mashawi offerings like trout, which is beautifully steamed in grape leaves.
The combination of food, space, and undeniable hospitality has continued to make Albi one of the hottest tickets in town even years after its grand opening. So to help you secure a reservation, we spoke with Willam Simmons, their wine director/director of operations — and the winner of the Washington, D.C. Michelin Guide’s Sommelier of the Year in 2024 — who has some tips, tricks, and recommendations for a reservation at Albi (and La’ Shukran as well).
P.S. For more information on how to get into Albi and more of D.C.’s most sought-after tables, head here.
Resy: How many seats are there at Albi?
William Simmons: Sixty five total.
What’s your favorite seat in the restaurant?
Honestly, there’s not a clear best table or seat, which was part of our objective. One of the reasons we did the renovation was that in the original iteration of Albi, there was a clear hierarchy in tables. Some of them didn’t have a direct line of sight to the kitchen, and it was just a fact that some tables were inarguably better than others. With the renovation, we’ve done away with that and instead created distinct spaces in the restaurant.
The bar room has a different feel than the dining room; tables are bar height and it’s high energy. The dining room is a little more intimate; it’s made up of semi-circular banquettes that run around the outside of the room. Each table is lit with custom made lamp shades, so it kind of feels like each table is its own little world.
When are reservations released?
We release reservations for the entire month at the start of the previous month, so at midnight on June 1, all of July’s opens up.
What are your busiest days?
We’re super consistent. We’ve never aimed to be a restaurant where we do 60 to 80 covers on Tuesday and then make up for it by doing 250 on Saturday. I’d say we stay in the 120 to 135 covers every night of the week. The only real difference comes at the bar — we take some reservations for those seats, but we do hold a lot of it for walk-ins and we run a waitlist. On Fridays and Saturday nights, the waitlist basically starts at the beginning of service at 5 pm. By the time we’re 45 minutes in to service, the waitlist is up to 4 hours.
Is there a busiest time of the night?
Not really. Of course, every restaurant in the world is busiest between 6 to 8 p.m., but we really value consistency. We talk to the team all the time about the fact that the people who eat at 5 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. are paying the exact same amount as the people who sit at 7 p.m.
Do you have any tips for getting a reservation?
We send our reservation confirmations 48 hours ahead of time, and that tends to be when we see a lot of turnover (two days before the reservation date). If you’re on the Resy Notify list, that can be a really good time to get through. When things do open up, be prepared to react.
What are your regulars like?
D.C. has a transient population, so we do see some people who are super consistent for a while and then fade away and then come back again. We like to think that Albi feels like home to those folks. I’ve worked in a lot of restaurants, but can truly say that I’ve never worked anywhere that has the same capacity for emotional resonance with guests. Some of that is what the team has built here, and some of that is what the guests have created. It’s hard to quantify or fully explain, but we try to be cognizant of the fact that there aren’t that many restaurants cooking the kind of food that we do that has achieved the kind of recognition that we have, and we take that trust very seriously.
What’s your favorite dish on the menu?
I’m notoriously bad at picking favorites. When people ask me what my favorite wine is, I always say, “For what?” That said, our sfeeha (spiced lamb pies), have been on the menu since day one, and I’ll never get tired of those. They’re served with toum and lemon that has been rolled in za’atar, it’s amazing. And then the sleeper hit on the menu is always the vegetarian version of whatever we’re cooking up. It changes with the season, so sometimes it’s beets or carrots or English peas. But whatever it is, it’s always so surprising and so good.
You’ve been part of the Albi team since the very beginning. What do you think has been the key to the restaurant’s staying success?
On some level, one of the things that we’ve always tried to do is reinvent ourselves. We’re constantly looking to keep things fluid yet purposeful, and most importantly, fresh. We reexamine ourselves all the time to make sure that we’re pushing to be better than the day we were before. We’ve never sought out the accolades. Instead, we’ve always tried to be the place we want to be, that we’d want to dine at. I think that really comes through in the Albi experience.
I think Albi is so special because it’s fine dining but still extremely familiar and comforting. How have you achieved that?
I’m a realist, I don’t believe in things that I can’t see. So I hesitate when I say that we’ve created soul at Albi, but there’s something special about what we’ve built. I think the key is that the team is really committed to that as a unit. They give everything 100% of their dedication and focus, and they’re so proud. We always try to stress the idea of being welcoming, that is, it’s more important to us to be thoughtful than technically correct. For example, if the rules of fine dining say that you should pour wine from one side of the guest but that breaks up a conversation, we’d rather pour the wine from the other side.
Tell me more about the renovations you did last year.
We did the full renovation in March of last year and really changed everything. The tables, chairs, lights, sound, paint, the front entrance — it was truly a reinvention of the restaurant. Honestly, it started off as a little refresh and then become a full 2.0; that’s the sort of reinvention I was talking about before. We never want to rest on our laurels.
Albi is open Tuesday through Saturday from 5 to 9 p.m.
Lulu Chang is a Texas-bred, D.C. and N.Y.C.-based writer who covers food, travel, lifestyle, and wellness, with a particular knack for spotting the cultural trends behind what and where we eat. Her work has appeared in outlets including USA Today’s 10Best, Eater, InsideHook, Prevention, and more.
