Tag Archives: Clydes

Courtesy of WETA

This week WETA is broadcasting an excellent documentary on the history of Washington through the 1960’s. Given that this included the Kennedy era, unsurprisingly Georgetown is prominently featured.

Besides rhapsodizing briefly on the link between the Kennedy mystique and Georgetown, the documentary’s first specific Georgetown reference is to mention the late great Rive Gauche restaurant. The fancy French restaurant on the northwest corner of Wisconsin and M was the standard of fine cuisine in the city in its time. Washington native Maury Povich states in the documentary “We always thought when we were young that you had to have a lot of money to go to Rive Gauche. That was picking at High Cotton.”

The documentary also briefly mentions Clyde’s (which opened in 1963, inspired at least in part by a stray New Yorker left lying around a beatnik hang-out on 31st St.) and Blues Alley. Continue reading →