Dōgon by Kwame Onwuachi

Dogon by Kwame Onwuachi opened in September 2024 on the Southwest Waterfront, inside what was then the Salamander Washington DC - the former Mandarin Oriental, renamed The Potomac Hotel in August 2026 when it joined Marriott's Autograph Collection. Onwuachi is a James Beard Award winner and Top Chef alum, best known outside DC for Tatiana in New York, and the cooking here is Afro-Caribbean, pulling on Nigerian, Jamaican, Trinidadian and Creole traditions. The restaurant took its name and its framing seriously from the start, and the recognition came fast: since opening it has been named among the best restaurants on the continent by World's 50 Best, the New York Times and Bon Appetit. Time Out has called Onwuachi a master of Afro-Caribbean flavours deserving of the fine-dining treatment.

The drinks deserve their own attention, because the programme was built with Derek Brown - a nationally known bartender, founder of Positive Damage, and one of the most prominent advocates in American bartending for mindful drinking. What that produced is a dedicated Low & No menu structured so that each course can be paired either with a full cocktail or with a spirit-free one, which is a different and better proposition than a short list of alcohol-free options bolted onto the end of a wine pairing. The named zero-proof drinks show the same construction logic as the alcoholic ones. Get Your Flowers is built on Fluere Spiced Cane with lemon, lime, spiced pineapple syrup, grenadine and cherry. The R_(n/a)_G&T uses Fluere Botanical with Giffard Pamplemousse and elderflower, tonic and edible flowers. Astronomy Club and the Sigi Tolo Rickey round out the list, the latter a nod to a star in Dogon cosmology. The programme leans deliberately on Black-owned and non-alcoholic brands and on creative riffs on the classics rather than on an afterthought soda list.

Practical notes. Dinner runs Tuesday through Saturday from 5pm to 10pm, with the restaurant closed Sunday and Monday, and reservations go through Resy. Because it sits inside a hotel on the Southwest Waterfront rather than on a restaurant strip, it is worth planning the trip: the Waterfront Metro station is the closest, and the Wharf's bars are a short walk away if the evening continues.