What Does MAGA Taste Like?

“Where are all the red hats — am I going to run into Steve Bannon?” asked one of my guests as we peered around the room at Butterworth’s, the buzzy, much-publicized MAGA hangout up on Capitol Hill. His voice was urgent, even kind of excited, and he spoke in a loud, hissing whisper, like an eager tourist out on safari for the first time waiting for the lions to arrive. It was the kind of tone that’s rarely heard around the placid, generally blasé Washington, D.C., restaurant scene, or at least I’d rarely heard it during my formative years growing up around the city, when I used to make regular visits to places like Duke Zeibert’s (a famous sports hangout), or the Yenching Palace on Connecticut Avenue (a Chinese restaurant favored by Henry Kissinger and assorted intelligence spooks), or a mercifully defunct downtown steakhouse called Blackie’s House of Beef, where J. Edgar Hoover and his cronies used to sit in the darkened banquets sipping their great fishbowl-size martinis.