King Street at Table

King Street runs its cobbled mile from the Potomac to the metro, and the mile eats at every register the republic has invented, a tavern that has served dinners since the seventeen eighties, its game pies and peanut soup still on the card, chef-driven rooms in the old shipping houses, oyster bars on the rebuilt waterfront, and a bakery-and-coffee culture that makes the morning half of the street as good as the evening half. As an eating street it is the capital region's most complete, and it requires no car, no plan, and no mercy.

The historic anchor sets the tone, the great tavern by the market square where the founders actually dined, its museum rooms upstairs and its working dining rooms below serving the eighteenth century's menu with a straight face, candlelight included, and the correct visit books the colonial dinner once, for the theater and the syllabub, and takes the modern street for the balance. The lower blocks toward the water run the newer serious rooms, seafood and Franco-American confidence, and the waterfront itself, per the town's pieces in these pages, supplies the oysters and the river light.

The daytime street holds its own, the farmers market on the square, running continuously since the seventeen fifties by the town's proud accounting, handling Saturday mornings, the bakeries and cheesemongers of the middle blocks provisioning the towpath picnics, and the ice cream institutions managing the afternoon negotiations of every family within sight. The side streets, Royal and Union and the alleys between, hide the wine bars and chef counters the residents consider theirs.

Eat the street end to end across a weekend, colonial dinner one night, waterfront the next, market and bakery mornings throughout, and walk the full mile after each meal as the architecture intends. Book the serious rooms ahead per the standing rules. The street has been feeding travelers since before the republic it helped talk into existence, and the kitchens, three centuries deep and still competitive, show no sign of considering the job finished.