Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:52:00

A Cordon Bleu-trained chef from Corsica opened a basement tavern here in 1957, and the room he dug out went on to hold what was often cited as the largest beer list on earth. The DC Comedy Loft and Bier Baron Tavern at 1523 22nd Street NW, in the Baron Hotel building near Dupont Circle, began as the Brickskeller - Felix Coja's clever twist on rathskeller, the German word for a below-street tavern - opened with his wife Marie in the hotel they ran as the Marifex. The building itself dates to 1912, and the hotel above still operates as a small European-style inn. Under the Coja family - son Maurice and his wife June through the 1960s, then daughter Diane and her husband Dave Alexander from 1982 - the Brickskeller became a Washington institution and a pilgrimage site for beer drinkers, its list swelling past a thousand bottles and pioneering the craft-beer movement in the capital decades before the term existed. The Alexanders sold the business on 18 December 2010, taking the famous name with them, and the new owners rechristened the cellar the Bier Baron Tavern. The comedy era began upstairs: the DC Comedy Loft grew into one of the city's essential stand-up rooms, an intimate space where national touring headliners, Netflix and Comedy Central names and the region's best local comics work a low-ceilinged crowd in the classic basement-club tradition - even though this one sits above the bar rather than below it. The tavern still trades on its heritage - a deep bottle list, pub food and the brick-vaulted atmosphere that made the original famous - while the nightly comedy calendar, open-mic nights and podcast tapings keep the building busier than at any point since its beer-list heyday. The location works in its favour: a residential block between Dupont Circle and Rock Creek Park on the edge of Georgetown, a ten-minute walk from the Dupont Circle Metro - a neighbourhood room in the most literal sense, carrying nearly seventy years of Washington nightlife in one 1912 building.