Anju team takes over food and beverage at Line DC hotel

The LINE DC has turned its food and beverage operations over to Danny Lee and Scott Drewno’s Fried Rice Collective, a change that could reshape work for servers, cooks and managers inside one of Adams Morgan’s best-known hotels. The hotel said the team behind Anju and Chiko will run the property’s dining program and eventually open its own restaurant on the ground floor.

For hotel workers, the biggest question is not the menu. It is whether the shift brings new jobs with clearer pathways or a clean slate that replaces the people already working the floor and the line. The announcement centered on the partnership and the future restaurant, but did not spell out whether current front-of-house or back-of-house staff will be retained, retrained or moved into new positions, or how schedules and management layers will change once Fried Rice Collective takes control.

The stakes are real because hotel food and beverage often mixes salaried managers, hourly line cooks and tipped service staff under one roof. When ownership or operators change, the ripple can reach tip pools, section assignments, kitchen prep standards and who gets trained on a new service model. At the LINE DC, those details matter even more because the property has long marketed itself as a boutique hotel in Washington, DC for the modern traveler, while the dining side has had to keep pace with a neighborhood that expects both destination rooms and strong restaurant programming.

Lee and Drewno already have deep recognition in Washington’s restaurant scene. Anju, the Korean restaurant and pub at 1805 18th St. NW, describes itself as “a contemporary Korean restaurant and pub bringing old traditions and new concepts to the D.C. metropolitan area.” Washingtonian ranked Anju No. 1 on its 2020 “100 Very Best Restaurants” list. The outlet also reported that the original Mandu space would reopen after a fire last year with “fun bar snacks and plenty of soju,” a reminder that Fried Rice Collective has experience moving concepts through disruption and restart.

The LINE DC sits in Adams Morgan, and its restaurant footprint has already drawn outsized attention. Washingtonian’s 2025 coverage on the hotel referred back to earlier reporting that Elon Musk wanted to turn the property into a “private social club,” a sign of how closely the building is watched in a neighborhood where hospitality changes can land as labor news, not just real estate news. Whether the eventual ground-floor restaurant becomes a stronger job platform for cooks, servers and bartenders or simply another reset for the hotel’s service staff will depend on who gets kept, who gets trained and who gets pushed aside as the handoff moves forward.