Big changes are coming to Village Brauhaus at 710 King Street in Old Town.
The new owners will close the doors of the restaurant for three weeks starting Tuesday, June 20, and will hold a grand reopening on Thursday, July 13, in a newly renovated and renamed Alexandria Bier Garden, managing partner Fito Garcia tells ALXnow.
“It’s painting, new tile, new decor,” Garcia said. “We’re pretty much transforming the inside into an indoor garden. We’re adding trees, plants everywhere. The Instagram-able moments in this place are going to be ridiculous. You’ll have lots of cool areas that you can just hang out with with your friends and grab a beer and take a picture. It’ll be a lot cleaner, a lot prettier, with a better vibe.”
Garcia and partners James Van Eperen, Gusto Campo and chef Michael Ciuffardi make up the newly formed The Inca Group, and bought the restaurant last October from Bill Gross, who opened it in 2019. Together they also own two Inca Social Peruvian chicken restaurants in Arlington and Vienna, and Garcia is also a co-owner of Courthaus Social beer garden in Arlington.
The owners are now building a rooftop expansion for Alexandria Bier Garden, which Garcia says will open in September. The rooftop is approved to hold up to 49 patrons at a time.
“The rooftop bar was a no-brainer,” Garcia said. “Outside the waterfront, our block has the most restaurants of any other block on King Street. We will become an icon in an Old Town. We’re the biggest rooftop, the only one with a bar and the only one with live music. We almost have a monopoly on the rooftop experience. That investment will pay off for a long time as long as we have a good quality, have a great service and keep on marketing ourselves.”
The menu at the Old Town restaurant will mostly stay the same, with some items added from Courthaus Social and Inca Social.
“I’m big on schnitzel, sausages, big pretzels,” Garcia said. “This is gonna still be German, but you’ll have some German-American fusion and even a little bit of Latin fusion in there, too.”
As for the aspirations of The Inca Group, Garcia says they want to open 10 Inca Social locations throughout Northern Virginia, Maryland and D.C.
“We want at least three chicken places under our belt before we franchise,” he said. “The goal is to franchise that concept. Then we want to take our management group and use our buying power, if you will, to help out other restaurants.”