A new restaurant opened its doors in West End Sept 8, offering up witch-themed Italian food and drinks.
Ellizabetta La Strega, a new restaurant specializing in Italian cuisine, has found a home at 2401 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, taking over the former location of the French-Belgian restaurant Marcel’s, a West End staple for 25 years which closed in 2024 after its owners were unable to reach an agreement on lease terms with the building’s new owner. Named after owner Elli Benchimol’s grandmother, Ellizabetta, the latter half of the restaurant’s name means “the witch” in Italian.
Benchimol also owns the Georgetown restaurants La Bohème and Michelin-star-awarded Apéro.
The restaurant’s lunch and dinner menus feature vegetable, meat and vegan dishes like the triple goddess ragu and the crispy berkshire porchetta. Benchimol said each dish is inspired by her Italian heritage, combining her family’s northern and southern Italian roots. She said one of her grandmother’s favorite recipes, a chicken milanese marinated in herbs, is featured on the dinner menu.
“My favorite is probably the Mayan Lemon Chittara pasta with caviar on top,” Benchimol said. “It’s very decadent, delicious. It’s actually a crossover dish that we also have at Apero, so keeping it in the family.”
Benchimol said much of the restaurant’s produce and meat is sustainably sourced from local farms in Pennsylvania and Virginia. She said she hopes Ellizabetta La Strega can be as “sustainable as possible,” in spite of rising costs for supplies, because she believes it is the right thing to do to ensure environmentally friendly sourcing.
Benchimol said she and her team, which includes husband-and-wife chefs Jennifer Castenada-Jones and Stephen Jones, started searching for a space two years ago. After securing the West End location, she said the restaurant had to delay its opening for five months while the building underwent renovations.
“There was scaffolding up while they were replacing the windows outside, which kind of put a damper on our opening as well,” Benchimol said. “But other than that, it was fairly smooth. It’s a lot of waiting, unfortunately.”
She said the hardest part of the process was curating the menu and finding the right team, particularly during the five-month opening delay. Benchimol said throughout renovations, she moved some of the managing staff at La Strega to her other restaurants, which caused other locations to be overstaffed.
“It was very expensive because we were overstaffed over there, but it gave us a lot of time to grow as a team,” Benchimol said.
Benchimol said a majority of the paintings hanging on the wall of La Strega are portraits she painted herself of different girlfriends and female family members in a “witch form,” painted with florals around their heads.
La Strega has lunch hours from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday and dinner hours from 5 to 10 p.m. on Sundays and Tuesday to Thursday, with the Friday and Saturday dinner hours extended to 11 p.m.
Between lunch and dinner, La Strega hosts “The Witching Hour” from 3 to 5 p.m. and 9 to 11 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and from 4 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Benchimol said “The Witching Hour” takes after the concept of aperitivo hour in Italy, when people gather for drinks and light snacks before dinner. The Witching Hour offers special prices on select menu items and a complimentary Chef Cicchetti Selection — an assortment of rotating Venetian tapas — with any beverage special, like La Strega spritzes.
“It changes every day,” Benchimol said. “It’s usually a little toast or snack that goes with your beverage because you should always have a bite to eat when you’re drinking.”
She said the restaurant also plans to introduce Tarot Tuesdays during Witching Hour, where guests can come in for tarot readings from tarot card readers in the area each Tuesday.
Benchimol said the community has been supportive of the restaurant’s opening and her neighbors have already become regulars. She said many regulars from Apéro and La Bohème have visited the new spot as well.
“I hope that they enjoy the way we made them feel while they were here,” Benchimol said. “It’s an experience, and that’s the goal. It’s just hospitality overall, and then of course, the food and everything else is the afterthought of that.”
Dining and Cooking