Industry Night: A Deep Dive with NRG's Greg Engert & Aged Fish with Chef Chico Dator

Greg Engert is the Washington DC restaurant insider who made this city care about beer, and he is the first person to tell you the math has changed. Happy hour is dead, the double turn is gone, and the generation walking through the door wants something his whole career was not built for. So we sat down at Modan in Tysons and got into what he is actually doing about it.
Greg Engert has been Beer Director and Managing Partner at Neighborhood Restaurant Group since 2006, which means he has had a front row seat to every swing of the DC dining scene for twenty years. Church Key. Bluejacket. Rustico. Josephine. Iron Gate. Snallygaster, now the biggest beer festival on the East Coast. In this chef interview podcast episode of Industry Night, Nycci Nellis gets him talking about the parts nobody puts in a press release: what it costs to keep a seventeen year old restaurant relevant, why NRG is closing a play cafe that did not pencil out, and why he reads every single guest review across the entire group every day.
He is candid about the generational shift too. Younger drinkers are not abstaining more than Gen X did, they are just drinking less per visit, and he points at inflation and healthcare costs before he points at wellness culture. His answer is to stop treating cheap drinks as a two hour window and start building low price points into the menu all day long.
Then Nycci pulls Chef Chico Dator out of the Modan kitchen. He came up through Nobu in Lanai, Malibu and Kuala Lumpur before landing in DC, and he now runs the only dry aging fish program in the region. He will not call it aging. Listen for why, here, and Watch the full episode here.