The Tabard Inn opened in 1922 at 1739 N Street, N.W. in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C . The proprietor, Marie Willoughby Rogers, established the guesthouse and restaurant in a Classical-Revival style rowhouse designed by the distinguished firm of Hornblower & Marshall in 1900. Rogers named the Inn after the hostelry in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The name advertised the hotel’s traditional ambience which was reminiscent of an English manor.
The first gathering at the Tabard Inn was recorded in the Capital Society Events page of the Washington Post:
Mrs. Gallard Sherburne Rogers and her sister, Miss Isla Willoughby, received yesterday afternoon at the opening of the Tabard Inn: Mrs. Nathaniel Dial presided at the tea table and was assisted by Mrs. Cooper, wife of the former Gov. Cooper of South Carolina; Mrs. Hutton and Mrs. Daniel C. Roper.
In its early years, the Tabard Inn was a popular meeting place for women’s social groups and clubs. In fact, Rogers had never intended to become a hotel operator, but simply desired a place “to just give parties.” She reflected that in its first decades the Tabard Inn “was full of debutantes…” For example, on May 1, 1926, the Washington Post announced, “A May day party will be given by the Woman’s Auxiliary of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers at 8:15 o’clock this evening in the ballrooms and drawing rooms of Tabard Inn … the proceeds will be devoted to the fund for the educating of needy and talented young men in engineering colleges.”
The Woman’s Auxiliary of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers (of which Rogers was a member—her husband was a geologist) favored the Tabard Inn for its meetings and frequently held luncheons, lectures, and card games in the hotel. The Tabard Inn also hosted art exhibitions, including a display of oil paintings by the well-traveled South Carolina artist Blondell Malone, “the garden painter of America.”
In 1928, Rogers expanded the Tabard Inn into 1741 N Street, N.W. the adjacent Romanesque-Revival style rowhouse that was designed by master architect/builder Samuel C. Edmonston in 1888. Rogers advertised the expanded Tabard Inn as a “Hotel of comfort, convenience and charm; delicious food; tea room open to public.” In 1936, Rogers purchased 1737 N Street, N.W., a Romanesque Revival style rowhouse designed by Thomas Franklin Schneider in 1887, thus completing the Tabard Inn as it is today.
During World War II, the Tabard Inn served as a boardinghouse for Navy Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES). The rooms and lounges afforded luxurious accommodations, even for the seventy WAVES officers that were assigned to the Tabard Inn. One of the volunteers reported, “After the horrors we’d heard about the wartime housing shortage in the nation’s capital, we were delighted to be there.”
Marie Rogers died in 1970. Although the Tabard Inn was threatened by demolition when a developer proposed to construct a high-rise office building on the site, it was spared and reemerged under new ownership. In 1978, restaurant critic Phyllis Richman wrote “For years, the restaurant at the Tabard Inn has been waiting to happen. The sunny rear dining room has lain in wait for a proprietor, its garden harboring potential springtime lunching, until last summer it was brought back to life.”
The ambience of the Tabard Inn factored greatly in Richman’s positive review:
The informality of the dining room, with its green and white checkerboard floor and whitewashed brick walls, forms a pleasant counterpart to the more stately ambience of the other parts of this converted townhouse of a hotel. Sun streams through the restaurant’s windows and skylight; in the evening, candles are the primary illumination.
The Tabard Inn is certainly a Washington, D.C. institution.