Jane Jane and Bar Betsie Founders on Building DC's Favorite Neighborhood Cocktail Bars
Ralph (left) and Drew (right) sitting at the Jane Jane bar.
Jane Jane is the type of neighborhood cocktail bar where the party spills out onto the street and any day of the week there's a healthy crowd inside snacking on little bowls of Cheez-Its while sipping some of the best cocktails in the city. Its new sister bar, Bar Betsie, just opened in Union Market and has managed to recreate the same vibrant atmosphere as Jane Jane, but with its own identity, an entirely new menu and amazing drinks.
Ralph Brabham, Drew Porterfield, and JP Sabatier started Jane Jane in 2021 and just launched Bar Betsie this year. But when I sat down with Ralph and Drew, I learned that their start in hospitality wasn't in cocktails or even really in hospitality at all. Ralph is a lawyer by training and Drew ran a successful art gallery up until this year. Their initial entrée into the business was almost completely accidental: helping their friend Aschara Vigsittaboot launch Beau Thai which now has two locations in DC.
It's hard to overstate how engaging Ralph and Drew are in person. They're quick to laugh, incredibly welcoming, and more than anything else, genuinely excited about what's ahead. They've launched Jane Jane and now Bar Betsie (led by co-owner and General Manager JP Sabatier), and they feel like they're just getting started. It was great to hear how Ralph and Drew found their way into hospitality, their initial pitch to building developers for Jane Jane (spoiler: it involved cocktails), and the question everyone wants to know: why they picked Cheez-Its as their bar snack.
This interview has been lightly edited for conciseness and clarity.
What’s your origin story? How did you end up starting and running Jane Jane?
Ralph: I was one of those people who wasn’t quite sure who I wanted to be when I grew up. I always liked the idea of running a small business but never knew where to start so I ended up following a more straightforward path to law school.
After law school I moved back home and clerked for a federal judge in North Carolina which is where Drew and I met. After living there for a while I realized that it wasn't the right space for me as a gay person. I needed to be in a city with a population of other gay guys so I ended up interviewing and accepting a job in DC. That same fall Drew was moving to New York to go to Parsons School of Design. We knew we wanted to be together so we tried long distance. Our attempts at a long distance relationship failed miserably and Drew moved to DC soon after.
We didn’t get our hospitality start at Jane Jane but actually as co-owners of Beau Thai. Our business partner at Beau Thai, Aschara Vigsittaboot, was a server at Rice Market on 14th and we got to know her. A friend of ours had hired her to cater a dinner at his house. We met her there and just fell in love with her food and her. We sort of organically started having dinners almost weekly together and then in the winter of 2009 during the Snowmaggedon she came over and told us she had just signed a lease to open Beau Thai and needed legal help with zoning. She thought I could help out as a lawyer even though zoning law was not my specialty at all. By that summer Drew and I found ourselves driving all over the DMV and to IKEA to buy tables and chairs and pick out the paint scheme. We sort of just found ourselves incredibly invested in her success and in Beau Thai’s success.
Two weeks before she opened she had us over for a private dinner as a thank you for all of our work and at that dinner she asked if we wanted to be business partners. To be completely honest she didn’t need the money, she just asked because we had invested so much. We thought about it, said yes, and were off to the races.
I would work normal law firm hours and then go over to answer phones and bartend. By 2012 I knew that being a law firm partner was not what I wanted to do.
I met with a career counselor who recommended I lean more into the Thai restaurant I loved. So, after a lot of thought we decided to open another Beau Thai. This was in early 2012 when I was going through a life journey. My dad was dying of ALS and Drew’s mom was passing from appendix cancer. We had big life changes that reminded both of us that life is short. I was pretty miserable practicing law and just didn’t like what my future looked like. For me and for us it was a good time for a pause professionally. Returning to law was always a backup idea but the three of us at Beau Thai were determined to make it work and make it successful.
As of March of 2012 I was no longer a practicing lawyer and everything has just taken off from there.
Drew: My origin story was a bit different because I had a full time job running a gallery until about a year ago. My love for Beau Thai, Jane Jane, and now Bar Betsie was as organic as it was for Ralph but it was never an exit strategy for me. The goal wasn’t for Ralph to leave the firm and make equivalent dollars, it was always about finding something he loved to do.
We weren’t super monetarily perfect, we weren’t super focused on the P&L, we just followed our gut and weren’t super tied up in the exact business planning.
Ralph: That said, we still put everything on the line. We maxed out the credit cards and used all of our savings to open the second Beau Thai. After we opened Beau Thai Mount Pleasant we met our new business partner JP Sabatier through our friend Amanda who owns Salt and Sundry. She opened her initial Salt and Sundry in Union Market which is where JP was GM of Rappahannock Oyster Bar. We met him there and became best friends; he quickly became part of our chosen family in DC. He went to the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) and worked for several Michelin Star restaurants including Maydan. We became really good friends, and since we were in the same industry we started thinking about opening something together.
When we moved our Beau Thai Shaw location to its current location we renamed it to BKK Cookshop and were always looking for ways to activate BKK. The restaurant didn’t open till noon. So, we developed a breakfast/brunch spot that we called Dot’s Spot named after Drew’s family’s former beach house where a gaggle of gays always went down every summer and where the entire family was centered.
We wanted to elevate and bring to life a morning at Dot’s Spot.
Drew: It was four best friends who already hung out all the time. We ran the pop up for a month over the summer on weekends. It was kind of a test run to see if we wanted to run a business. We left the Dot’s Spot project (our fourth friend Greg who ran it with us moved out of DC) knowing we could run a business together.
The Jane Jane Bar, courtesy of the Jane Jane team c/o Brian Miller.
So how did you go from starting Dot’s Spot and being co-owners of Beau Thai to Jane Jane?
Drew: Jane Jane is the kind of bar we like to go to to have drinks. We aren’t looking for complicated cocktails, we want really well made cocktails in a small intimate setting. We didn’t see that in DC at the time so the Jane Jane idea came easily.
Ralph: We had a friend who worked for Whitman Walker (the development firm that owns the building). They had a small, very niche space and they asked us to try and do something with it. JP, Drew and I just sat around our kitchen table spitballing and dreaming about what it could be. Before the space was presented to us we had tossed around the idea of a little wine bar but we had never identified what concept we would want to create as a trio. But around the table we came up with the idea of a small cocktail bar.
There weren’t a ton of those in DC and particularly on 14th street where people go out to dinner. We pictured Jane Jane as a before or after dinner spot. We never thought it would be as lively as it is but it’s evolved into a really fun thing.
So we asked for a meeting with the developer and did a whole dog and pony show. We had a cooler with vintage glassware. JP was shaking drinks, Drew was handing out cheese and I was spinning the story.
Drew: Not unlike Beau Thai we did a full business plan but it also was just us having fun. We literally showed up and gave booze to the people we were presenting to. At the end of our presentation they asked us to step outside and then came back a few minutes later to tell us that we had been selected. I think then it hit us that we actually had to figure out how to open and run Jane Jane.
“When you open something new it is 7 days a week 2 hours before open and 2 hours after close making sure everything works but eventually you have to hand it over to your managers. We love and trust the people that work for us. ”
What’s the time commitment?
Drew: It's 24 hours a day and sometimes no hours a day but it’s also fun.
Ralph: Right now we’re in a sweet spot where we have a great management team who can take over a lot. We still cover the big stuff but our team is just fantastic.
One perk of having done everything at Jane Jane and now Bar Betsie is that we can always go back to running the dishwasher or being the host. The era when we were kicking off Jane Jane was super intense but it forced us to learn how to delegate.
Drew: When you open something new it is 7 days a week 2 hours before open and 2 hours after close making sure everything works but eventually you have to hand it over to your managers. We love and trust the people that work for us.
Ralph: We’re older now and opening Bar Betsie this year nearly killed us. The bar is open till 2am and just because it closes at 2am doesn’t mean we’re done. We were putting in 18 hour days and 4am nights. Opening a place is grueling and we have so much respect and appreciation for our staff for whom this is their normal schedule. We try to make sure our environments are very supportive to enable our staff to make a job that has a 2am close sustainable.
Picture of Bar Betsie, from the Bar Betsie team c/o Brian Miller.
Do you look back on fondly on those early Jane Jane days?
Drew: Oh yes.
Ralph: Our entree into hospitality was Thai restaurants and as much as we are invested in the restaurant it's not our culture or cuisine. It’s not something that we say we know. In contrast, Jane Jane and Dot's Spot were really ours. We had deep personal connections to what we were putting out. We could lean in to all of the parts of Jane Jane in a really different way than Beau Thai.
Okay I have to ask since one of my favorite things about Jane Jane are the little servings of Cheez-Its you get when you sit down…why Cheez-Its?
Drew: When we opened we were serving these amazing roasted, spiced, mixed nuts. We wanted it to be a cute small classic cocktail bar where you sit down and they bring you a little snack. We created these nuts that were delicious and our vision was that every table would get a bowl of mixed nuts. They were so good but not everyone was eating everything when they sat down so we had to throw out a ton of nuts every night. As we were working through the math we realized we were spending $700 a week on mixed nuts that we were throwing out. We just decided Cheez-Its were the way to go. We were going to the Giant at 9th and Q and would literally buy all of the Cheez-its at the store whenever they were on sale. I think the person checking us out at the grocery store thought we must have been legitimately obsessed with Cheez-Its with how many we would buy.
What are the highs and lows of this job? What’s great about it and what could you stand to give up?
Drew: The part I like most about it is the community of small business owners especially in the hospitality industry. The people we talk to are super friendly, super available and cheer each other on. It’s not competitive and it's truly a community of people who want each other to succeed.
The thing I like least is the bureaucracy. There are a lot of extraneous reporting tasks from the DC government that aren’t supportive of small businesses. There are so many more layers of things that you have to do. Things could be way simpler or more streamlined and they’re just not.
Ralph: On the positive side I love being in hospitality and being a part of people’s stories. Last night, someone at Jane Jane tagged us in a post and they had gotten engaged and were celebrating at their favorite spot, Jane Jane. We’ve had engagements happening at Beau Thai, we’ve hosted rehearsal dinners and great friend dinners. It’s so cool to be a part of something that people value and enjoy. During the pandemic we had people who ordered food from Beau Thai every friday night from us. I love that we can be in people's lives and bring that joy. I’m very grateful to be in a city where this could happen. How random that two guys from North Carolina could help start a Thai restaurant!
On the other side of the scale we deal with a lot of reporting and there are a lot of well meaning things that DC has or requires of small business owners that individually sound great but cumulatively stack up. There are parking requirements (we don’t even have a parking spot) and every January we have to submit a report that says we don’t provide parking benefits to employees. If I was a smaller business owner without the other co owners I don’t know how this stuff just doesn’t fall through the cracks. Collectively we have to deal with an enormous amount of work that often feels repetitive or confusing or both at the same time.
Drew: I mean we have the luxury of hiring lawyers to help with permitting but so many small businesses can’t afford lawyers and don’t have that luxury. Figuring some of the DC permitting and forms on your own would be next to impossible.
“I’m very grateful to be in a city where this could happen. How random that two guys from North Carolina could help start a Thai restaurant!”
You’ve been running Jane Jane for 5 years and just launched Bar Betsie, how have you evolved alongside Jane Jane and now Bar Betsie?
Drew: I think I have evolved alongside it a lot. Jane Jane felt very personal; we needed to hold its hand and be there all the time. It felt very much like our baby we were taking care of. Once we got to Betsie we felt the same way but not for quite as long. When we started Bar Betsie, We made some adjustments for how we hired and trained staff so we were ready to go from day 1. What took us 6 months at Jane Jane was ready from day 1 at Bar Betsie. For me, I learned I didn’t have to hold everyone's hand all the time. At Betsie I was able to open it, love it and be there but felt like we had the right team in place.
Ralph: When we opened Betsie I created the front of house/host guidelines. I love hosting, it's my favorite role in the restaurant, you get to play the game of tetris with seating everyone. In the early days of Bar Betsie I was working the host stand and JP, our co-owner and General Manager would tag me out midway through the night so he could train the actual host we had hired to do the job. I went to therapy over this because I didn’t want to be tapped out. My therapist told me, JP is doing his job, you’re not intended to be there doing that job. Knowing when to step away and delegate and set up systems where you’re not there all the time has been an evolution we have gotten to but it wasn’t immediate.
Drew: You probably hear this from other owner operators - if you own a restaurant and are working there full time its incredibly soul sucking, it drains you.
Ralph: There is something to be said about entrusting and empowering your people to be there and represent you.
Drew: If you want to grow you have to delegate and step away at some point to let other people execute. We are learning to empower and give other people a sense of pride and leadership.
Ralph and Drew’s “Best Of” List
-
Drew: Red Hen we go there all the time. We go there almost every Monday for a date night and sit at the bar.
Ralph: Tail Up Goat is one of my favorite all time meals. I’m so bummed they are closing. I think Reveler’s Hour would also be up there, Jill is a magical restaurant owner and an amazing person and their food is great.
-
Ralph: Dabney Cellar, you can get a great freezer martini and oysters. It’s lovely and a quiet little date moment.
Drew: Etto, they have my favorite cocktail in the world: a negroni bianco that is perfection. During covid Ralph got them to make me a gallon pitcher for my birthday. It’s my absolute favorite.