In a city known for its boozy brunches, new 14th Street spot Butter Me Up hopes to stand out by serving locally sourced breakfast cuisine with a side of positive affirmations “made to uplift” its customers.

Butter Me Up opens Friday at 14th and T streets NW in Logan Circle, marking the growing business’ first brick-and-mortar location in the District.

“It’s essentially the intersection between breakfast and lunch and we’ll be essentially offering the two all day,” Butter Me Up founder and CEO André McCain says of his vision. “Sort of a brunch all day spot where you can have breakfast and/or lunch in addition to coffee, juices, smoothies and those types of things.”

The restaurant features the four popular breakfast sandwiches that fueled customers during its early pop-up days, including “Easy Like Sunday,” with scrambled eggs, turkey sausage, Havarti cheese and honey-mustard aioli.

“The sandwiches are inspired by the classic American breakfast sandwich that we all make at home ourselves,” McCain says. “We thought, ‘Well, how do we do the work for people at home? By looking at each element of this sandwich and providing the best quality for each of those items.’”

The new location’s menu expands on the sandwiches, which came out of the original pop-up within McCain’s HalfSmoke restaurant in Shaw, to include various toasts, such as “So In Love,” topped with crushed avocado, soft-boiled egg, Everything But The Bagel seasoning, hot sauce and sprouts. Sides include sweet potato tots, fruit salad and cinnamon sugar French toast sticks.

The restaurant sources many ingredients from fellow local businesses. Capitol Heights baking outfit Panorama Bakery furnishes the brioche rolls for Butter Me Up’s breakfast sandwiches, which get filled with everything from turkey sausage and eggs to fried chicken and goat cheese. (That sage turkey sausage comes from Landover-based MeatCrafters.) D,C.’s own Gordy’s Pickle Jar makes the pickles and local farms around the region supply its eggs.

The expanded menu essentially mirrors the offerings at Butter Me Up’s Bethesda location, with several exceptions in the works.

Soon, McCain will roll out a brunch cocktail program that’s unique to the location, and add several salads — kale Caesar, warm smoked salmon and cobb salad among them — to round out the lunchtime options.

In keeping with its “breakfast made to uplift” slogan, every sandwich comes with a card displaying a positive affirmation, such as “today will be the best day ever” and “call someone and tell them you love them.”

The 55-seat restaurant (45 seats inside and 10 outside) replaces Taqueria Nacional, which closed at the end of 2020 after seven years. The 2,500-square-foot space is designed to feel like home. It’s divided into three sections: the “living room” in the front where customers can sit at the window or on the couch, a “dining room” with a traditional table set up that’s good for larger groups, and finally the marble and wooden breakfast/champagne bar where you can catch up with a friend or eat solo.

Even dogs can get in on the action. In a nod to the dog-friendly neighborhood, customers can reserve one of four outdoor dog cabanas on the patio, next to their table. Butter Me Up will treat the furry patrons to water and dog food.

The location, part of a cluster of storefronts that housed a former post office, appealed to McCain because it’s only about a mile away from the sausage-centered, fast-casual HalfSmoke. A large chunk of HalfSmoke’s customer base lives nearby within the U Street Corridor, he says.

“We wanted to basically be as close to them as possible and to make it very convenient for them to enjoy our full menu,” McCain says. “And so, 14th Street really made a ton of sense from that standpoint, because that’s where our core customer lives and also hangs out.”

Butter Me Up opened within HalfSmoke in May 2020, nearly four years after HalfSmoke debuted at 651 Florida Ave. NW and two months after D.C. Muriel Bowser suspended sit-down service at restaurants and bars at the start of the pandemic. While that forced McCain to turn HalfSmoke into a takeout and delivery operation, he also launched Butter Me Up as a breakfast pop-up to take advantage of an underutilized time at the restaurant. The additional business helped keep some 15 of the dozens of furloughed staff members employed, according to McCain, and HalfSmoke still produces breakfast sandwiches.

And that breakfast business is booming. McCain opened Butter Me Up’s first standalone brick-and-mortar over the summer at Westfield Montgomery Mall in Bethesda and plans to open its third location this fall at Westfield Annapolis Mall.

The restaurant opens Friday, and on Wednesday, McCain is running a “pay what you want” promotion and plans on donating all of the restaurant’s proceeds to the Washington Area Women’s Foundation, an organization that supports women and girls of color living in the District through grants and advocacy.

Butter Me Up is located at 1409 T St NW in D.C. and open daily from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.