Stephen Starr, the restaurateur behind D.C.’s Le Diplomate and St. Anselm, is officially partnering with Los Angeles-based chef Nancy Silverton to bring an Italian market and restaurant to the former Dean & DeLuca location, part of the Georgetown Park development. The 20,000-square-foot restaurant and market is slated to open in late 2023, according to a press release.

This will be the first East Coast location of Silverton’s upscale Italian restaurant Osteria Mozza. The menu will feature wood-fired pizzas, meat, fish, and vegetables, along with fresh pasta dishes and an expansive wine program. Diners can also enjoy entire bars dedicated just to prosciutto and mozzarella. The accompanying market will face M Street and offer fresh produce, and ingredients like olive oils, house-made rubs, and canned Italian products. (Silverton told Washingtonian she imagines a bartender dipping out to the market to pick up fresh mint for a cocktail.)

“I want people of D.C. to have a place to celebrate life with the great Italian flavors of Mozza,” Silverton said in a press release.

Silverton is a big deal: The award-winning chef and baker is the owner of a restaurant empire in California, with additional locations in Mexico, London, and Singapore. Her brands include Osteria Mozza, Pizzeria Mozza, Mozza2Go, and Chi Spacca. In 2014, she won the James Beard Foundation’s highest honor of “Outstanding Chef.”

New York-based design firm Roman and Williams is in charge of returning the retail space, owned by real estate developer Jamestown, to its mid-19th century roots as a marketplace. The Dean & DeLuca high-end grocery store that formerly occupied the space closed in 2019, though it faced health code violations involving mouse poop and cockroaches dating back to 2013.

Starr first proposed the idea for a massive Italian eatery at the M Street building in June of 2021, when he described the concept as “an event” or a “festival of food” to the Advisory Neighborhood Commission. At the time, he only hinted at bringing on Silverton as head chef. The partnership with Silverton and Georgetown Park owner Jamestown is the match he needed to bring the idea to life, he says.

“Finding the right partner for this was easy,” Starr said in the announcement on Friday. “I’ve always wanted to collaborate with Nancy Silverton, and her amazing menu at Osteria Mozza was a perfect fit. I am confident that what we create together will knock the socks off of D.C.”

The CEO of the Philadelphia-based Starr Restaurants, he has restaurants up and down the East Coast. It was Silverton’s focaccia di recco at her Hollywood restaurant Chi Spacca that first blew Starr’s socks off, per Washingtonian.

“He’s creating this multimillion dollar restaurant so that he can have focaccia di recco any time,” Silverton told the magazine. “That’s your $10 million focaccia.”