Elaine's Modern Mediterranean
Opening a restaurant was a childhood dream for Cynthia Higgins, who spent years as a child in her grandmother’s kitchen in Egypt.
“Elaine is my grandmother, and my happiest memories as a child were of cooking with her in the kitchen,” said Cynthia. “Our whole life was [spent around] the dining table in the kitchen.”
That dream finally came true for Cynthia when she opened Elaine’s, a modern Mediterranean restaurant, earlier this year.
Her two-story restaurant is in a fully renovated historic building that used to house Bilbo Baggin’s Restaurant and Pub, at 208 Queen St.
The menu mostly features Elaine’s recipes. In addition to being a fabulous cook, Elaine was the first female investor in the Egyptian stock exchange in the 1950s and an incredibly generous woman as well as a philanthropist, Cynthia said.
“She’s the inspiration for this restaurant and for everything else in my life. I have big shoes to fill, so I’m trying to live up to her standards, which is not easy, but I’m a work in progress,” Cynthia said.
The original plan was for her to open the restaurant with her brother as general manager. They were extremely close and just 11 months apart in age, but he passed away just a few months before the restaurant opened. Her husband, Jeffrey James Higgins, stepped into the role.
“My grandma told me to never give up. Fail, and fail 10 times, but never give up,” Cynthia Higgins said. She lives with multiple sclerosis and has had both temporary paralysis and blindness which has made it, at times, difficult to be in the kitchen due to heat intolerance.
She has also recovered from cancer but has lingering health issues from the treatment.
Cynthia and Jeffrey Higgins
“I came into this space, and I immediately envisioned what it was going to look like,” said Cynthia. There’s still a connection to the old Bilbo Baggins Restaurant and Pub, which operated at 208 Queen St. for nearly 40 years.
Jeffrey said that the restaurant hosted a Bilbo Baggins restaurant fans Facebook group meetup just after opening. In addition, original Bilbo Baggins chefs have come in to eat dinner, and the wife of Bilbo Baggins’ founder Michael Armellino has visited. Certain items on the cocktail menu honor the old restaurant.
The bar counter is the same, but the rest of the historic building was ripped down to the studs and rebuilt.
“Even though it’s a whole different vibe and it looks different, we want to be the neighborhood place, still,” he said. The restaurant, in a few short months, has established itself as a literary haven.
“I have books I wrote when I was six, with covers and illustrations. They were horrible,” he recalled, laughing.
Cynthia has also published several books, including non-fiction. Jeffrey, who has started to find time to write again now that the restaurant is up and running, has two books coming out next year. One is a mystery novel, and the other is a techno-mystery thriller with an artificial-intelligence bent.
Through his writing career, Jeffrey found that unless you’re an A-list author, it’s difficult to find places to do book signings and launches. That was part of his motivation to open Elaine’s to authors. In the coming months, he said, he plans to host a "Noir at the Bar" event, happy hours for local mystery and thriller authors and several more book launches. “There’s a really vibrant writing community in the DC area,” he said.
Of the book launches that Elaine’s has already hosted, he noted, “It’s more fun than being at a bookstore – and I love bookstores – but you can eat and drink here.”
For people coming in for book events, Cynthia recommends her favorite item on the menu — the mezze platter. In addition to offering a taste of multiple items, the best-selling item is also visually pleasing. “The aesthetics of food are very important to me because I am also an artist,” Cynthia said. She used to be a sculptor, but had to stop when she was diagnosed with cancer.
“It’s very personal. Food is the most personal thing,” she said. “It can’t get more personal when you’re cooking someone a dish and you want them to feel full and happy. I like to communicate love through cooking and through our hospitality — my love for my team, for Old Town and for the country I immigrated to.”
Jeffrey said he spent much of his career in counterterrorism, including working on the first narco-terrorism case. But he always had literature in his heart and has, since retirement, written multiple books. (His best-seller “Furious: Sailing into Terrorism,” has more than 1,000 reviews on Amazon, averaging 4.4 stars.
