An Interview with Soung & David from All Souls & The Little Grand
Picture provided by Soung & David. Photo Credit to Deb Lindsey from The Washington Post
All Souls is a classic neighborhood bar. The vibe inside is warm and friendly, like catching up with an old friend. The founders kept the original tin ceiling and installed a beautiful bronze bar counter that’s only slightly dulled after years of daily use. On the walls are remnants from other bars that David & Soung used to frequent as well as memorabilia from years and years of their annual All Souls party. The bar is food friendly and people often bring in pizza from the spot around the corner, gathering at one of the tables outside or in the big corner booth with friends. David, the friendly co-founder and long time DC resident can often be found behind the bar or at the far end saying hello to the steady stream of regulars and new visitors.
All Souls is the brainchild of a small team led by co-founders David & Soung. David and Soung’s story is unique. They came to the city for music (rock and post-punk) and have stayed in DC for over 30 years. Soung leads an incredibly successful design firm and David got started working the door at The Black Cat and playing drums in a local band before bartending at a couple different spots around the city.
After running All Souls for well over a decade they’ve kept growing, opening The Little Grand in the summer of 2022 with their business partner Joanna. Where All Souls was heavily influenced by David the Little Grand is a combination of all 3, blending the warmth and familiarity of All Souls with some of the best pizza in the city. Don’t believe me? You can ask The New York Times or Tik Tok food reviewer Big Schlim.
This interview is best enjoyed with a drink on the All Souls patio or paired with a big slice of pizza from The Little Grand.
This interview has been lightly edited for conciseness and clarity.
All Souls bar
You have both been in DC for about 30 years, what brought you here initially?
David: I grew up in Pennsylvania a couple hours away. We gravitated to DC because there was a great music scene here. We would come down and see bands in college. I ended up moving to DC to join a band with my friends in the early 1990’s.
Soung: All of his friends were my friends in college. The reason we met is because of those friends and then David ended up joining a band in DC and I eventually moved here too.
David: We used to call it a rock band but it was kind of a punk band called Crownhate Ruin. I had toured with them as a roadie then the drummer quit so I started playing drums for them. But that's what got us down here. That lasted for, you know, six months. It's a strange city in that you blink and all of a sudden it's your home. You're like, “oh, shit, I couldn't imagine myself anywhere else.” And yeah, I could maybe imagine myself somewhere else now but at the time it was a great place to be.
Do you feel like the city has changed?
Soung: It was a very different city in the 90’s since there wasn't the development that there is now. Our lives revolved around going to 14th Street and the Black Cat before anything else was there. Most of our time was really outside of what we think of the city now and what people may think about the city, which is the federal government or working on the hill. We were just young and our lives were about music and we pretty much had blinders on to everything else. Then development started happening. I think if we were to move here now at the age we were then we probably wouldn't have attached ourselves to this city in the same way.
How did you decide to start a bar?
David: I really wanted to play in bands but it just wasn’t happening. I was doing some odd jobs like stone working and I remember being 26 and waking up in the morning and my back would hurt from the job the day before. I knew if I kept on working in a trade like that my body would just break down.
I was working the door at the Black Cat and started thinking “Oh, well maybe I could bartend.” There was a long line to bartend at the Black Cat so I started bartending at other spots in DC. At that point I realized I could find a job that wasn’t physically as taxing as stone working and by 1998 I was bartending full time. I worked days at Jaleo and just really liked it. At some point about 5-6 years after I started bartending our partner Joanna (she’s the third partner for Little Grand) told me and Soung that there was a bar for sale in Shaw which had previously been an Ethiopian restaurant. Our minds were blown. In 2003/2004 the idea that we could open and run a bar ourselves sort of got into our heads and became the goal. I eventually moved on from Think Food Group but kept the idea that we could launch our own bar. Around 2010/2011 we just kept on inching our way closer. Ultimately, we knew as long as we could find the right space we had the ability to run a bar, so we just started getting closer and closer to actually doing it.
Soung: The idea was that this bar would open and I wouldn’t be as involved in the day to day but I would do the branding and help with the design. But the process to find the right space took a long time.
David: We ultimately found the location for All Souls in a funny way. Soung was running her own design firm with an office above Hank’s Oyster Bar. When I would bike home at night I normally went down Q but I couldn’t that night because they were doing construction on what would become Le Diplomate. I took a route up T and just randomly saw the “for lease” sign for what is now All Souls. At that point we had been ready for a year or two to get a space. I saw the sign and called the guy immediately. He called me back and we were off and running.
What was challenging about opening the bar once you had a lease?
Soung: As far as branding and design went that didn’t rev up until we got the space. We didn’t even have a name until we got the space since the name, brand and identity came from the building itself. We took a lot of inspiration from that. But the hardest part is that we were very naive in terms of how we approached raising money.
David: That’s the hardest thing, asking the people you love for help raising money.
Soung: We knew we were only going to ask friends or family for money and when you’re raising money from friends and family you just really don’t want to mess it up.
David: We were small, we didn’t need a lot to open, we put our own money in. It was really hard to get it open. We knew we could get it open but it was a long process in DC because we had to get the liquor license and navigate the neighborhood, making sure that they could trust us to do the things we said we were going to do.
David sitting at the end of the bar at All Souls
What was the opening day like?
David: Our opening day fell on this repeal anniversary and we had a bunch of bartenders come in right when we were trying to close.
Soung: We also didn’t make an announcement. We told friends and family and then pretty much just opened the doors.
David: Yeah we knew enough people and bartenders. The first few years we never closed early and always kept our hours. Post pandemic that’s totally different. The first few years there were a lot of 6-7 day a week of bartending.
Soung: What I remember about the first few years are the connections. I remember the very first guy who walked in, Drew, who lived a block away. He walked in almost immediately after we unlocked our doors and just became the first regular. We had a guy named Erwin who just showed up a lot too. There wasn’t a smoking receptacle out front and one day we showed up and there was a metal fixture outside for cigarette butts. We didn’t know it but Erwin had just decided the bar needed that so he bought it himself and set it up. All Souls is a really personal place that people want to connect to.
David: At the time, Shaw was very much in a state of transition. There used to be more young people living 4 to a house. It was a neighborhood that had struggled a bit after the ‘68 riots and then there was a lot of development in DC. But the people that started coming in the early days have been coming for years. We’ve watched them get married, have babies and start to raise families.
Can you tell me more about All Souls Day and how that came about?
David: We opened on December 7th, 2013. That’s our actual anniversary. All Souls Day is November 2nd. We knew we could not ignore All Souls Day and didn’t want to have two parties so All Souls Day is also the public celebration of our anniversary. We make t-shirts, we do specials, and we raise money for charity. It’s the busiest day we have and a lot of that is that the branding and concept is really fun.
Soung: I’ve scaled back my branding firm quite a bit since COVID but back then we would treat All Souls Day like a full project and each designer would do a concept for it. We put a loose framework in place for the design, allowing them to be dynamic and different each year but still connected. The color palette is tightly restricted which allowed us to control the potential chaos that could happen. The All Souls cocktail still stays the same. The third year we played off the copper bar top with all of the drink rings on it which is a really creative idea that came from one of our designers.
Let’s pivot to your new spot! What inspired the Little Grand and then what learning did you pull from All Souls to The Little Grand?
David: The developers who built the Apollo on H Street wanted us to do something down there. The architect of the building had left a cavity in the back to do a small bar type spot. We said that we’d love to do it but we didn’t want to do All Souls. At All Souls there was a pizza place next door and people can bring food to the bar. We knew wanted this new spot to be a bar with pizza. It took a long time to get the lease going and we had to think about more financing but essentially we opened up a bar that we thought was going to serve pizza.
Soung: We figured out quickly that if we opened up a bar with food it was going to be a restaurant.
David: Running one thing from the other, they are super different.
Soung: Because there’s food it’s dramatically different and given that component I became very involved. Leading up to the project we had someone on the team who was very locally experienced in pizza and could lead back of house who was going to run the food. The project took so long that the chef ended up needing to take a step back and wasn’t in the right spot to take on that role. At that point we still wanted to do pizza but had to figure out what to do next. We ended up going to New York to do some R&D and see if we could learn more about pizza. While we were there we met a chef, Bobby, who was great in getting us open. He’s still involved in a background way but he doesn’t live here. Then, being the busy body that I am, I got very very into the pizza dough.
“So our dough is 100% Soung. We’ve had chefs consult on some things but based on the atmosphere and humidity, the dough is unique to her and the place. ”
David: Prior to that you had done a baking deep dive and gotten super into this.
Soung: I love a rabbit hole.
David: So our dough is 100% Soung. We’ve had chefs consult on some things but based on the atmosphere and humidity, the dough is unique to her and the place.
Soung: I could not have done this without lots and lots of help and getting counsel from friends who were like “you are crazy to do it this way.” We started with commercial yeast with 00 (a type of flour) imported from Italy but I wanted to do sourdough. I started wanting to do local flour, I didn’t want to ship flour from across the ocean. Every single day the dough would be slightly different so we had to flex a lot.
David and I were talking about this the other day. Working with a product that changes slightly every day is unique. We still make our sourdough crust every day and we have that focus on working with this living thing that is consistent but changes slightly every day. It consistently will always taste good.
Picture provided by Soung & David. Photo Credit to Deb Lindsey from The Washington Post
So is NYC Pizza R&D Just code for eating pizza around New York?
David: Yes! I brought a little pizza cutter with me and we would cut slices of a piece or two of pizza. The very first place we went was Scarr’s in the East Village and we got drinks and the waitress put the pizza down and I pulled out the pizza cutter.
Soung: It was super fun but boy it was a lot of pizza. We loved Ops.
David: We had dinner there and it was amazing.
Soung: Great wine, great salads, hitting all the notes of what we wanted to do. The other spot we loved was L’Industrie and their pizza was fantastic.
David: Best slices in New York in my opinion.
“We do things a certain way because it’s the right way to do it. ”
How did you finance the Little Grand and what did you do differently than All Souls?
Soung: The big difference this time is that we applied for an SBA (Small Business Administration) loan. We still had friends and family invest as well. We also put a big chunk of money in between us three co-founders. The Little Grand was a lot more expensive to build out than All Souls but I don’t know if it would have occurred to us to look outside for venture capital or private equity money and that isn’t something we were interested in. We love that our friends and family want to be part of the process.
David: I mean to be clear we were very fortunate to have friends and family that wanted to invest. For context, these aren’t insanely large investments from people. Our basic investment at All Souls was $5,000. One thing that’s really cool about All Souls is that the landlord invested and bought into what we were doing. When we were able to pay those people back from All Souls they then wanted to buy in with The Little Grand.
We’re really thoughtful about how we ask for money and don’t take money when we can’t pay it back or it requires us to change the way we work. We’re not interested in making a ton of money. We do things a certain way because it’s the right way to do it. It’s as basic as the cocktails. We try to run things in the right way and treat our employees, our guests and our purveyors in a fair and positive way. We could do a lot of things to make more money and we don’t do them because we think there’s a right way to do things. One thing about All Souls is that we get so many requests a week to rent out the space and I’ve never wanted to do that because I’ve gone to spots I like and they’ve been closed for a private event and we want people to be able to come when we’re open. We’re still trying to give people value and run with all these ingredients. It’s never been about the bottom line.
Soung: I think the simplest way to say it for the Little Grand, “Hot pizza, cold drinks, warm people” is our tagline. We’re not saying we’re the best in the world but all of those things illustrate that we’re trying really hard to deliver.
David: For us, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Have I had better pizza than ours in the world? Sure. I’ve also had better drinks too. But I think what we’re trying to do is create an environment where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
The Little Grand just got a New York Times shoutout, which is amazing, have you seen a big influx in business since then?
Soung: I’m usually in the kitchen so I’m not hearing as much from customers. We didn’t know we were mentioned in The New York Times until someone told us.
David: One of our wine reps was like “congrats on the New York Times mention” and I was like “what are you talking about?” Maybe this is just because we’ve now been around for almost three years and more people are coming to visit but we’ve seen more tourists. However, day to day sales have been pretty consistent from before the mention to after.
Soung: We had a guy on Instagram, Big Schlim, who reached out to us about a food review and was super nice. After he posted his video we saw a big uptick. One of our delivery drivers told us he saw us on Tik Tok. It has never been so overwhelming like a Michelin mention so we’ve been Abel to absorb those smaller spikes well.
David: We definitely see some folks come in and mention that they saw us on Tik Tok so we hear about the mentions on social media but we’re still staying in our lane in the sense that nothing so far has been so big we haven’t been able to manage demand.
Okay last question. How do you balance running a business while having a personal relationship?
Soung: Our joke is that since we are still married after all of this we can survive anything.
David: Sometimes it’s “I love you I hate you.” I think parts were hard. As involved as Soung has been in All Souls it was different. It was really a place that I was running but Soung was a huge part of it. She was the fabric in so many ways. The Little Grand is a place where I am not as much of a part of how things look. We’ve never been as good about pulling punches and we spend time learning to be better communicators not only between ourselves but in front of staff and in front of people. It’s always a work in progress. A lot of this is Soung because she wasn’t always the better communicator but she’s become the better communicator. There was one year for my birthday present I wanted 1 day a week to not talk about work since Soung’s tendency is to just work. I need time to check out and I definitely need a day off.
Soung: There’s a different approach we both have. David needs separate work and life boundaries and I don’t need those. I like everything all the time. I tend to constantly think about work so it’s hard for me to not drag him into it. There have been times when we weren’t working together as much or during covid when we were working from home and David would be taking a nap on the couch and all I see is David doing nothing and there’s a list of things to be taken care of. But ultimately it balances out and it’s something we think about a lot.
Soung and David’s “Best Of” List
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(Soung) Rhizome- It’s really hard since there are different ones for different reasons. What Rhizome is doing is really cool and the bands they bring in are great small indie bands. I’ve gone to see friends' bands play there.
(David) Black Cat- We just have a history, I’ve been going there as long as it’s been open. Iit’s a kind of perfect space, a bigger band could sell it out and a smaller band could still play there. It covers a lot of ground.
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(David) Red Hen - It’s on the way home from All Souls and we’ll stop by there for dinner and just go sit at the bar. The food is amazing. The Pug is also great, I used to go there after work all the time.
(Soung) Red Hen - I like having a martini there before dinner. Also home, I like having a drink at home too.
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(Soung) Izakaya Seki - The food is amazing. I love to het a bottle of Sake and just eat a lot of stuff. Also, get their potato salad. Just trust me.
(David) Gemini - They just do a great job. During the pandemic they did 16in rounds in New York style and it was just amazing.