Chinatown DC Hotel, a Tribute Portfolio Hotel

A new Tribute Portfolio hotel planned one block from Capital One Arena would preserve seven historic Chinatown rowhouses behind a nine-story addition, developed by the Moy family, whose patriarch first sketched a hotel for the site in the 1970s, alongside Rift Valley Capital. At 90 rooms and roughly $75 million, it is pitched as a preservation project as much as a hotel, though it has also drawn local pushback over the eviction of two longtime neighborhood businesses.

The place

H Street NW, one block from Capital One Arena and the Gallery Place-Chinatown Metro station, on a stretch of Washington's Chinatown that has lost much of its historic retail base over the past two decades. This project sits on one of the last significant Chinese-American-owned property holdings in the neighborhood.

The concept

This is not a reflag of an existing property: it is a new hotel built by preserving the facades and structure of seven historic Chinatown rowhouses and adding a new nine-story building behind and above them. The site belongs to the Moy family, whose roots in DC's Chinatown run three generations deep. Patriarch Hamm Hong Moy, a WWII veteran, opened Veteran's Market at 6th and G Streets NW after his service and reportedly sketched an early hotel concept for the same site in the 1970s. His son Eddie Moy, discovering the old proposal, is now developing the roughly $75 million project with Rift Valley Capital, led by Stephan Rodiger, pitching it as a way to keep the neighborhood's remaining Chinese-American cultural footprint intact rather than clear it for another generic downtown hotel. The project has not been free of friction. Two longtime tenants, Full Kee Restaurant and Gao Ya Hair Salon, vacated the rowhouses in mid-2025 to clear the site, and a community group organizing as 'Save Chinatown' has campaigned against Rift Valley Capital, arguing the development accelerates the neighborhood's displacement rather than preserving it, a characterization the developer disputes, saying the departing restaurant's owner had long known the building could be sold.

Dining & wellness

The plan calls for a Chinese restaurant, an Asian market and other culturally relevant retail woven into the ground floor, positioned as a partial replacement for what the rowhouses' outgoing tenants provided rather than a generic hotel lobby. No chef, F&B operator, or spa and pool details have been announced.