The Tombs sits in a cellar at 1226 36th St NW, one block from Georgetown University's front gates, and it has been the Hoyas' bar since 1962. Low ceilings, wooden booths, crew oars and old rowing photos on the walls, and screens that fill on a Georgetown basketball night. It is a college bar that grew up without losing the point of being one.
Georgetown alumnus Richard McCooey opened it beneath the 1789 Restaurant and named it from a T.S. Eliot line, and more than 60 years later it still runs as the campus living room, per the bar's own history. Generations of students have marked their 21st birthdays here on a "Tombs Night," and plenty of them come back as alumni to do it again.
The room reads collegiate without being a theme. The brick-and-wood cellar holds a mix of students, professors and neighbors, the fireplace runs in winter, and the screens over the bar carry Hoyas games to a crowd that actually watches them. It was also the real-life model for the bar in the 1985 film St. Elmo's Fire, which is the kind of pedigree most college bars can only wish for.
What to order is the classic move: a pitcher of lager for the table and the Tombs burger, which has fed Georgetown students for decades and still anchors the menu. The kitchen runs beyond bar food into a proper New American lineup, and weekend brunch from 10 or 11 a.m. is a Georgetown institution in its own right. Pricing holds at $$, fair for the neighborhood and the history.
Who it is for: the Georgetown student, the returning alum, and the visitor who wants a slice of college-town atmosphere a few blocks off M Street. It plays as a sports bar on game nights and a neighborhood tavern the rest of the week. For the full field, our ranked guide to the best sports bars in Washington DC places The Tombs at the head of the Georgetown list.
Best time to go is a Hoyas basketball night when the booths fill and the screens carry the game, or a weekend brunch before a walk along the canal. There is no Metro stop in Georgetown, so plan to walk from Dupont or Foggy Bottom or take a bus or ride down. For a different Georgetown register, Mr. Smith's covers the piano-bar end of the neighborhood, and our round-up of DC's best bars for watching the game maps the rest.
What keeps The Tombs more than a campus relic is that the standards never slipped with the years. The burger is still good, the pitchers still come cold, and the room still treats a Georgetown game like it matters, which is why a 60-year-old cellar bar still draws students and alumni to the same booths. Our full Washington DC guide and the national sports bars index round it out.
The Tombs also runs a long tradition of student rites that keep it more than a bar, from the 99 Days celebration before graduation to the birthday rounds that fill the booths most weeks. Alumni weekends and Hoyas tournament runs pack the cellar, and the staff has seen enough of both to keep the lines moving and the pitchers coming. It helps that the kitchen, shared with the 1789 Restaurant upstairs, holds the food to a standard most college bars abandon. Sixty years on, the formula has not moved: a cellar, a game, a pitcher, and a crowd that keeps coming back.
Sources: The Tombs (official) · Yelp (updated May 2026) · OpenTable · Ghosts of DC
