Barmini’s Devin Gong on his plans for H Street NE’s Copycat Co.

Devin Gong is taking his well-regarded bartending talents from Barmini to H Street Northeast.

Gong, the former craft cocktail bartender at Jose Andres’ Barmini, hopes to open Copycat Co. at 1110 H St. by the end of October, he told me. The permit for the renovation work in the Hubert Newsom Real Estate building dropped on Monday.

Copycat will feature a “cocktail program” on the second floor that “will be more about de-specializing, revivals of classics, and transplanting various drinks from my past experiences both as a bartender as a guest,” Gong said.

“There is a cocktail matrix that I have been working on for the past year or so that organizes roughly about a dozen old cocktail books along with recipe books that I worked on before into classic categories of drinks,” he said.

“The idea is for the bartenders to learn, honor and credit cocktails that have been made already before considering creating an original,” Gong continued.

On the first floor, Gong’s restaurant will serve some of his favorite food to eat while drinking, in addition to the food that his mom makes. Options will include skewers, pork baos and pot stickers, “the food that went along with street beer tents” in his native Northern China.

The food will be served “fairly cheap” and also late, he said, and there will be a casual beer garden in the backyard.

The Copycat name, by the way, is a take on Baltimore’s landmark Copycat building. Gong attended the Maryland Institute College of Art.

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