A surprise newcomer tucked on the second floor of late-night favorite Mayflower Club will start serving up Central and South American classics, like Peruvian chicken and continent-spanning ceviches, and playful takes on internationally beloved dishes, like patatas bravas made with crispy bites of yuca, on Friday, July 18. Selva, the Spanish word for “jungle,” has the same verdant green interior of its namesake and is influenced by the tropical jungles found in executive chef Giovanni Orellana’s birthplace of El Salvador (1223 Connecticut Avenue NW).

Mayflower Club owner Antonis Karagounis is behind the new restaurant, which is his first sit-down spot since opening Rewind Diner in 2018. The prolific restaurateur and club owner behind Decades and Ultrabar met Orellana back when he was working at Lima Restaurant and Lounge, where the chef fondly remembers starting as “a salad boy” and working his way up to executive chef for six years. The two have collaborated on plenty of concepts over the past 20 years, including Barcode, Mexican taco spot Taqueria Local, and next door’s Rewind. There were also gaps where Orellana worked with chefs like San Lorenzo’s chef and owner Massimo Fabbri and chef Matteo Venini, who helmed many Italian restaurants around D.C. before opening the wildly successful area chain Stellina Pizzeria.

Karagounis pushed Orellana to develop Selva after doing tastings for Rewind that continuously blew him away. After all these years of watching him adapt to new cuisines and develop menus for everything from sit-down spots that served lunch, dinner, and happy hour to ghost kitchens they experimented with during the pandemic, Karagounis was happy to give over the reigns to Orellana and calls Selva “his project, basically.”

“The cooking is definitely his memories from Lima and the recipes from there,” says Karagounis. “But also it’s his, I guess, culinary journey since that time, because Lima opened in 2006 and closed in 2013 and he’s done various places since then, many with me.”

Just a glance over the appetizers showcases that journey, with Spanish and Italian influences appearing in spicy lamb meatballs, tequila-steamed mussels with spicy chorizo, crispy chicken croquetas, and gazpacho that is poured in a chilled martini glass filled with rich Maryland crab. Orellana jokes that Spanish diners might disavow the spicy take on gazpacho or bacalao fritters served with a zesty tartar sauce, but they can’t say they aren’t delicious.

He adds something extra to more traditional-leaning Latin American dishes too, like potato empanadas made with a melt-in-your mouth corn dough and stuffed with more crab meat. He’s excited to to cook up “all the Central American cuisine that is not well represented yet in the area” in high-end restaurants, influenced by Peruvian, Central American, and his birthplace of El Salvador, where he grew up on a farm. Orellana’s family members in El Salvador now operate fish farms, where his love for fresh seafood grew from. “I am obsessed with ceviches … there’s nothing better the next day when you have a hangover and that completely brings you back to life,” he says.

The five ceviches on the menu document that obsession. The ceviche del chef includes shrimp and clams, plus the iconic Salvadoran additions of plenty of sliced radish and a dash of umami-filled Worchestshire sauce. The ceviches play with plenty of flavor profiles, from the ginger and tobiko in the Japanese-influenced tuna nikkei or the traditional Peruvian sweet potato and choclo (a type of large corn) in the ceviche de mariscos.

The Lima influence is really seen in the larger plates, where arroz chaufa and Peruvian chicken hit the mark with nostalgic flavors and sauces like ají amarillo and rocoto that deliver pepper-filled spice. One of the dishes Orellana is most proud of is his wagyu steak, a super-rare flat iron that comes with chimichurri sauce and cilantro rice.

The extensive cocktail menu from bartender Dennis Garcia, also from Rewind Diner, plays with Latin American flavors, from a passionfruit and mezcal sour to a coconut spritz that he uses his own coconut water concentrate in. His signature Coco Loco is a simple fresh coconut that comes with a shot of alcohol or your choosing.

For a really fun dinner experience, he can lead diners in tastings of flights of tequila and liquors distilled across the Americas, like a Colombian aguardiente, Peruvian pisco, and, his specialty, Central American rum. He worked at Zacapa Rum in Guatemala for three years, under the tutelage of famous master blender Lorena Vasquez, and loves to tell diners more about the bottles they are tasting. In the future he hopes to have late-night, “low-key bottle service” at Selva, where friends can split a bottle of tequila and chat above the booming music below in Mayflower Club.

The food and drinks feel natural in the intimate restaurant, full of lush green hanging plants and jewel-toned couches that diners can relax into before tucking into a satisfying meal. Nail Vegas of Creative Buildr was in charge of the design, making the space distinctly different from the club below.

Opening up a sit-down restaurant that spans multiple cuisines and even serves extensive cheese and charcuterie on the second floor of a bumping Dupont Circle club may seem like an odd choice, but Karagounis says he’s seen a real change in D.C.‘s club scene over the last few years. More people just want to “grab a bite to eat and hang out” and end up leaving early, while the hardcore clubbers are showing up after midnight to its DJ-driven sibling spot Zebbie’s Garden up top. He hopes the marriage of having Selva and Mayflower Club in one building will appease both nightlife crowds.