A headline this week in The Washington Post reads, “‘The City is Dead:’ As Restaurant Week Arrives in D.C., Owners See a Decline in Reservations Amid Takeover of City’s Police Force.” A seminal paragraph in the story by Tim Carman and Warren Rojas read, “This August has been particularly tough on D.C. restaurants, numerous operators told The Washington Post. They were already dealing with a number of destabilizing issues — rising labor and ingredient costs, soaring rents, federal worker layoffs, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement audits, when the president announced last week that he was sending in troops and federal agents.”
The Restaurant Association of Metro Washington’s annual August Metropolitan Washington Summer Restaurant Week that over 100 dining establishments rely on to pull them through these dog days when Congress is on vacation and so are so many others is being brutally impacted by the addition of Trump’s martial takeover of the capital. An article in the LGBTQ+ weekly online magazine, Metro Weekly, reports that “the surge of federal agents stationed on 14th Street NW and along the U Street corridor in D.C. cost them thousands of dollars in lost business this past weekend.”
We deplore the conditions created by Trump’s egregious takeover of our nation’s capital, including of the Kennedy Center and Smithsonian museums that he is now seeking to transform in conformity with his angry, straight white male cultural prejudice. It is killing our capital and all the businesses in it, which could indeed be its purpose.
Since all this began in January, the first wave came in the form of people vowing never to set foot in the Kennedy Center again. This is really tough, given the marginal salaries most of the performers there receive already, and the wonderful performances of the National Symphony Orchestra and Washington National Opera and others that do so much to be a balm for so many in the otherwise rough political terrain of this capital city.
We wish all in D.C. the best, not the least because the health of the capital city matters to all of us in the greater metropolitan area. But sadly, now more and more in its suburbs are talking resolutely about staying out of D.C. altogether, many out of protest, but many more out of fear of being rounded up in indiscriminate ways by unprofessional agents of ICE and the growing numbers of National Guard.
But we can remind those people, being victims of this process as well, that there is no shortage of fine dining and entertainment venues in Northern Virginia and in Falls Church. After all, there are formal participants in this week’s Metro D.C. Summer Restaurant Week right in Falls Church, being Ellie Bird, Nue Elegantly Vietnamese, Chasin’ Tails and The Falls, as well as favorites right on Falls Church’s borders like La Cote d’Or, the Idylwood Grill and Fava Pot. More Northern Virginia regional ones are imminent, as well.
