Illustration by Bob Scott
Most restaurants are tenuous ventures, held together by a ragtag, passionate group of people overworking themselves to exhaustion every night. Margins are slender. For owners and chefs, it’s a month-to-month endeavor.
Add an outside complication — say, the city turning the street outside your restaurant into an ongoing construction zone — and it isn’t going to take long at all to threaten an otherwise stable operation.
And that’s just what’s happened on a stretch of Broad Street.
Since the city began construction for its Bus Rapid Transit project in August 2016, nearly 700 parking spots have been lost; two restaurants in the work zone, Jerk Pit and Betty on Davis, have closed, though it’s unclear whether or not BRT construction was a factor; and scores of others have struggled for business.
And now, with the news that the city’s completion incentive date of Oct. 25 won’t be met, some restaurateurs hard hit by construction are speculating that this existential threat to their livelihoods might stretch to June 30, 2018, the date after which the contractor will begin to incur a fine for not finishing the job.
“All the things I worried about,” says Jami Bohdan, the owner of Savory Grain, “have come true. The city promised minimal impact, with rolling closures and fast construction — but business is down, construction is delayed and I fear the contractors aren’t being held accountable.”
William Wright, the owner of Bistro 27, is equally dismayed by what he sees as the city’s failure to warn and protect businesses. “They promised a narrow disruption, but it has been major,” he says. “We’ve lost too many parking spots, and making left turns is a real problem.”
Wright says the issue has been compounded by the city’s refusal to grant Bistro 27 designated valet spots. He has resorted to crediting parking fees from nearby lots.
Others have gotten more creative.
Michele Jones, a co-owner of Comfort, saw that lunch was being threatened most of all. “With all the construction and lost parking,” she asks, “how can you leave work, circle the block four times and still have the time to sit down and enjoy a meal?”
So she and partner/chef Jason Alley channeled their love of “Rocky” movies to create a lunchtime pop-up, the Paulie, serving hoagies that can be eaten on the run. The restaurant is considering petitioning the city for valet spots that can be used for midday curbside service.
Not every restaurant has been so affected.
Rick Lyons, the owner of Lunch/Supper, hasn’t seen a dip in sales, in part, he thinks, because of the boom in Scott’s Addition. But he laments the left turn he’s lost onto his street from Broad.
His biggest concern is that the BRT ridership predictions may have been overly inflated. “I hope it lives up to expectations, but the [ridership] numbers worry me,” Lyons says. “Look at the Redskins training camp and how they’ve come up short.”
Carrie Rose Pace, the director of communications for GRTC, insists that the organization has “been very conservative with our ridership projections.” GRTC’s current figure of “3,500 per day” is a modest but significant increase over the current 3,000 daily riders along the route.
Pace freely admits that the project is behind schedule, but she maintains that the project will be completed in 2017 and that 400 of those lost parking spots will return. Until then, and perhaps even after, restaurants will resort to what they always have in order to survive: creativity in the face of desperation.
