Yesterday the Washington Post reported that Fran O’Brien’s Stadium Steakhouse, a restaurant beloved by our on-the-mend combat vets at Walter Reed Medical Center, has been refused a lease renewal by landlord Hilton Hotels. The restaurant’s basement location in the Capitol Hilton will have to be vacated by May 1, 2006. [See this heart-tugging WUSA Channel 9 video report.]
The decision has created an understandable uproar in the veteran’s community: Fran O’Brien’s has been treating our severly wounded veterans to complimentary Friday night steak dinners for the past 2 1/2 years. Their generosity has become legendary, and going out for dinner at Fran O’Brien’s has become a “rite of passage” after difficult months spent recovering from serious injuries in a sterile hospital bed. Veteran’s families have begun asking Hilton Hotels to re-think their decision. To help them to do that, a petition has gone up…
Please consider signing the petition and passing the link along to others who might join us if you’re so inclined. As many of us celebrate a holiday today with loved ones at our side and good food passed all around, I don’t think there’s a more appropriate advocacy action worth your time and effort than this one.
From the Washington Post:
The steaks are great, of course.
But it isn’t the T-bones, the porterhouses or the rib-eyes that will be sorely, even painfully, missed when Fran O’Brien’s Stadium Steakhouse loses its lease and closes its doors this month.
The downtown D.C. restaurant, which has hosted a decade’s worth of power lunches, political dinners and salacious hookups, is more poignantly known for its Friday night steak dinners for severely wounded soldiers recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. “It looks like they’re kicking us out,” sighed Marty O’Brien, son of the late Redskins offensive lineman Fran O’Brien, before closing the restaurant yesterday afternoon for the Easter weekend.
For the past 2 1/2 years, O’Brien and business partner Hal Koster have made their thick steak dinners and a night of bottomless drinks one of the rites of passage for the soldiers who are steeling themselves for their postwar lives in wheelchairs or with prosthetic limbs.
They come to the subterranean restaurant, at the corner of 16th and L streets NW in the basement of the Capital Hilton, in volunteer’s vans and trucks. They’re carefully wheeled down the stairs or slowly negotiate the steps on crutches. It has become a tradition so beloved among veterans that Garry Trudeau featured the dinners in his Doonesbury comic strip.
Hilton Hotels says the decision is strictly a ‘business decision.’ After many months of negotiations with the O’Brien owners, they advised the restaurant this week they would not to renew their lease.
The Hilton has offered to help take over the Friday night dinner tradition. Management has suggested the dinners could move to a ballroom or the hotel’s other restaurant, Twigs. “Twigs? Nah, . . . they don’t get it. It’s not just about a place and some food,” he said. “I have these guys’ numbers in my cellphone. I talk to them. We check on them. Hal picks them up. . . . He brings them milkshakes.”
Of course, atmosphere might have something to do with the appeal to veterans. O’Brien’s is a virile place, with deep red booths and a long, polished bar [take a look at these photos of the place and the food!]. Sports memorabilia everywhere. A longtime hangout for Redskins players. The pool tournament on television. American flags on the walls. Some veterans have called it the first place where they’ve felt at home since they left the battlefield and months of sterile hospitals. …
O’Brien’s intends to hold two more Friday night dinners. In the meantime, the Italian Embassy has called O’Brien, offering its digs for the dinners until he comes up with another plan.
Retired Army Staff Sgt. Michael Cain will never forget the porterhouse he had on his first night at O’Brien’s, in 2003 after five months in the hospital. “It beat the hell out of hospital food,” said Cain, who lost part of a leg in an explosion in Tikrit. He spent many nights at O’Brien’s regaining his appetite, his humor and his dignity. “I really hope they don’t end this,” Cain said. “It’s a great thing that a lot of guys look forward to.”
Check out Fran O’Brien’s super hip website. Get a feel for the place; then sign the petition if you’d like to chime in. You may also wish to contact Hilton Hotels management, but PLEASE be very respectful if you choose to do so; let them know how much the troops value their Fran O’Brien’s experience and that you wish they could re-think their decision:
Online contact form [see this post for a sample letter]
There’s other contact information floating around out there, but I hesitate to add it here. It does appear that a number of groups have been working on this problem for the past week, with the consensus being that Hilton Hotels won’t budge on the decision. Rather than inundate the Capitol Hilton’s management with calls and emails, it may be better to just sign the petition; if you want to go one step further, register your complaint using the company’s online contact form.
Then, hope for the best…
