My City Was Gone
I wrote this a year ago but it was never published. I’m doing so now. — AR
I recently walked by City Buffet’s storefront and saw the windows completely covered in brown paper, and was surprised to discover that I felt nothing.
I hadn’t eaten there in months. But I used to eat there every week. On reflection, I’ve probably eaten more hot meals in my adult life there than anywhere but my mother’s house, spiking my sodium and sucking down Diet Coke and wontons, spring rolls and Mongolian beef. I went on a diet over the summer after a breakup, and lost 50 pounds in seven months. Taking and keeping them off required resolving, not for the first time, never to eat there ever again.
When I first moved to Washington, there were two downtown all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets. The first one, Hunan Palace, closed seven and a half years ago, and I felt a bit bereft. City Buffet was just two blocks away on 14th street, but it may have endured thanks to a consistent flow of Russians from the ambassador’s residence on 16th street, for whom the restaurant’s PA system played an endless tape of easy listening versions of classics like Moscow Nights and Katyusha.
I used to be something of a connoisseur. The only all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet left that I know of is the Blue Pearl, a sprawling place in the bottom floor of a struggling shopping mall in Silver Spring, Maryland. For what it’s worth, and by now this should tell you something, I never really liked it.
I arrived in Washington a few months before before George W. Bush’s second-term midterm, the wave election that brought Democrats back to power in the House and Senate, sweeping a new generation of young twentysomething college graduates to the city to find a world of possibility as we learned how to spend discretionary income instead of cooking and tried to decide whether to go back to graduate school after our first job.
The bars in Adams Morgan were stuffed to the gills with people wearing adult kickball league t-shirts, pounding electric mixed drinks and twist-off Bud Lights. The eight Obama years brought hundreds of new bars and small-plate restaurants to the city, fueled by an upsurgence of Top Chef contestants like Mike Isabella, Marjorie Meek-Bradley, Bryan Voltaggio, Kwame Onwuachi, and Spike Mendelsohn.
And Top Chef wasn’t the only reality show training its sights on the nation’s capital. The Real World even set its 23rd season in the District in 2009, right as the birthplace of the lime rickey was starting to overflow with local alcohol. First with beer—2009 marked the founding of DC’s first new production brewery since Prohibition, and a half-dozen more swiftly followed—and then, inevitably, the harder stuff: local distilleries bottling gin, vodka, whiskey, rum, and bitters within Washington’s Senatorially disenfranchised borders. An endless stream of bars serving $14 cocktails soon sprang up to serve them.
The explosion in Washington bars and restaurants was not merely due to the election of a youthful, Jay Z-quoting president. From roughly 2006 to 2010, as I remember it, Washington faced the effects of the housing and financial crises. Skittish investors and banks seemingly sat on their thumbs and bode their time. In the meantime, what restaurants were open made constant usage of innumerable daily deals sites to fill their seats: not just Groupon, but also LivingSocial, KGBDeals, Scoutmob, Travelzoo, Amazon Local, Restaurant.com, Washington City Paper Real Deal, and Washington Post Capitol Deal.
Of course, on a 50% discount, the life of Riley became a lot more affordable for a policy wonk on an entry-level salary. Like iPhones, food and booze became consumer luxuries, and Washington restaurants specialized in liquid deals, particularly bottomless brunches and happy hours.
The coupon sites declined and the building boom commenced right around the same time. By the end of Obama’s first term, money had gotten a whole lot cheaper, and people had become a whole lot more willing to spend large amounts of it.
If they wanted to eat out, they didn’t have much choice. If you come to Washington, you’ll immediately be struck by two things: everything is expensive, and nothing is cheap. In many big cities, like New York, there are off-the-beaten-track restaurants that occupy the price middle ground between the $20-$40 a plate you pay at a “nice” place and the $2-$4 you pay at McDonald’s. Likewise, lots of cities have dive bars, places where you can get a bottle of beer for two bucks, even if the fancy cocktail bars charge four times that amount. In Washington, other than scads of fast-casual Chipotle clones, that middle range almost doesn’t exist.
That’s one thing I miss, and it may be why I habitually gravitate to cheaper places. In my hometown of Atlanta, for example, there’s Manuel’s Tavern. Founded in 1956 by a son of Lebanese immigrants, it’s a local journalists’ and politicos’ landmark where you can get a hot dog or meatloaf that tastes better than you expect, where most of the 30 draft beers can come in a pitcher, where you can always find a table with easy viewing of a TV tuned to Georgia college sports. Atlanta Magazine describes the crowd of people there as “eccentrics and intellectuals,” and God, I miss it. Its price range, its ambience, and its vintage are nearly impossible to find in the capital.
Maybe that’s because official Washington rarely puts its feet up. As the seat of government, Washington has always attracted its share of the starstruck, and celebrity culture allowed you to pay a premium for a connection to someone whose name you knew from television. And more and more of them were coming, as Washington’s booming economy covered the inflationary cost of doing business.
Washington is, as Paul Begala loves saying, “Hollywood for ugly people,” and celebrity has always trumped all. And Hollywood sometimes returns the favor. But modern shows like Veep and House of Cards (both British imports) are as cynical as The West Wing was naive. All are more cartoonish than realistic, stroking a viewing public for whom the word “Washington” is more a bugbear of wasteful spending and ill governance than a living city with a half million residents who pay federal taxes without voting representation in federal government.
That easy cynicism coupled with deep ignorance has taken hold, and anti-Washington rhetoric in both fiction and fact is at permanent fever pitch. That partly explains why, shortly after the election, a pretty good neighborhood pizza place, one where I’ve eaten many times, was shot up by an extremist who saw on Reddit that it was a secret front for a Clintonite child sex ring. The horrifyingly absurd is numbingly commonplace.
The presidential transition brought widespread predictions that Washington’s food scene would change from the fusionist small-plate gastronomy of the Obama years to a more literally meat-and-potatoes sensibility as the other party came to power. Just before swearing his oath of office, the new president opened an eponymous hotel with a swanky chophouse just inside; later, he was reported to have ordered an expensive dry-aged steak to be served well-done, with ketchup. The restaurant’s chef denied the report. Like nearly every news cycle now, it was, somehow, exhausting.
In the end, I could understand every reason that the City Buffet closed, and in my own small way, by cutting their revenues by $10 a week, I had made a contribution. It made sense. Maybe even the Russians had bigger fish to fry.
The city always changes every two years, like Congressional clockwork. Somehow the recent changes feel more profound. Still, I arrived during a wave, and, in retrospect, everything back then felt completely unprecedented, too. But I’m thirty-four now—I feel nostalgic all the time.
(Not so much for oily Chinese food. I can see from my bathroom scale that I have already had enough of that to last a lifetime.)
What I’m really nostalgic for, though, was already nearly gone when I first got to Washington: old, reliable neighborhood places that have been around for decades and don’t cost too much. There are a lot of things I can’t go back to, and I don’t want to, either—I don’t want to live in Atlanta again, and I don’t want to gorge on all-you-can-eat again. But I don’t want to live in the unprecedented any more.
