Posted on 04/15/2006 7:53:17 AM PDT by Ooh-Ah
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.
Jim Mayer, a veteran who works at the Department of Veterans Affairs and who helped start the steak dinner tradition, is concerned that the hotel wants to eliminate the spectacle of hundreds of severely disabled soldiers coming in and out of its building or that the restaurant's repeated requests for a new elevator or escalator to accommodate them was too much.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
It was an OUTSTANDING place to eat as well!
Ping
The Hiltons have to close it because they need the money to pay for Paris' clothing bills at Slut$ Are Us.
I don't know much about this story, but this has the stench of Code Pink all over it. I'll bet they flooded Hilton with letters and calls pretending to be guests, and whining about how disturbed they were having to look at wounded soldiers.
Will they be offering food as well? Italian style T-Bone can be really, really good.
Agree but hope they find a new place long term on the ground level or with adequate elevators/escalators.
A t-bone with spaghetti on the side? :) Good for you, Italy!!!
First I'd heard of that. Thank you both for calling it to my attention. And a special thanks to our Italian friends! I remember an Italian firm donated $75k to Fran O'Brien's a while back for these troop dinners.
For now. The new government may have a different opinion:
Expatriate backlash (Italian expats give victory to leftist Prodi over Berlusconi)
Darn right! Where did you get this info? Can you post or send me a link?
Yep, that's the one. I wasn't about to attempt spelling it from memory. :-)
I wish these *business considerations* would be spelled out ... was the restaurant not keeping up the turnover, the freebies to the soldiers putting too big a hole in the profit margin? It doesn't sound this way, not from the other stories. So what's the problem, Lisa??
... concerned that the hotel wants to eliminate the spectacle of hundreds of severely disabled soldiers coming in and out of its building ...
Are these people trying to say that the *spectacle* of some maimed soldiers is off-putting to other patrons? Is it that the maimed are soldiers? Would these patrons be as unable to enjoy dinner if the people with wheelchairs and prostheses were civilians? Is this America or have we disabled now become the untouchables that they have in the Middle East?
... or that the restaurant's repeated requests for a new elevator or escalator to accommodate them was too much.
Seems a good many other small businesses have had to comply with wheelchair/disabled access, if a hotel chain like Hilton could explain why this was such an outrageous hardship with which to comply, I'd love to hear it.
It's right there in the article, darlin'! :-)
I hadn't linked to the original article, so missed this. I thought you were quoting a later separate source. Thanks!
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