It was just like any other Sunday, recalls Andrew Dana, owner and founder of the Call Your Mother deli in Washington DC. “I was at the Georgetown store until about noon and then I left because we close at 2pm and I said, how much can happen in the next two hours? By the time I got home, my phone had exploded.”
Dana’s staff were eager to tell him about the deli’s newest and most famous customer: the president of the United States. Joe Biden had waved from his extensive motorcade as his son, Hunter, and a member of the Secret Service collected four bagels and left a tip of more than 50%. The publicity boost was instant: sales at Call Your Mother’s locations in Washington are up almost 80% over the past week.
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“And more than that, company morale is through the roof,” Dana added. “It’s absolutely been a lightning bolt for the whole staff and everybody’s proud and excited. It’s a pretty awesome week.”
It was an early sign that Biden intends to engage with the city he now calls home. There are hopes that both he and his vice-president, Kamala Harris, could provide a much-needed boost for cultural scene hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic and focus attention on the District of Columbia’s (DC’s) long campaign for statehood.
Dana, 34, born and raised in Washington, added: “After so many small businesses have had such a rough year, to have them out and about is definitely going to drive business to places that desperately need it. It’s an amazing thing and the energy in the city is so different now that they’re in office. It is two thumbs up.”
There was no such enthusiasm for the former president Donald Trump in DC, a Democratic bastion where he polled just 4.1% against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election and 5.4% against Biden in 2020.
During four years at the White House, Trump only patronised one restaurant in Washington: his own. For a night out he would enjoy a well-done steak with ketchup at BLT Prime at the Trump International hotel, half a mile from the White House. When his staff ventured out, they were often booed and heckled.
Although Biden famously commuted from Wilmington, Delaware, to Washington during his 36 years as a senator, he had eight years as vice-president to get to know the capital. Harris was a student in Washington in the 1980s and served as a senator. Earlier this month she and her husband, Doug Emhoff, were spotted at Floriana, an Italian restaurant in Dupont Circle, showing their support for small businesses.
Charlene Drew Jarvis, a neuroscientist and former DC council member who works in education, said: “It will be a wonderful boost for Washingtonians because we are the centre of the world but we are also a community of neighbourhoods, and to have the president and vice-president seeking out opportunities to be in our neighbourhoods is a very significant thing for us. It’s refreshing.”
Biden and Harris are likely to offer a contrast in tastes and styles. The president’s past haunts include old school politico favourites such as Cafe Milano, an Italian restaurant in Georgetown, and Le Diplomate, a French bistro in Shaw. The 78-year-old has demonstrated his appetite for burgers, pasta, pizza and ice-cream at joints such as Pete’s New Haven Style Apizza, Pizzeria Paradiso, Ray’s Hell Burger (now closed) and Shake Shack.
Harris, 56, is more adventurous. She has been sighted at the fashionable Blue Duck Tavern in Georgetown and Cork Wine Bar & Market in Logan Circle.
She is also a regular at Bluestone Lane, an Australian-inspired cafe near her home in the West End. The Washington Post reported: “On weekend mornings before Harris’s own run for president, Emhoff would come downstairs from the couple’s two-bedroom apartment and put his name on the waiting list.”
The Post reported: “The restaurant would text him when it was time to come down and the pair would take their regular seats at table 201 near the bar. Harris would get a regular latte and an Avocado Smash. Emhoff ordered the Green Baked Eggs, said cafe manager Chanel Hammock.”
Bluestone Lane’s website now has a congratulatory message for Harris on its website and promises: “An Avocado Smash at table 201 will always be ready for you.”
Jarvis, a fourth-generation Washingtonian whose son was a contemporary of Harris at the city’s Howard University, added: “Apparently she has a very eclectic interest in restaurants. It can be Ethiopian, it can be Jamaican, it can be southern comfort, it can be higher end. She calls herself a foodie and she and her husband cook.”
Harris has also helped bring national attention to Howard itself. She delivered its commencement speech in 2017 and held a press conference there when she announced her run for president. She is the first vice-president to graduate from an HBCU (historically Black college and university).
Some presidents have embraced Washington while others have kept it at arm’s length. Bill Clinton was spotted on early morning jogs and at long dinners at establishments such as the Bombay Club and Nora. George W Bush rarely went out on the town but Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, brought some much needed glamour.
When he was president-elect, Obama dropped in for lunch at Ben’s Chili Bowl, a landmark in the African American community that was a favourite of Harris during her student days (Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen was another). As first lady, Michelle frequently ate out with friends.
Sally Quinn, an author, journalist and famed Washington host, said: “The Obamas went out. They they had a lot of date nights and they tried out a lot of different restaurants in Washington. They were always trying out the coolest, hippest new restaurant there was.
“Trump came here and he had nothing to do with Washington. He was completely divorced from the city and so it really was like a sort of occupying army. There was just no communication with the Washington community. I think that one of the reasons he didn’t go anywhere was because he was afraid he wouldn’t be well received – and he was right.”
Quinn, the widow of Ben Bradlee, a revered editor of the Washington Post, added: “When the Obamas and Bidens went out the people who had the restaurants were thrilled and it always ended up in the paper, and that’s good for business in Washington.
“I think Washington has gotten over its sleepy town reputation but New Yorkers still raise their eyebrows and look down their noses at Washington in terms of a cultural centre and a centre of great cuisine. The fact is there are a lot of fabulous restaurants here and a lot going on. Not now, but before Covid.”
Despite Washington’s rapid gentrification and booming arts and culture scene, Trump, a New Yorker who switched his official residence to Florida, showed little interest in his temporary home on the Potomac River.
He was the only president never to attend the annual Kennedy Center Honors. A month after taking office, he took a brisk tour of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture where his reaction to the Dutch role in the slave trade was: “You know, they love me in the Netherlands.”
In late 2019, Trump did show up to watch the Washington Nationals in the baseball World Series but was met with loud boos and chants of “Lock him up!” and “Impeach Trump!” He was more at ease regularly travelling outside the city to play golf at his club in Sterling, Virginia.
Sidney Blumenthal, a biographer of Abraham Lincoln and former senior adviser in the Clinton White House, said: “It wasn’t Washington; it was Trumpistan. It was like the capital of a former Soviet republic where the tyrant would go to his fortress, the Trump Hotel, and that was it for him.”
That’s the return to normalcy: Biden walking to the ice-cream store or the bagel shop
Sidney Blumenthal
Blumenthal recalls Biden indulging his penchant for ice-cream in Glover Park. “When he was vice-president and senator, he was well known in our neighbourhood for his patronage of the local small ice-cream store. His picture was up there as vice-president with his family. That’s the restoration we want. That’s the return to normalcy: Biden walking to the ice-cream store or the bagel shop.”
Such interaction with the city’s communities and neighbourhoods could also provide fresh impetus for campaigners seeking to make DC the 51st state of the union, giving its 700,000-plus population full representation in Congress.
This week Tom Carper, a senior member of the homeland security and governmental affairs committee, led a group of Democratic senators in reintroducing legislation to grant statehood to DC. Last year a companion bill passed by a vote of 232-180 in the House of Representatives.
Both Biden and Harris have expressed support for the step but Republicans have expressed staunch opposition, with some suggesting that DC is dominated by bureaucrats and lobbyists rather than authentic working families.
Meagan Hatcher-Mays, director of democracy policy at the grassroots social movement Indivisible, said: “Historically, conservative politicians have prevented DC from becoming a state to prevent DC’s black residents from building or wielding their political power. It’s past time to give district residents a voice in Congress and the power to govern its own affairs.”
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