Onwuachi also opened the upstairs bar to the public. Gorsuch said in his interview with The Post it was too little too late. The post High-profile DC restaurant The Shaw Bijou closes two and a half months after opening appeared first on WTOP.A neon sign featuring J.J. It’s not often that you can say a restaurant was truly original, but in the case of Henry at the Life Hotel, it’s an apt description. Johnson’s kitchen specialized in Pan-African cuisine, mixing staple dishes of the African diaspora and beyond - jollof, piri piri sauce, West African peanut sauce - into the fine-dining tradition. The restaurant’s mission, as Johnson told me when it opened, was to expose the world to the power and the potential of African-inspired cooking in an environment that was unapologetically black, where hip-hop would blare, where the staff was comprised almost entirely of people of color, and where the dining room featured one of the most diverse crowds south of 125th Street.ĭuring its 11-month run, Johnson had no problem drawing critical acclaim around his restaurant’s cuisine. He earned a glowing one star from the New York Times, and landed on both critic Pete Wells’s and GQ critic Brett Martin’s lists of the best new restaurants of 2018. What’s more, Johnson appeared just this week in an ambitious Times profile of black chefs who are changing the American food scene. (Johnson’s first cookbook, Between Harlem and Heaven, won a James Beard Award in May.)Īnd then, suddenly, the restaurant closed. If Johnson knew the end was nigh, his mile-wide smile didn’t betray it, but the finish appears to have arrived swiftly. The restaurant’s website disappeared, as did its social-media accounts. (And a banner celebrating Johnson’s Beard Award still pops up when you visit Craveable’s website.) No one involved - Johnson, the management company Craveable Hospitality Group, or the hotel - offered a reason why. When restaurants close - especially restaurants that display all the trappings of success - owners and chefs often scramble to publicly thank their supporters, offer their condolences to the employees who will lose their jobs, and (almost inevitably) discuss the difficulty of running a small business in New York. With Henry, none of that happened and the seeming silence feels unsettling, almost as if people want us to forget that the restaurant even existed in the first place.Ī veritable blockade has been thrown up by everyone involved. Craveable Hospitality issued a boilerplate statement that the company has “concluded their collaboration at Life Hotel in New York City,” as if Henry were little more than a pop-up. Johnson offered a firm “no comment” about the closing. Pam Wiznitzer, who opened the attached bar, Gibson + Luce, and ran Henry’s bar program, quietly left back in January. Employees at the hotel’s reception desk have also apparently been instructed to say nothing and to forward all inquiries to Craveable. The situation immediately calls to mind the abrupt closing of Washington D.C. Chef Kwame Onwuachi’s restaurant, The Shaw Bijou.
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