On a sunny Sunday in late August, live jazz percolated through Georgia Brown’s, which had been serving gumbo and grits in the shadow of the White House since 1993. The brunch crowd was so large, and so hungry, that the restaurant ran out of food.
Around 7 p.m., last call sounded for drink orders — and for Georgia Brown’s.
“I just felt like the captain of the Titanic,” said the co-owner Ayanna Brown. Between rising operational costs and dwindling customer traffic since the pandemic, she couldn’t see a way forward.
For three decades, Georgia Brown’s was a vibrant culinary symbol of the era when Washington was the nation’s first large majority-Black city, dishing out Lowcountry cuisine to K Street power brokers and tourists from Kentucky alike.
Among its regulars was Marion S. Barry Jr., the four-term mayor. Vernon E. Jordan Jr., a civil-rights leader and top aide to President Bill Clinton, held court over lunch. A year after the restaurant opened, The Washington Post described it as “a picture of Washington as it would like to be: sophisticated, prosperous, effortlessly interracial,” citing guests like Denzel Washington, Wesley Snipes, Ted Koppel and the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson.
Tastes change. Restaurants fail. But the closing of Georgia Brown’s reflects how soul food restaurants, most of them Black-owned, have slowly retreated from Washington’s landscape, as they have in many other American cities.
The casualties in the District of Columbia include Horace & Dickie’s, renowned for its fried fish, which closed its Washington restaurant in early 2020. (Another three remain open in Maryland.) District Soul Food, on Capitol Hill, succumbed in 2021. The Bussdown DC closed last December after about a year and a half serving what it described as pan-African cuisine “fusing Caribbean and Cajun Creole flavors” in a bustling food hall near George Washington University.
Torrie’s, on the edge of the Howard University campus, fed students and locals for 30 years before shuttering last year. A sign on the restaurant’s red brick wall still advertises soul food classics like beef liver, catfish and collard greens. Faded photographs of the many celebrities who once squeezed into its red banquettes now look out on an empty dining floor.
“We’re seeing a decline in soul food options,” said Shawn Townsend, chief executive of the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington, who ate brunch at Georgia Brown’s a few weeks before it closed. “I think it’s a huge loss for the city.”
At the same time, he noted, this increasingly cosmopolitan city has a solid core of restaurants that speak to the Black experience in Africa and the Caribbean. Acclaimed chefs like Kwame Onwuachi and Marcus Samuelsson have drawn on those traditions in ambitious new destinations like Mr. Onwuachi’s Dōgon and Mr. Samuelsson’s Marcus DC.
“The incredible thing about Black culture is that it lives always in multiple lives,” Mr. Samuelsson said. “Black culture always wants to show that it’s not monolithic.”
Marcus DC, which opened in June, remixes Mid-Atlantic cuisine with influences from Mr. Samuelsson’s upbringing in Ethiopia and Sweden. Based in the fashionable NoMa neighborhood, it charges accordingly. Its oysters flavored with South African piri-piri sauce cost $25. At Georgia Brown’s, oysters were fried and served with Ma’s Pickle Slaw for $15.
“So many restaurants are catering to the new D.C.; Georgia Brown’s spoke to the old D.C. — Chocolate City,” said the cultural scholar W. Ralph Eubanks, using the nickname that the funk musician George Clinton bestowed on Washington in 1975. The proportion of Black residents in the city first fell below 50 percent in 2011.
As demographics change and a younger generation of customers comes of age, menus are in flux — even at the Florida Avenue Grill, which opened in 1944 and claims to be the world’s oldest soul food restaurant.
Jay Hawkins, who became the owner in June, said she wants to appeal to the area’s newer residents, with vegan dishes and eventually cocktails. But she also wants to retain customers who remember when the restaurant served pig’s feet — for $5.95, on Saturdays only, according to an undated menu archived at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
She said she fields daily calls from older customers demanding chitlins. “I am going to bring them back,” Ms. Hawkins said.
For now, she is merely trying to keep the business afloat, like many other restaurateurs in Washington. Dining has slumped in recent months, and some owners trace the slowdown in part to President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to tamp down what he says is out-of-control crime in the city. Cuts to federal jobs and contracts have dealt a blow to the region’s economy.
“You can tell something’s going on, that people are staying at home,” Ms. Hawkins said.
She and many other restaurateurs also say their bottom line has suffered from the passage of Initiative 82, a measure that is slowly raising the district’s tipped minimum wage.
The Florida Avenue Grill is likely to weather the current storm in part because it is a museum almost as much as it is a restaurant. During the era of racial segregation, it was a regular gathering place for civil rights leaders.
The passing of restaurants so steeped in history means more than just the fading of a culinary tradition, said Adrian Miller, author of the 2013 history “Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time.”
“We are losing huge chunks of a community’s narrative,” he said.
During the Great Migration from the rural South in the 20th century, Black families introduced their foodways to cities like Philadelphia, Chicago and Oakland, Calif. The term soul food arose in the mid-1960s to describe the food that they took north. And it became a cultural signifier.
“It speaks to a way to celebrate Black culture unequivocally, and unapologetically,” said Psyche A. Williams-Forson, the author of “Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America.”
Soul food can also embody the story of enslaved people who brought to the Americas the culinary traditions of West Africa, including dishes incorporating rice, yams and okra.
“It’s our immigrant cuisine,” said Michael W. Twitty, a historian of Black and Jewish food. During a time of discrimination and violence, he said, soul food restaurants “had to serve as refuge, resistance and joy space.”
Memories of that era are receding, said George Derek Musgrove, a scholar of the Black experience at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
“I think there’s a deep attachment to soul food among African Americans,” he said. “I also think the number of people who actually remember their grandmother standing over a pot of greens, or remember getting fresh pigs’ feet from a local butcher or a farmer who had just butchered a hog, has dropped dramatically.”
Across the country, several celebrated soul food restaurants, both traditional and updated, have closed in recent years: Mitchell’s Soul Food in Brooklyn, N.Y., Ms. Girlee’s Soul Food in Memphis, Indigo in Houston, and Ida B’s Table in Baltimore.
Not everyone thinks the closings reflect a culinary sea change. “People go out of business for different reasons,” said Johnny Ray, the founder of Johnny Ray’s Sultry Soul Food in Silver Spring, Md., a Washington suburb. He said some soul food restaurants had struggled as they became more ambitious, trying to grow beyond simple mom-and-pop operations. “You have to be consistent with the food,” he said.
Washington still has several soul-food options. You can get sweet potato pie at Henry’s Soul Cafe. The United House of Prayer for All People houses the Saints Paradise Cafeteria. Just steps from the shuttered Torrie’s, the Ethiopian-born chef Elias Taddesse serves his own version of fried chicken at Doro Soul Food.
“Popeye’s was often my go-to for comfort food after working in the kitchen,” Mr. Taddesse wrote in an email. His own chicken tenders achieve a complex tension between crispy exterior and juicy interior. The spiciest version, coated with an Ethiopian blend known as mitmita, scorches the mouth before settling into a steady heat.
At a time when healthy eating has become a major political talking point, some say soul food needs a rebranding.
“Soul food has an image problem,” said Anela Malik, a Washington-based food writer. “The perception of soul food is that it’s only these very hearty meat dishes with fatty sides. And we’re talking about leafy greens, beans, fresh tomatoes.”
Mr. Onwuachi, the Dōgon chef, pushed back on any suggestion that soul food is less healthful than other cooking, pointing to Italy’s rich cuisine. “I’m not saying eat a pound of macaroni and cheese, but also, don’t eat a pound of Parmesan, either,” he said.
Ms. Hawkins of the Florida Avenue Grill believes that at a time when so many Americans are suffering from loneliness, soul food can offer something extra: community.
“The practice of coming together and making sure everybody’s taken care of is still a very important part of the culture. It shows up in the food through a lot of stews and one-pot dishes,” she said. She hopes to hold small, family-style Sunday dinners at her restaurant.
A sense of community was palpable at Georgia Brown’s two nights before it closed. There were no celebrities or politicos, but the bar was crowded with customers ordering drinks from the beloved bartender Abel Minda, who had worked at the restaurant for 16 years.
One customer, who gave only his first name, Emanuel, compared Georgia Brown’s to the fictional Boston bar in the sitcom “Cheers.” He could sense a special spirit here.
“It’s love,” he said. “You can feel it, right?”