![]() ![]() People do understand that we’re not trying to usurp culture and reimagine it but rather uplift it.īusboys and Poets’ overt embrace of progressive politics isn’t for everyone - one anonymous reader, commenting on a Washington Post profile of Shallal online, complained that while dining at the cafe, he “was having the extreme progressive liberal agenda pushed on me with my appetizers.” Shallal’s political positions - particularly his criticism of Israel and American foreign policy - also have their share of detractors.Īnd he has had to win over the local African-American community, acknowledging that he and the restaurant faced “healthy skepticism” about th eir intent after naming the place after an icon like Hughes. Plans for a sixth - in Brookland, one of Washington’s lastest up-and-coming neighborhoods - were announced at the beginning of December. “I look for diversity as much as possible, a place that kind of has a need,” he says of the locales he’s chosen to open Busboys and Poets, which now has five locations in the D.C. Which is exactly as Shallal, an Iraqi-American immigrant who grew up in nearby Virginia, intended. For Washington, D.C., Busboys and Poets has always been on the edge of that trend, offering itself up as a bridge between communities - a sort of Switzerland of the gentrification wars, where urban blacks, young white professionals, hipster bike messengers and college kids of all colors come together over a menu of Southern soul food, Chesapeake Bay classics and Middle Eastern fare, with some vegan favorites mixed in. It’s a phenomenon that has gathered steam across the United States and the globe over the last decade. The result: urban gentrification, with all its ups and downs. ![]() The white population in the city, meanwhile, has skyrocketed. The most recent figures put the African-American population in our nation’s capital at just a squidge over 50 percent. It has long been known as the “chocolate city,” although as the 2010 census showed, that’s no longer such an apt description. Indeed the nation’s capital is rich in such history, thanks in no small part to the traditionally black Howard University, located not far from the original Busboys. never owned the Harlem Renaissance and it should,” Shallal says. Busboys and Poets is named after Langston Hughes, the renowned African-American poet who was famously discovered while working as a busboy at D.C.’s Wardman Park Hotel in the 1920s. “I always saw the U Street corridor as the heart of D.C.,” owner Andy Shallal, the restaurateur and Leftist political activist who is now running a dark horse campaign for mayor of D.C.
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