Walter’s Sports Bar and Restaurant had a streatery on N Street SE for five years, but was told to remove it after the city adopted new guidelines
WASHINGTON — A D.C. bar owner that had to remove the streatery outside of his business earlier this year is blaming its absence for an underwhelming weekend of sales.
“Event at Nats Park, event at Audi (Field), full college football, full pro football, and still down 20% over what we did last year opening NFL weekend,” said Jeremy Gifford, the owner of Walter’s Sports Bar and Restaurant in Navy Yard.
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“We’re a big, huge sports bar, so on these days where there’s that many people coming into the neighborhood, that’s when we’re able to cover ourselves on Thursday night when there’s 20, 30 people sitting around the bar watching a Caps game on TV,” he said.
D.C.’s temporary streatery program, which began during the pandemic, ended late last year. Restaurants and bars had to apply for permanent streateries. Walter’s did that. Its streatery had been right-turn lane on N Street Southeast since 2020, but the owner says the District told him streateries are no longer allowed in turn lanes.
Gifford’s streatery came down in February under D.C.’s new permanent streatery rules. He says the city would not allow it to remain in the right-turn lane where it had stood for five years.
“Right now, the streatery is really just an illegal parking space that multiple people are taking multiple times a day,” said Gifford pointing to a row of parked cars in the right turn lane where his streatery was.
He it added another sixty seats to his restaurant. When those tables disappeared, he says some of the business did too.
“Being able to have this extra space on these big days is critical, and we’ve seen two restaurants this year just on N Street alone close,” said Gifford. “Making a hard business harder, all for a weird right-hand turn lane, just seems really weird to me.”
Gifford wishes city decisionmakers had worked more creatively with businesses to find a way to keep the N Street streateries.
“Taking off the hat of the government official who just looks at the regulation and doesn’t see any sort of gray area and saying like, well how do we make this work?” he said.
Gifford says that during events at Nats Park, N Street Southeast becomes one-way, with both lanes of traffic feeding onto South Capitol Street, so his old streatery wasn’t much of a factor on game day.
DDOT’s published streatery guidelines do not specifically list right-turn lanes as prohibited locations. WUSA9 reached out to DDOT to ask why Walter’s was required to remove its streatery. We are waiting for a response.
Dining and Cooking