For those of you who peeked your heads in on Sunday, you may have seen my diary sharing WaPo's
report on
Fran O'Brien's Stadium Steakhouse. The restaurant is beloved by our on-the-mend combat vets at Walter Reed Medical Center and has been refused a lease renewal by landlord Hilton Hotels. The restaurant's basement location in the
Capitol Hilton has to be vacated by May 1, 2006. [See this heart-tugging WUSA Channel 9
video report.]
The decision has created an understandable uproar in the veteran's community: Fran O'Brien's has been treating our severly wounded veterans to complimentary Friday night steak dinners for the past 2 1/2 years. Their generosity has become legendary, and going out for dinner at Fran O'Brien's has become a "rite of passage" after difficult months spent recovering from serious injuries in a sterile hospital bed. Veteran's families have begun asking Hilton Hotels to re-think their decision.
To help them to do that, a petition went up. [If you haven't signed it yet, please do!] There were a lot of questions about why Hilton Hotels was attempting this bad-PR move. I've got an update for you...
The National Review Online today gives us a few more
details:
[Fran O'Brien's] is often the first place soldiers appear in public after losing limbs and it is a coveted part of their therapy. You can see the progression -- new attendees hang out mainly in the private party room; regulars migrate to the bar in the main part of the restaurant, mingling with patrons and buying drinks.
But Fran O'Brien's is located in the Capital Hilton Hotel and the lease ran out in December. The owners had been asking for a new lease since the fall and management had been assuring them it would be renewed. Two weeks ago, they were given until May 1 to vacate.
There are two possible scenarios, and neither says much for Hilton.
Scenario number one says Hilton is worried about a lawsuit. The hotel is in violation of Americans With Disabilities Act. Hilton has not made the basement restaurant ADA compliant -- part of the lease negotiation was to have been for the replacement of a non-working escalator in the Hilton lobby with an ADA-compliant elevator. Since there were no negotiations, there is no elevator. The soldiers have been using a steep stairwell or the service elevator. Perhaps Hilton doesn't know that there have, in fact, been several accidents, but the soldiers, being soldiers, are more interested in dinner than lawsuits.
ADA noncompliance is illegal, but more importantly, it is shameful when the chief victims are veterans who have been injured in service to our country. But the compliance issue is the better of the two possibilities.
Scenario number two is that Hilton is uncomfortable with so many wounded soldiers passing through its lobby on the way to the restaurant and worries about the impact it will have on the hotel guests. ...
Hilton has been inundated by calls and e-mails from Americans who are appalled to see veterans treated shabbily by a corporate giant. The Capital Hilton's website Monday -- for a few hours -- announced the eviction of Fran O'Brien's as "strictly a business decision" and that the hotel had offered to host a dinner for the troops on May 5. But by evening, the notice was gone and the website had its usual advertisement for the restaurant.
What's truly puzzling about this obviously idiotic PR move by Hilton Hotels, is the following press release I came across yesterday. It announced a grand occassion (just look at the attendance list...) held at Fran O'Brien's on March 20, 2006 -- a mere 4 weeks ago:
At a ceremony hosted by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, Pier Francesco Guarguaglini, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Finmeccanica SpA, presented a check for $75,000 to the Fran O'Brien's Stadium Steakhouse in support of a program for wounded American soldiers. The Friday "steak night" has become a valued part of the soldiers' recovery from injuries sustained in Iraq and Afghanistan. ...
The steakhouse dinners provide an ideal environment for government and military leaders to visit privately with the soldiers and their families. Many problems that otherwise seem to be hard to fix, can be solved quickly when government and military leaders meet face to face at Fran O'Brien's.
Participating in the check presentation were the Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Ed Giambastiani, Dr. Paul Wolfowitz, President of the World Bank, Ambassador Giovanni Castellaneta, Italy's ambassador to the United States, Mr. Tom Neumann, Executive Director and Mrs. Shoshana Bryen, Special Projects Director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Mr. Martin O'Brien and Mr. Hal Koster, owners of the Fran O'Brien's steakhouse. Joining the event were a number of recovering men and women from the Armed Forces, currently assigned to the Pentagon.
Also attending was Mr. Jim Mayer, a Department of Veterans Affairs employee and a volunteer at Walter Reed who helped start the steak night celebration for patients three years ago. Also present were caregivers from Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the National Navy Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, who provide invaluable support and rehabilitation services for seriously wounded soldiers. ...
Dr. Stephen Bryen, President of Finmeccanica Inc. said at the ceremony: "Finmeccanica is particularly proud to contribute to this effort. As a company based in Rome, Italy, with substantial operations in the United Kingdom and the United States, Finmeccanica is part of the community of nations and leaders with common values based on freedom and democracy."
Well, apparently, Hilton Hotels isn't part of that same community.
Ah, but this press release provided one clue to something that stumped kfred in my Sunday diary: why did the Italian Embassy pick up the phone and offer to host the Fran O'Brien's dinners until the owners found a new place? It may have been because of their recent participation in this event.
So what to do?
Check out Fran O'Brien's super hip website. Get a feel for the place via this 3-D viewer and by taking a look at the steak dinners our soldiers have been raving about; then sign the petition if you'd like to chime in. You may also wish to contact Hilton Hotels management, but PLEASE be very respectful if you choose to do so; let them know how much the troops value their Fran O'Brien's experience and that you wish they could re-think their decision:
Online contact form [see this post for a sample letter]
There's other contact information floating around out there, but I hesitate to add it here. It does appear that a number of groups have been working on this problem for the past week, with the consensus being that Hilton Hotels won't budge on the decision. Rather than inundate the Capitol Hilton's management with calls and emails, it may be better to just sign the petition; if you want to go one step further, register your complaint using the company's online contact form.
Then, hope for the best...