Many a candidate seeking elected office has tried to convince voters that he or she deserves a chance as an outsider to it all. In this race, Shallal, for better or ill, may have the best claim.
Since 1974, when Washington held its first election after being granted the ability to elect its mayor and City Council, all six mayors have been African-American. The first elected mayor was the presidentially appointed mayor-commissioner in the years before home rule. Three of the others were City Council members, another the Democratic National Committee treasurer, and one was the CFO of D.C.
Shallal was born in Iraq and moved to the Virginia suburbs of Washington at the age of 11. He suffered from a terrible stutter and was 80 percent disfluent into his early 30s — in both Arabic and English. He may be an artist, an activist and a restaurateur but has never held public office.
But observers say he might have a shot. “He is outside the political structure, but he’s not outside of D.C. culture,” said Tony Norman, a community activist and an advisory neighborhood commissioner in the city’s Ward 1.
And Shallal is putting forth his art, his activism and the influence of his businesses — on job creation and neighborhood revitalization — as better credentials to run the city than those of his competitors.
For those who don’t know Washington, his friends say, the label “restaurant owner” or “businessman” doesn’t completely capture the impact of Shallal’s businesses.
“He is democracy’s restaurateur,” said Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate and former Green Party presidential candidate. “He broadened his definition of a restaurant to make it a community gathering place and has brought more people to more issues, discussion, enlightenment and debate.”
Shallal met Nader in 1987 when he opened the restaurants Skewers and Café Luna in a brick row house on P and 17th streets. Nader, whose office was nearby, went for the Middle Eastern food. The men became friends, and with Jerry Brown — whose grass-roots campaign for president Shallal ran as a volunteer in northern Virginia — they brainstormed ideas for creating a political salon that could promote democracy and civic engagement. Shallal decided to transform the floor above Skewers into a meeting and organizing space. When he began to toy with the idea of adding a bookstore, Nader’s interns walked over with boxes of books Nader donated to the project.
“Jesse Jackson, Howard Zinn, Alice Walker — we all used to hang out drinking and discussing changing the world,” said Shallal.
Soon the quarters were cramped. At the same time, Washington’s rapid development began to expand into the U Street corridor, a neighborhood just a few blocks away that had been home, historically, to a thriving African-American community. (Howard University is nearby.) But the area was the epicenter of riots after the 1968 assassination of King and were devastated in the violence.
A Whole Foods, condominiums and expensive restaurants began popping up on what were once blighted streets. New business and residences riffed on the neighborhood’s rich African-American heritage but served mostly white patrons and homeowners. The sense among some — that “Chocolate City” was being left behind in D.C.’s rapid gentrification — appeared validated when developers constructing a new housing development, named for Duke Ellington (who was born nearby), circulated glossy advertisements with renderings of what the completed building and surrounding area would look like. The images depicted residents and passersby, none of whom were African-American.
But it was available retail space in another development, the Langston Lofts, named for poet Langston Hughes, that Shallal zeroed in on. He has long found comfort in memorizing the lines of Hughes’ poetry.
Shallal mortgaged his house, signed over his car and, with a loan from the Small Business Administration, transformed the space into Busboys and Poets. (The name is an homage to Hughes’ time as a busboy at Washington’s Wardman Hotel, where he worked before gaining success as a writer.)
Shallal went on to hire 30 people, 20 of them full time with benefits; he has helped found Restaurants Advancing Industry Standards in Employment (RAISE), which advocates for health insurance for employees and other practices.
“Andy has been an example of how to do business ethically in the city,” said a man who goes by Mr. Tate. The two met at a small-business development forum; Tate runs a barbecue cafe that trains local high school students for careers in the food industry.
Shallal also opened Eatonville Restaurant across the street, inspired by Zora Neale Hurston. (Sharing a corner, the sibling businesses are meant to reconcile Hurston and Hughes, who fell out after fighting over rights on a collaboration.)
Since opening the flagship Busboys on 14th Street between U and V, Shallal has opened three more, with a fourth on the way. Across his businesses, he employs 530 people. (More than half are full time; everyone has sick leave and access to health care, and the full-time employees have retirement plans with matching contributions.)
“What he did was bring a real cutting-edge business into the ward. He had a vision that was very different than most of these types of bars, and it became an exciting place to be, and it’s added to the excitement of U Street,” said Jim Graham, councilman for Ward 1.
Now developers pay the costs for Shallal to open a Busboys and Poets, using it as an anchor to attract other businesses and investors. They are hoping the changes he helped bring to U Street can be re-created in other parts of the city.
Muriel Bowser, a rival would-be mayor, said, “I like Andy. He’s going to open a restaurant in Ward 4,” referring to a Busboys and Poets launching later this year in Tacoma.
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