Valentina Pasquali

Washington DC – In April 1968 Washington DC was burning. As the word spread that Martin Luther King had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, street violence broke out in the Shaw/U Street neighborhood, heart of the African American community. Rioters stormed through the area for four consecutive days, leaving twelve dead, 1,097 injured and over 6,100 arrested. During the unrest, 1,200 buildings were set on fire, including 900 stores. Most businesses never reopened again. Only one, small, family-owned restaurant decided to keep serving its chiliburgers in spite of the fires; Ben’s Chili Bowl emerged from the smoke on April 8^th 1968 and is still running today, forty years later.

Ben and Virginia Ali, who opened up shop at the intersection between U Street and 14^th Street on August 22^nd 1958, celebrated the fiftieth birthday of the restaurant last week, surrounded by a cheering crowd of supporters, long-time costumers, local notables and politicians. “Ben loves his hometown more than many of us,” Eleanor Holmes Norton, Congresswoman for the District of Columbia, said Friday morning at a press conference. “This is not just a eating place, or a business, this is a family eating place and a family business, and families don’t go out of business…Long live Ben!” Rep. Norton continued. The Mayor of DC Adrian Fenty was also in attendance. “It doesn’t take long to realize that this is an institution of Washington DC,” Mr. Fenty said and then, reading a resolution of the DC City Council, he proclaimed August 22^nd Ben’s Chili Bowl Day, while entrusting the Alis with the symbolic key to the national capital.

The most remarkable aspect of this 1950s-style deli – which now appears on all travel guides as a must-see in Washington – even more than the food itself, is the determination and dedication with which Virginia and Ben have kept it up through some of the roughest moments of the recent history of Washington DC — a history that closely resemble that of contemporary America. The Alis, graduates of all-black Howard University, started Ben’s Chili Bowl in the segregated United States. The restaurant soon became the center of a lively African-American community lined with jazz bars and theaters that became known as “Black Broadway.” It was the regular hangout for celebrities like Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Bessi Smith, Cab Calloway, Nat King Cole and Bill Cosby.

In the following decades Ben’s Chili Bowl lived through the civil rights movement, the assassinations of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy; it survived a recession that battered the national capital in the early 1970s, days when U Street turned into a dodgy area populated by crack-dealers and plagued by unemployment and boarded houses. Finally, the long and narrow restaurant famous for its half-smoked hot dogs made it through five years of construction work when, in the late 1980s, an additional line to the Washington DC metro system was built underneath U Street, turning it into a big dusty hole in the ground. And yet again, while all the other businesses were shutting down, the Alis kept a side door to the restaurant open and kept serving chilidogs to a few regulars and the many on-site workers.

It is no surprise, then, that the U Street community joined Ben’s Chili Bowl’s 50^th Anniversary so enthusiastically. The festivity kicked off on Thursday night, with a VIP reception for local celebrities, at which chilidogs and champagne were served, and a gala at the nearby Lincoln Theater, both of which the Alis offered for free to all of their affectionate costumers.

I spoke to a few of them queued up outside of the Lincoln Theater waiting to take their seats. Jakob and Gwendolyn Adams have been going to Ben’s for 38 years. They belong to the Breakfast Club, a group of residents originally from Saint Louis, Missouri. “We meet up at Ben’s for breakfast every other Saturday,” they told me. Barbara King moved to Washington DC in 1960; “I went to school on 9^th and U Street and I used to eat lunch at Ben’s everyday; that is why I’m here.”

The Master of Ceremony was also a long-time friend of Virginia and Ben, actor Bill Cosby. “Even the foreigners now come to DC for Ben’s,” Mr. Crosby said. “And they can’t even say half-smoked, and then they go back to their buses smelling like one,” the internationally known comedian joked to an animated crowd.

The simple fact, beyond the glamour, is that Ben’s Chili Bowl remained the center of a community through the neighborhood’s few ups and many downs, providing local residents not only food, but comfort, jobs and financial help in case of need and becoming a social, cultural and economic pillar for the local residents.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism