‘It’s Just Not Sustainable’: D.C. Restaurants Pushed to the Brink

The Washington Post | By Warren Rojas, Tim Carman and Emily Heil | April 14, 2025

“What you created here was really special,” a father stops to tell Brookland’s Finest co-owner Tony Tomelden while herding his two school-age kids out the restaurant’s door on a bustling Friday night. “This restaurant has given us so many happy nights.”

Tomelden puts down his tumbler of Irish whiskey and throws his arm around the guy’s shoulders, assuring the bummed-out well-wisher — one of many flooding back into the Northeast Washington hub in recent weeks for a last hurrah — that it’s not his fault the decade-old eatery is shuttering.

“I just couldn’t cut people. And that’s what we should have done,” Tomelden says of the minimum-wage-related pressures that ultimately forced his hand to close the restaurant on Sunday. “I thought things would change.”