H Street Blues.

Complaining about little annoyances and “rich people problems” is a small satisfaction in life, particularly life in the D.C. area. Some elevate DC-inspired grumpiness to an art. People don’t get out of the way on Metro escalators; parking is tight; the Brickskeller was out of both beers I wanted; people throw bricks at me on my commute. Cry me a river.



H Street NE corrals a whole lot of DC annoyances into a couple of blocks of suck for your miserable convenience. It’s got a fake name invented by real estate speculators (the Atlas District sounds better than South Trinidad). You can’t walk there from the Metro. It’s got jaded hipsters who are already convinced their neighborhood has gone to the bridge-and-tunnel dogs. And they have a point—on a Saturday night it’s also got a lot of Virginians and Marylanders, like myself, lured by the perceived edge and novelty of an “evolving” neighborhood.

I made the mistake of driving down there Saturday night to see the Oranges Band and check out Granville Moore’s. I should have known better—the restaurant recently appeared on the Food Network, and other restaurants nearby have some buzz. So it’s probably my own fault that I showed up at 9:30 p.m. and expected to be able to eat. After struggling to find parking, we arrived and were told the wait was 2 hours. The kitchen closes at 11 p.m., so, doing a little math, I interpreted that as “Don’t bother.”

W… T… F… It’s like the yupster Cheesecake Factory. This kind of thing used to happen a lot at Matchbox, another popular spot that doesn’t take reservations. The result is I pretty much stopped going. I may be a sucker who will gladly pay $30 for a beer, some shellfish, and fries, but I’m not the kind of sucker who will wait for 2 hours for the privilege. It’s enough to make me go to Applebees—I bet I can walk there, and they take reservations.