When Gravitas debuted brunch service Saturday, it should have been a shining moment for the American restaurant’s chef and owner Matt Baker.
Instead, a widespread power outage in the Ivy City neighborhood hit 59 minutes into brunch and pulled the plug on the restaurant, leaving Baker and his staff apologizing profusely to guests like myself.
I was sipping on a cocktail when the lights went out. Then I saw the emergency lights kick on and wondered what was going on. I soon found out.
Servers said they were sorry for not being able to bring out certain items, which included waffles and lattes. Manager Yousef Riad apologized as he poured free glasses of rosé to brunchers, then apologized again because the credit card machine was down, forcing diners to wait while staff calculated their bills manually. And he apologized a third time when he called diners who’d already left to ask them for the last three numbers on the back of their credit card. (Luckily, everyone called back and provided the numbers, Baker says.)
Baker himself went from table to table apologizing and asking brunchers to give Gravitas another shot. Because the restaurant uses gas stoves, Gravitas could make most of what was on the menu, but Baker substituted a free dish for the ones the kitchen couldn’t prepare.
On Twitter, he lit into Pepco.
https://twitter.com/Chef_mbaker/status/1106972595923177472
Christina Y. Harper, communications manager for Pepco, confirms that in addition to Saturday’s outage, there were outages in Ivy City on March 3 and Dec. 16, 2018 that each lasted under two hours.
Baker estimates he lost between $1,200 and $1,400 from the most recent power outage as a result of compensating guests with free food and drinks. But shuttering the seven-month-old restaurant on a Saturday simply wasn’t an option, he says.
“The biggest thing is it’s a small business and Saturdays are important to us and it’s also important for our staff as they depend on tips and hours,” Baker says, adding that he’d been building the brunch up for weeks. “I felt it was the right thing to do, to serve the guests, even if we’re taking a financial hit.”
As construction continues throughout Northeast D.C., power outages have become a nuisance for people living in Ivy City and sometimes, beyond. Saturday’s outage affected 1,200 customers and spread to Union Market, causing some vendors there to close.
Pepco says Saturday’s power outage happened because of ongoing construction near Florida Avenue and 3rd Street NE. Crews, who had not been doing work for Pepco, had dug into an underground cable, damaging the utility’s infrastructure.
Most affected customers lived or did business between Montana Avenue NE and New York Avenue NE, and were bordered by Florida Avenue NE and West Virginia Avenue NE, Harper says.
While Pepco returned power to about 1,000 customers in Ivy City at around 2:20 p.m. that Saturday, parts of the Union Market neighborhood remained dark until 8:30 a.m. the next morning.
Included in the count are more than 300 residents living in the Hecht Warehouse luxury apartment building across the street from Gravitas. I went there after brunch, and the outage forced us to take the stairs because the elevators weren’t working.
That also meant resident Peter Loftus, who is the general manager of the Ivy City Smokehouse, couldn’t retrieve heavy foodstuffs he ordered for the restaurant and sent to his home.
Nearly 50 Hecht residents wandered over to the restaurant during the blackout to wait it out, as they often do when the power’s out, Loftus says. The smokehouse remained open because it’s not on the same power grid as other parts of the neighborhood.
Yet Loftus has mixed feelings about the influx of visitors, because he doesn’t like profiting off other restaurants’ misfortune—three other restaurants in the area—Dock FC, Ari’s Diner, and La Puerta Verde—closed, and I saw employees being sent home.
“I never want to take someone else’s crowd, so to speak,” Lotfus says. And he knows what it’s like to be embarrassed when your restaurant has no power.
Loftus says he’s experienced four power outages since the smokehouse opened in 2016. He remembers the first one happened on a Saturday within the first 90 days of opening. While he didn’t have to throw away any food, this particular blackout dragged on for four hours, prompting him to send people home and soothe angry customers. He estimates he lost thousands of dollars that day alone.
“It’s crippling the only way I can describe it, it’s like getting an injury,” Loftus says. “You can’t operate the normal method that you do. You have to make changes.”
The other two times the power went out for Gravitas this year, Baker was serving dinner from his tasting menus that start at $90 per person. He says those outages lasted between four and six hours. (Pepco places those outages at less than two hours each.)
He kept Gravitas open on those days too, because the outages surfaced towards the end of the dinners. Those blackouts, he says, helped prepare him and the staff for the one that nearly derailed his brunch service Saturday. The brunch guests were understanding about the situation, and so were the reservation holders whom staff called to warn about the power problems—most of them ended up coming anyway, Baker says.
Going forward, Baker says he’ll train staff on how to better use the manual credit card machine so staff won’t need to call customers after the fact. And he’s considering designing a special menu to roll out in the event of yet another power failure—it’ll likely include grilled items that don’t require an oven or another machine that needs to be plugged in.
“You have to be prepared for anything and the biggest fear is that this happens on a Saturday night or a Friday night,” Baker says, saying those days make or break his week. “Hopefully this never happens again and we can move on with our lives.”
