A beloved Anacostia restaurant—one of the few sit-down restaurants in Ward 8—closed its doors on Friday.

Cheers @ The Big Chair’s owner Dionne Bussey-Reeder, who challenged At-Large Councilmember Elissa Silverman during the last city-wide election, says her landlord, Curtis Investment Group, declined to renew her lease.

Bussey-Reeder says the lack of options in the area was one of the reasons why she chose to locate her restaurant there.

“We wanted to help conquer this food desert,” Bussey-Reeder told WAMU. “When no one else wanted to be over here, we came.”

The closing of Cheers @ The Big Chair means that fans will temporarily be denied the restaurant’s crab fries, which every patron interviewed by WAMU said was a favorite.

“It was a whole different concept,” said Marsha Middleton, who patronized the restaurant whenever she had meetings in the neighborhood. “They’ve got french fries everywhere. But Dionne—they’re the ones that came up with the crab fries.”

“They’re not stingy with the crab,” said Shawn Spencer, who frequented the restaurant on his lunch breaks. “You taste crab with every bite. That’s what makes it special.”

But the significance of the restaurant’s closing is not just about those Old Bay, crab, and mayonnaise-covered fries. Now, the area around Cheers @ The Big Chair, Anacostia’s Martin Luther King Jr. corridor, is changing. A new Busboys and Poets location opened a block away earlier this month.

Despite some residents’ and activists’ fears about displacement, Bussey-Reeder insists that the presence of Busboys actually would have improved her business.

“It’s not a negative, it’s a plus,” she said. “People who never thought about coming to Anacostia are coming to Anacostia, and we appreciate that.”

But Middleton says she’s concerned the city is not doing enough to help small businesses as D.C.’s neighborhoods become more and more developed. “Why can’t you have some tax breaks for some businesses that are there that have been there for a long time to help them continue to stay?” she said.

“Southeast is coming back,” Spencer said. “It’s good in some respects, and bad in some respects. We’ve got to find a balance or a happy medium somewhere.”

As for those crab fries, Bussey-Reeder said fans will not have to wait long to enjoy them again. She said she’s searching city-wide for locations for two new restaurants.

“Crab fries is gonna be with us until we close our doors forever, and that won’t happen in this generation,” she said. “My granddaughter has a responsibility to keep this thing going.”

This story originally appeared on WAMU.