The bar will be closing this Sunday after a five-year run.

Penn Commons

Come Sunday, the Capital One Arena bar and restaurant scene will become a little less boozy, as American tavern Penn Commons is closing permanently after brunch. The bar announced the news Wednesday night via its Twitter account, ushering in a handful of replies from disappointed patrons. (One person on Twitter lamented, “Why!? Why does every place I love die here.”)

The Chinatown bar is closing after five years due to financial issues, according to David Wizenberg, partner at Passion Food Hospitality, the group that owns Penn Commons. Though this year has been particularly hard on the place, “the restaurant has never really done as well as we would have hoped,” Wizenberg says.

“There’s a very serious problem in D.C. with the over saturation of restaurants,” he says. “You can look around Chinatown and see a lot of restaurants that have closed, because it’s difficult to maintain the rent when you’re not getting the same amount of customers.” (In the past 16 months, Honeygrow, Matchbox, Graffiato, and 10 Tavern have all departed Chinatown.)

Wizenberg mostly chalks the bar’s financial woes up to the government shutdown, which he says kept a lot of folks at home and out of Penn Commons. The partial shutdown of the Blue and Yellow lines this summer may have also played a role. He says patrons have told him that they haven’t been to the bar much lately because they’ve been opting to telework to avoid the Metro delays.

The bar has also often been a go-to for sports fans headed to the nearby arena, and Wizenberg points to the Capitals’ early exit in the playoffs as another reason for the bar’s recent financial woes.

Penn Commons is the second food establishment in the Passion Food Hospitality restaurant portfolio that’s closed over the past year. On New Year’s Eve, the group shuttered Cajun-Creole restaurant Acadiana after 13 years in operation. Passion Food Hospitality also operates seafood restaurant PassionFish in Bethesda and Reston, pan-Asian TenPenh in Tysons, Burger Tap & Shake, and District Commons, both in Foggy Bottom.

Penn Commons also isn’t the only bar that’s recently departed the Capital One Arena area: Chain sports bar Greene Turtle closed in March after its lease was bought out by Monumental Sports & Entertainment, the same group that owns D.C.’s hockey and basketball teams, as well as Capital One Arena. Some local outlets and sports fans have speculated that Monumental plans to turn the bar into a sportsbook.

To commemorate Penn Commons’ closing, the bar will be running happy hour all day on Saturday and Sunday, with $4 draft beers, $6 wine and cocktails, and 50 percent off select bottles of beer and wine. They will also be running a “countdown special,” with 50 percent off all food and drink items that are running low. The discounted pricing will kick in whenever there are 10 or less of a specific menu item left, but guests won’t know if they’re getting the discount until they get their check.

Although the bar is supposed to officially close after brunch on Sunday, Wizenberg says that there won’t be an exact closing time. “We’ll continue to operate and when we run out of things, we’ll close.”

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