Hanumanh, the Laotian restaurant that came to Shaw last summer, has been tapped as one of GQ’s best new restaurants in America for 2020. 

The high-brow recognition comes at a troubled time for the 7th Street restaurant: Mother-son owners Seng Luangrath and Bobby Pradachith decided to close Hanumanh and their three other area restaurants due to the coronavirus closures. The owners decided to completely shut down operations.

“With many considerations, take out options resulted to be unsustainable and right now our main priority is maintaining our staff safely and healthy,” reads a March 22 post on the restaurant’s Facebook. Pradachith has launched a GoFundMe to support employees, which has raised more than $23,000 so far.

The GQ list was compiled after critic Brett Martin visited 23 cities and 93 restaurants in a pre-COVID world in his search for America’s best. The final result strikes a different tone than in year’s past. Several of the 16 picks face pandemic-induced uncertainty. By the time GQ published the list, one of the restaurants mentioned had closed for good, while others marked their first days of business since the coronavirus shut them down. Noting the impossibility to predict what the future will hold, Martin selected those restaurants he hopes “you get to see and taste for yourself.”

The pandemic marks a complicated bookend to Hanumanh’s first year of operation. Only months after opening in June, the restaurant closed for maintenance repairs to the 7th Street building, reopening in January. During its closure, the owners ran pop ups at Destination Wedding bar, serving a truncated menu and a tiki-themed cocktail menu crafted by Al Thompson of Jose Andres’ Barmini.

Despite these obstacles, Hanumanh left a lasting impression on food critics. Martin wrote in longing memory of Hanumanh’s curry, “spiked with lychee and chrysanthemum and host to delicate chunks of white crab.” The restaurant also received three stars from Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema in February, and secured on a spot on Michelin’s 2020 D.C. Bib Gourmand Awards, a list of the best reasonably priced eateries in the area.

Hanumanh is the fourth restaurant from Luangrath and Pradachith, who originally brought D.C. its first full-fledged Laotian eatery in 2014 with Columbia Heights’ Thip Khao. The duo began with a small Thai restaurant in Falls Church, and a Laotian-Thai restaurant in McLean.