The Park View coffee shop and bar once known as Colony Club is back with a new name. The establishment, which has been closed since the coronavirus pandemic hit D.C. in March, reopened over the weekend as Doubles.
The cafe announced the new name, a reference to its trademark ping pong table, in an Instagram post on Saturday.
Owner Max Zuckerman says his business partner Ben Heller was tossing around ideas related to ping pong a few weeks ago, in part because during the pandemic the two have been “playing a lot of ping pong because no one else is using the table.”
The name felt right for a lot of reasons, he says: it alludes to doubles games of ping pong and double-shots of espresso and alcohol. It also connotes “togetherness” and helps mark a “second iteration of the business,” per Zuckerman.
Zuckerman first announced plans to change the name from Colony Club in June, as large-scale protests against police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s killing swept the District.
“Over the years we’ve been asked about the Colony Club name and what it means,” he wrote in another Instagram post. “Several customers expressed concern about using the word ‘colony,’ pointing to its very negative associations with colonialism, and further connecting that definition with the in-progress gentrification of the neighborhood.”
Zuckerman and Heller opened Colony Club in 2015. They expanded with pizza parlor Sonny’s Pizza and cocktail club No Kisses, located next door, last year.
The name Colony Club was inspired by a flower shop Zuckerman’s grandparents ran called Colony Flowers, which was also located on Georgia Avenue, and was itself named for a nearby theater, he said.
Zuckerman told DCist in June that the burden often fell to employees to explain the name. “It was sort of left to the staff to justify it or defend it, even though they really had nothing to do with naming it,” Zuckerman said. “So it started to feel unfair to the staff in addition to other concerns that we had.”
Following the protests over racial inequality, a number of local businesses have reconsidered names for their establishments or offerings.
In June, bagel joint Call Your Mother announced it would change sandwich names that referenced Black athletes and artists, and remove framed photos of rapper Drake from its walls. Late last month, the white owners of U Street NW wine bar Barkada also pledged to change its name, after receiving criticism online for using a word from the Tagalog language native to the Philippines, despite not having any Filipino offerings. Even the local NFL team decided last month to go by “Washington Football Team” until it announces a permanent replacement for a moniker that has been criticized for being a racial slur.
While Zuckerman and his colleagues started having conversations about changing the name from Colony Club before the protests began, he said the demonstrations pushed the team to think critically about the shop.
He says Doubles will put an increased focus on “being positive community members,” from how it deals with staff and customers to its role as a neighbor in Park View. He called it an “ongoing process,” but didn’t name specific items.
Despite the new name, don’t expect to play ping pong there quite yet. Doubles is currently open Wednesday through Sunday for takeout orders only, though they plan to eventually add outdoor seating.
This story has been updated to include comments from Max Zuckerman.
