Aja Drain
It wasn’t so long ago that the lines outside of Columbia Heights Filipino restaurant Bad Saint were so long, you couldn’t count on getting in unless Game of Thrones was on TV.
But the D.C. food scene staple — once named the number two new restaurant in America by Bon Appetit— is another victim of the area’s pandemic restaurant closures. In an email Monday, Bad Saint owner Genevieve Villamora announced that the team had decided to close the restaurant. The last dinner service was Saturday, July 9.
“We opened our doors on September 3, 2015 with our hearts full of pride and passion for Filipino food and our warm, personal approach to hospitality,” Villamora wrote. “We had a clear picture in our minds of what we wanted the restaurant to be. It far surpassed all our imaginings. To be honest, it’s hard to know quite what to say.”
Washingtonian first reported news of the closure.
In an interview with DCist, Villamora cited the fact that the pandemic continues to drag on — and that many programs that were put in place to support businesses have expired — as the biggest contributing factors to the restaurant’s decision, adding that there’s just “a feeling like it’s not improving.”
“Just the idea that various policy measures that were put in place temporarily to help people in the pandemic are not being renewed as if the pandemic is over, as if needs somehow magically evaporate,” she said. “The recovery has to be long-term.”
Though she didn’t want to speak for her employees in terms of the toll the pandemic has taken, she acknowledged that she’s suffered from insomnia and had her own mental health challenges that she only recently started addressing.
“Our bodies aren’t really meant to be operating on stress hormones nonstop for two years plus,” she said. “I actually have struggled a lot with my mental health, just the weight of the responsibilities that I have and the relentless nature of pandemic business ownership.”
Bad Saint came on the scene in 2015 with a plan for longevity. “I don’t think we want to be another trend. We want to be around for a while,” Villamora told the Washington City Paper that year. “People are always chasing the next new thing, and so it’s easy enough to have a line for three months…But we have our eye on the long game.”
The restaurant proved to be wildly popular with residents and critics, serving some of the city’s most beloved Filipino food and even netting a James Beard Award for then-chef Tom Cunanan in 2019. (That was also the year that, after long holding out, the restaurant finally began accepting reservations for the small dining room — but we didn’t get to enjoy it for very long.)
But like other popular eateries, Bad Saint was pushed to takeout, delivery, and outdoor service exclusively during pandemic. Its intimate 25-seat dining room never reopened for dine-in service, though patio seats were available.
The restaurant struggled to get the word out about that patio, Villamora said, despite efforts to keep people updated via newsletter and social media.
“I think the food has been tremendous and just as delicious as ever,” she said. “But it was very hard in this pandemic environment to get information out to people and between the algorithm and people not opening emails.”
Hundreds of restaurants and other businesses in the area have closed since March 2020 — nearly 400 in D.C. alone as of last March.
As for Villamora, she’s planning to help her employees find new jobs. Beyond that, the former public policy expert turned restaurant owner isn’t focusing yet on what she’ll do next; instead, and “feel[ing] excited about the idea of rest” and “recharg[ing] the batteries.”
“It was a journey getting to a point where I was ready to let go of something that we’ve all worked so tremendously hard on. And I think part of it was just really an unwillingness to let to give up on something that we had been so determined and so dedicated and committed to,” Villamora said. “But these are really, really difficult conditions to be operating under.”
This story has been updated with comments from Genevieve Villamora.
