Woodmont Grill, a longtime staple of the Bethesda dining scene, abruptly closed Tuesday night.
Hillstone Restaurant Group, which operates Woodmont Grill among several other restaurants around the country, told Axios that the “diminishment of parking over time” and staffing struggles factored into the decision. “While Woodmont Grill has represented us well with a beautiful building and many valued guests over time, we feel it is best to focus our efforts on our other restaurants,” the company said.
The modern American restaurant, originally Houston’s, first opened in 1992 and rebranded as Woodmont Grill in 2008. It’s long been one of most popular restaurants in Bethesda, known for its blend of chain-restaurant consistency (its famous spinach dip tastes the exact same as it did at Houston’s 30 years ago) and little luxuries like live jazz. It won fans with an accessible menu of veggie burgers, ribs, and French dips, but also with smart service touches: if you were midway through a martini there, your server would—unprompted—pour the remnants into a new, freshly chilled glass.
Given the restaurant’s bustling reputation, regulars expressed surprise that the it would close without warning. Employees were likewise blindsided.
A front-of-house employee, who wished to remain anonymous for privacy reasons, says none of the staff knew the restaurant would be closing until the evening of the last service. Around 7 PM, members of Hillstone’s corporate team came to the restaurant and pulled aside managers one-by-one.
“I’m assuming that’s when they told them, because a lot of the managers were upset. I think two of them ended up going home crying,” she says.
Still, the employee and many of her colleagues were left in the dark. She assumed that the corporate folks were there to tell managers they weren’t doing so well. “I went home not knowing anything of the situation until my co-worker called me and was like, ‘Check the website.’” There, she saw the public notice that the restaurant was closed.
Another longtime employee who worked in the kitchen says he didn’t find out about the closure until he read a news story about it the next morning. “It was a straight gut punch. Your heart sinks to the lower part of your stomach. Your mind starts racing. You’re trying to figure out what’s really going on. I laughed about it. I was like, ‘This has to be AI. No way this is true.'”
The employees didn’t receive official notice of the closure and their terminations until they received an email the following afternoon. The email, full of legalese, says employees will continue to be paid and receive benefits for 60 days.
As for why the restaurant closed? The front-of-house employee says word among the staff was that Woodmont Grill was last in sales among Hillstone’s restaurants. “From what I heard, we were costing the company money to stay open,” she says.
The kitchen employee says he’d heard similar rumors, but the place still seemed fairly busy. “We had days where it was slower than normal, but that happens in restaurants. All restaurants go through that. It wasn’t to the point where we thought it was going to be shut down within a day or so,” he says.
Hillstone has not responded to Washingtonian‘s request for comment.
Although the dining room often seemed busy, the front-of-house employee confirms the restaurant has long been understaffed. She says Hillstone has a policy that servers can only have three tables at a time to provide the best possible service. But because they didn’t have enough waitstaff, they weren’t always able to fill the dining room to full capacity.
“A lot of times, we would only have four servers in the morning, which means we could only take 12 tables maximum in the morning,” she explains. “Everyone said it was going to eventually close because of how bad we were doing. But it didn’t look like that on the outside to guests. But, yeah, we were struggling.”
Both employees says there had also been rumors among the staff that Marriott wanted to buy the real estate—although that is only speculation at this point.
“People are obviously upset. We really loved our team,” the front-of-house employee says. “We were really close because we weren’t a big company. Everyone knew everyone. And it was so sudden.”
Jessica Sidman covers the people and trends behind DC’s food and drink scene. Before joining Washingtonian in July 2016, she was Food Editor and Young & Hungry columnist at Washington City Paper. She is a Colorado native and University of Pennsylvania grad.
