Fran O’Brien’s Steakhouse to Close

Every Friday night for the past 2 1/2 years, Marty O’Brien and Hal Koster have provided steak dinners and bottomless drinks to severely wounded service members in wheelchairs and with prosthetic limbs. They were brought in vans and trucks from Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Bethesda Naval Hospital to O’Brien’s Stadium Steakhouse at 16th and L streets NW. Most of them were encountering their first exposure to the outside world since they were wounded. But on May 1 O’Brien’s’ lease of the restaurant in the basement of the Capital Hilton expires and Hilton officials say they made a business decision not to renew it. According to Koster, negotiations broke down after he made repeated requests for the hotel to install a wheel-chair lift or elevator for handicapped access to the restaurant. O’Brien and Koster are searching for another location in the Washington area so they can continue the tradition.