Post Mortem: The Occidental Restaurant

FOR 65 YEARS THE OCCIDENTAL RESTAURANT attracted the rich, the famous, and, most of all, the powerful. Everybody who was anybody ate there, and its walls were lined with the proof: signed and framed photographs of its best-known patrons. By the 1950s more than 2,500 of them covered the walls.

The Occidental Restaurant went out of business in 1971, but now it’s back, along with more than 600 of the original signed photographs, on loan from the Columbia Historical Society. They were donated to the society by W. Hamilton Crawford, a Crofton developer who bought them when the Occidental went on the auction block in 1972. Washington’s original power lunch place wouldn’t be the same without them.

This article originally appeared in the May 1987 issue of Regardie’s.

Columbia Historical Society Occidental Restaurant W. Hamilton Crawford