Loudoun Portal to the Past Serves Its Last Bit of Love

By Jonathan Mummolo (Contact)

Sunday, May 11, 2008

As she finished her shift at Johnson’s Charcoal Beef House in Leesburg last week, waitress Violet Jewell was on the brink of tears.

For more than 40 years, she has served up scrapple, country ham and porterhouse steaks that are, the menu promises, “tender as your mother’s love.”

But come Wednesday, the Loudoun County landmark will close its doors for good, and Jewell will be looking for another job. In these days of fast food and drive-throughs, it will be hard to find an environment like Johnson’s.

“I want a family restaurant,” Jewell, 76, said with the mournful anger of someone who has lost a friend. “I don’t want any of these things like IHOP and Wendy’s or nothing like that.”

Since Nov. 22, 1963 — the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated — Johnson’s has been serving country cuisine to grateful small-town regulars, even as the small town has been all but eclipsed by growth and development.

Johnson’s is the kind of place where families could get dressed up and come for Sunday dinner and weary workers could unwind over lunch, where local politicians could take the pulse of constituents and find common ground over barbecue, where breakfast regulars could expect their meals to be warming on the grill before they got x to their usual seats.

“They come in, and their coffee’s already in their cups and their tickets are already up in the window,” said Shelby Johnston, 53, the junior waitress at Johnson’s (she has only worked there three decades or so). “So if they decide they’re eating something else, they’re in trouble, aren’t they!”

But, as Johnson’s co-owner Buddy Sadak put it, “times have changed in Leesburg.”

As Loudoun transformed from a smattering of small rural towns to one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation, such places as Johnson’s have, one by one, been assimilated into the commercial sprawl. Jewell can remember when East Market Street outside the restaurant was two lanes and a car coming down the road was an event.

“I’d pray for a car to go by,” she said.

Her prayers were answered, and then some.

Outside Johnson’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, Wendy’s and Starbucks line the traffic-choked, strip-mall ensconced, four-lane throughway. There are more than two dozen banks in town, and when the restaurant is demolished, plans call for it to be replaced with . . . a Chevy Chase Bank.

“Places like this aren’t as popular as they once were. At one time there used to be lines out the doors to get in here, and we don’t have that anymore,” said Sadak, who said the workload, his ailing knees and the slowing business convinced him it was time to put the property on the market last year. “The big thing is really the growth outside of Leesburg. At one time, there were just a few restaurants in Ashburn, and there’s probably 50 restaurants in the Ashburn area now. And it’s a traffic issue, too. Getting in and out of town is not as easy as it used to be.”

But somehow, Johnson’s has remained a comforting portal to the past.

Novelties adorn virtually every part of the restaurant’s dim, chandelier-lighted interior: dozens of mounted rifles, some predating the Civil War; an antique coffee grinder, radio and telephone; a giant stuffed wild turkey — each with its own story.

The menu, bad for the heart but good for the soul, has remained basically unchanged since founder Reed Johnson opened the place, and his son Richard passed on his recipes to Sadak in 1984.

For local power brokers, that kind of consistency and laid-back authenticity has been invaluable. Meetings could be held in a comfortable, homey environment, where people could let their guard down and be authentic, too, regulars said. Community leaders could be found having discussions that shaped the town and, in some cases, the region.

State Del. Joe T. May (R-Loudoun), chairman of the House Transportation Committee, recalled organizing his first campaign committee at Johnson’s in 1993. In 2004, when he needed a place to quietly discuss whether to break with his party and support a tax increase, Johnson’s was it. And when the stress of his job mounted each week, he had Saturday breakfast at Johnson’s with his wife, Bobby, to look forward to.

“Maybe the deals weren’t necessarily struck there, but the groundwork for deals was struck there,” May said. “They know that I like Tabasco sauce for my eggs, and I don’t even have to ask. And when I leave my glasses, I know to go back to the cash register and they’ll be up there.”

Former state senator H. Russell Potts Jr., who has been dining at Johnson’s since it opened, was dumbstruck at the news that it was closing.

“For goodness’ sakes!” Potts said. “Oh, my golly! . . . I had a lot of constituent meetings there with people. You had a comfort level, and you were not intimidated by the surroundings. When they would see me eat that barbecue — particularly somebody you don’t know who asks you for your help when you’re in the Senate, they hardly know how to act around you — and when they’d see that barbecue juice drip down your chin, pretty soon they’d be telling you their problems. . . . The damn barbecue juice on my tie, it was a badge of honor.”

Sadak, 53, said he plans to take it easy for a while. He figures he’ll eventually get back into the restaurant business. His father and grandfather were in the business, and it’s “in my blood,” he said.

After finishing her lunch Wednesday, Rose Deimler, a customer since 1967, sauntered up to the cash register to cash a $50 check.

Johnson’s is “my bank, too,” Deimler explained with a grin.

Soon, it will be everyone’s bank. And that, patrons say, will be everyone’s loss.

Tagged: Loudoun, restaurant

Your Thoughts...

What action towards school development would best fit your community's needs?