Adams Morgan Latino food market closes

Amid the sound of mariachis playing dirges and the aroma of Latin American street cuisine, a three-year-old District experiment in business incubation ended with hugs and bitterness in Adams Morgan on Friday afternoon.

“I feel very sad, but I say thank you to Pati for her cooking,” Jose Gutierrez said in Spanish, balancing a plate of three tacos in one hand while embracing Patricia Cruz, owner of the food stall El Sabor de Mexico.

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Cruz smiled and blushed. Later, she said in Spanish: “We are all left without work. I don’t know what we’re going to live from.”

Friday was the last day of what supporters say is Washington’s only open-air Latino “market,” a three-days-a-week cluster of nearly a dozen vendors under tents in tiny, triangular Unity Park, at the corner of Euclid Street and Columbia Road NW.

“Market” was a generous term almost from the beginning of the effort to give formerly unlicensed food-cart vendors in the neighborhood a sanctioned outlet for their entre­pre­neur­ship. The market was more of a pop-up food court, with a few crafts on the side, and no produce.

It became a popular lunch spot, operating most recently Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays and serving up hearty samplings from Mexico, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Peru and beyond.

The idea was to give the vendors a little boost on the path to more stable food service careers, maybe even restaurants of their own. The vendors never made the transition from the perk of free space on city land, even as they complied with licensing, tax and health regulations.

Roxana Olivas, director of the D.C. Office on Latino Affairs, said the city will not renew a $50,000 grant that the Greater Washington Hispanic Chamber of Commerce has used to help administer the market. She said the main reason is that it is technically “illegal” for commercial vending to take place in city parks, although that issue was not seen as a roadblock when the Latino affairs office launched the program during the Fenty administration.

Olivas and Angela Franco, president of the Hispanic chamber, said they are working to facilitate a move by the vendors to private land on 14th Street in Columbia Heights, where the merchants would have to share the $2,500 monthly rent. Franco said the chamber has applied for a separate $50,000 grant to support Latino businesses citywide that could also be used, in part, to provide marketing assistance to the vendors if they move.

“These individuals have been there three years,” Olivas said. “Other individuals need help and want to be entrepreneurs. Why not share the opportunity to other people?”

Several vendors disputed that the move to 14th Street is a realistic possibility, with some saying the rent is too high and others saying permits to sell food there have not come through.

“How can we sign a contract to pay that money when we don’t have permits to sell?” said Freddy Vides Jr., whose mother, Moritza Guevara, owns the stall El Sabor del Salvador.

At least one merchant is privately contemplating a move back to unpermitted street vending.

Over the years, some Adams Morgan restaurateurs have complained that the vendors pose unfair competition; the vendors say they’ll face the same resistance on 14th Street. Olivas denied that business pressure was behind the decision to pull the plug on the market.

“We couldn’t compete with their prices,” said Ernesto Giron, owner of Churreria Madrid, adjacent to the market, who said his Saturday lunch business rose 75 percent when, in the wake of business complaints, the city recently closed the market on Saturdays.

Friday, Giron had customers at just one table, while dozens of people flocked to the market.

“You can’t find this quality, quantity and affordability in the restaurants,” said Antonio Contreras, who works in a store.

“Any time I have a visitor in town, I bring them here,” said Sarah Allen, a Treasury Department employee who lives nearby and brought an out-of-town guest to try Eliezer Segui’s Puerto Rican roasted pork. “It’s delicious and feels special that it’s on the street.”

Going from stall to stall, saying adios, was also Mercedes Lemp, the former head of the Latino affairs office who helped launch the market.

“I feel sad about it because we felt we were taking something that was an issue in a negative way, these illegal vendors, and we had a nice solution to the problem.”