My Dad Won a Restaurant in a Poker Game — But It Was Losing Money. Now It’s a Historic Business.

My dad won a restaurant in a poker game. That was in 1971, the year I was born. I grew up in that restaurant, and now I own it.

Our restaurant is called Mr. Henry’s, and it’s an institution in the heart of Washington, D.C. — just six blocks away from the U.S. Capitol. A lot of people think I can run this place with my back turned. It’s old and established, they figure, so what’s there really to do? But that’s not the case.

The restaurant business is never an easy one — especially not today, with the economy the way it is. So I have to keep evolving. But when I look back at the history of Mr. Henry’s, I can see that’s nothing new. If a business can last long enough to be historic, that’s entirely because of its ability to change.

My restaurant, Mr. Henry’s, began life in 1966, when Henry Yaffe took over a place called 601 Club. It had big windows, and back then, it was still taboo for people to be seen drinking in bars. So Henry replaced them with stained-glass windows from a church being razed nearby. He also salvaged some pews, which still serve as booths in the restaurant today. After renovating around the customers, one day, he changed the name to Mr. Henry’s.

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A historic beginning

Henry was gay, and this was the 1960s. You had to be careful. But he opened Mr. Henry’s with the intention of being both gay-and Black-friendly. That was important. He was very egalitarian. We have this iconic photograph from the 1968 riots where all the windows of Mr. Henry’s are boarded up. “Soul Brothers and Sisters Work Here” was spraypainted on the pieces of plywood. Mr. Henry’s survived the riots.

Henry was a hustler in the best sense of that word, in that he was always looking for ways to make the business work. That included live entertainment. He met a young public-school teacher who began playing in the restaurant on weekends. She was talented, and started to draw a crowd. So Henry converted the second floor of the building into a jazz room, and installed her as a headliner. Her name was Roberta Flack. She got discovered, and the rest is history.

My family came into the picture in 1971. Henry knew my father, Larry Quillian, who was another businessman on Capitol Hill, working in real estate. They were in a poker group that played every week, and one night Henry bet the restaurant in a game. My dad ended up winning. He always says that he got me and the restaurant in the same month — though I think fatherhood put a damper on his poker playing. He had to be a little more conscientious with his money after that.

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Fixing what’s broken

When my father took over Mr. Henry’s, he realized that while Henry had a great eye for opening restaurants — he must have opened a dozen in the years since — he wasn’t so good at operating them. The place was losing money. To set things right, my dad began by focusing on inventory: Liquor and food had been disappearing! He caught a cook stealing a whole box of cold cuts one night. It turned out he was running a sandwich cart somewhere during the day, and we were his supplier for lunch meat.

My father also created a talent pipeline for management. He took three promising waiters and made them assistant managers. He wanted to see who rose to the top. It worked. Over the course of a year or two, one became the general manager. Dad incentivized him by giving him little bits of ownership over the years. His name was Alvin Ross, and he stayed on as general manager for 40 years.

When I was a kid hanging out at the restaurant, my father often analyzed out loud. I think any child of an entrepreneur will understand this: Your parents will do the analysis aloud so you get the benefit of hearing their thinking. In the summer before second grade, I went with my father every morning to count money in the restaurant. When I came back in second grade I took a test, and they put me in third-grade math.

When I grew up, I started my career as an analyst in the energy sector, and then took some time off to raise my kids. But when Alvin retired in 2014, I decided to buy him out.

By then, the jazz room upstairs was defunct, so I brought it back. We gave the whole restaurant a lick and shine for its 50th birthday. The stigma attached to drinking in bars was gone by then, and we needed to make it so that people could see in, because that’s how you attract customers. So I took out the stained-glass windows, and put them by the bar. After we made that switch, longtime customers came in and said, “I don’t know what’s different, but it’s different.” I loved that. We didn’t want to change the ambiance. We just needed to modernize it.

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Facing modern challenges

A lot of things have changed in the decade I’ve been running Mr. Henry’s.

Since the pandemic, supply costs have really gone up. We’ve had to increase prices. We’ve had to modify staffing. Meanwhile, customers have changed. People aren’t drinking as much or going out as often. Before COVID, we had customers who came four or five days a week, having three or four drinks a night. Now they might come in once a week, have one or two drinks, and go home early. I think people got used to cooking and making their own drinks. Home became where they’re most comfortable. And uncertainty in the economy over the last couple of years has made people more conscientious about money.

But if you can’t rely on a group of regulars coming in multiple nights every week, you need to find more customers. So that’s what we’ve been working on: steadily growing our customer base by luring people out of their homes, out of their comfort zones. That means offering things they can’t get at home. We have live jazz every night now. We work with a game store down the block to host weekly board game nights. We’re launching a gospel brunch on the weekends. And we finally decided to partner up with Grubhub, which we resisted for a long time because we didn’t think pub food would travel. We’re not getting a lot of orders, but we’re getting a steady number.

You have to change, even if you own a historic business. You have to make sure your menu is changing, and the way you’re reaching out to people is changing. But what’s stayed the same is the culture — the “everybody’s welcome” element of Mr. Henry’s.

One thing our bartenders are really good at now is engaging people in conversation and introducing them to their neighbors. In a society where everybody’s stuck on their phones, our staff helps anyone there by themselves connect with others. That theme is part of our outreach now: You’re not going to be lonely when you’re here. And when you come back, somebody’s going to know your name.

That’s what keeps me going, and why I keep working at it. And it is work. But we need these watering holes and gathering places, these businesses that add character to our communities. If we don’t keep evolving to keep them going, we’ll all be worse off.

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