Paris Hilton's family booted famous restaurant that served free steak dinners to wounded vets

By C.J. Raven
U.S. Veteran Dispatch
June 13, 2007

While heiress and pseudo-celebrity Paris Hilton munches on jail fare, her family's Washington, D.C. Hotel has eliminated steak dinners for wounded American veterans.

Hilton, in apparent wonder at the press furor over her incarceration, recently issued this statement: "I would hope going forward that the public and the media will focus on more important things like the men and women serving our country in Iraq and other places around the world."

Perhaps, in her jailhouse religious conversion, Hilton will display a measure of social consciousness not visible in her father, hotel magnate Rick Hilton.

It was Rick Hilton and his board of directors who closed Fran O'Brien's Stadium Steakhouse, which operated in the basement of the Capital Hilton in Washington, D.C. The steakhouse became a second home for American veterans recuperating from wounds at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.

Every Friday night for three years soldiers flocked to O'Brien's for juicy steaks and bottomless drinks. O'Brien and Hal Koter, co-owner of the restaurant, picked up the tab. The idea was Koter's, a Vietnam veteran who still remembers the cold welcome he received when he returned home from that war.

Last year, Koter and O'Brien attempted to renegotiate their lease with the Capital Hilton for months. They were told, at almost the last minute, that they must find another place for their business.

"This is a business decision whereby Hilton Hotels is exploring several options to utilize this space," the hotel chain said in a statement released by its headquarters.

But the former restaurant remains empty today, more than a year after it closed. And the steak house has disappeared from the Washington culinary scene.

O'Brien, son of the late Washington Redskins offensive lineman Fran O'Brien, and Koter made Friday nights one of the rites of passage for soldiers who were steeling themselves for postwar lives in wheelchairs or with prosthetic limbs. Some veterans called it the first place they felt at home in since they left the battlefield and months of sterile hospitals.

They went to the subterranean restaurant, at the corner of 16th and L streets NW, in volunteers' vans and trucks. They were carefully wheeled down the stairs or slowly negotiated the steps on crutches. It became a tradition so beloved among veterans that Garry Trudeau featured the dinners in his Doonesbury comic strip.

Jim Mayer, a veteran who works at the Department of Veterans Affairs and who helped start the steak dinner tradition, believes the hotel wanted to eliminated the spectacle of hundreds of severely disabled soldiers going in and out of its building or that the restaurant's repeated requests for a new elevator or escalator to accommodate them was too much

But Hilton spokeswoman Lisa Cole said the hotel's position on the lease had nothing to do with the dinners. She said the decision was based strictly on business considerations.

Then one wonders why the space is still empty.

Perhaps Hilton, sated on bologna sandwiches and cold cereal, will reach a better understanding about the importance of O'Brien's to our nation's heroes and particularly toward "men and women serving our country in Iraq and other places around the world."

Or maybe not.

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