Last March, at a Montgomery County Council meeting in response to the New Year’s catastrophe, RW Restaurant Group owner Frank Shull put it more simply. “It places an unfair and unnatural burden on businesses,” Greenbaum says. Jackie Greenbaum, who recently shuttered her much-loved Silver Spring restaurant, Jackie’s, cites the DLC as the reason she’ll never open another eatery in Montgomery County. While his resignation has led to a new push for reform, the effort is one more chapter in a long, fraught history of wasted task forces, unpassed legislation, and interjurisdictional battles, all fueled by the liquor authority’s $30 million in annual revenue. At the time, the DLC’s New Year’s debacle-which led to the resignation of its director, George Griffin, a county native who’d held the position since 2001-seemed like a final straw that would lead to the reform of Montgomery’s liquor business.īut since then, restaurant owners in the county have come to see Griffin as only the latest fall guy for a system whose unreliable deliveries, limited selection, and lack of accountability are endemic. More than 50 Montgomery establishments spent their holiday week scrambling to make up for similar shortages, chalked up to a clerical error at the department’s Gaithersburg warehouse. When the DLC Christmas delivery finally arrived on the day before New Year’s Eve, “they just dumped it all and rolled out,” says Vasile, who also owns the Adams Morgan bar Grand Central. Even so, says Brickside’s owner, Brian Vasile, the restaurant ran out of eight or nine items: “It can’t get any worse than them just not coming.” To keep his taps flowing at the busiest time of year, Brickside’s manager drove from one DLC store to another-the department also operates all of the county’s hard-liquor stores-to secure enough alcohol to get through the week. From two days before Christmas until two days before New Year’s Eve, the DLC-an 80-year-old government entity that maintains a monopoly on the county’s alcohol supply-missed its deliveries to Brickside, shorting the Woodmont Triangle eatery by more than ten kegs of beer and about 50 cases of wine, liquor, and bottled beer. The culprit: the Department of Liquor Control. In the last week of 2015, a familiar disaster struck Brickside Food & Drink in Bethesda.
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