‘I am not giving up’: U Street club owner perseveres through commercial, personal loss

Six months into the COVID-19 pandemic, DC club and restaurant owner Aman Ayoubi was struggling. Tropicalia, his eclectic global music room and bar in a basement at 14th and U streets NW, had been closed since March, and Local 16, his restaurant and bar farther west on U Street, was trying to survive on limited capacity and hours. Then he was hit with even more bad news. 

On Sept. 2, Ayoubi’s elderly parents were diagnosed with COVID-19 and hospitalized.  Six days later, Tropicalia manager Derrick Parker called with another piece of upsetting information: Someone had stolen the subterranean bar’s drum set and much of its sound system, lighting equipment and liquor. Ten days after that, Ayoubi’s father, Assif Ayoubi, succumbed to the virus. His mother, Benazir Ayoubi, whose Afghan recipes have inspired dishes on Local 16’s menu, is now at home but remains seriously ill. A number of his relatives have been infected. 

“Since I took my mother and father to the hospital, there was a worry that I had COVID too, so I isolated. I was negative, but I am still not feeling good,” says Ayoubi, 61, referring not only to physical ailments but the emotional toll of this year.

Tropicalia is an intimate, 300-person establishment that Afghanistan-born Ayoubi opened in 2012 below a Subway fast-food outlet. Named after the 1960s Brazilian psychedelic music and art scene, Tropicalia offers live international music in the early evening hours and DJ’d pop- and rap-inflected dance music with thumping bass on late weekend nights. Mosaics of colorful Mexican tiles adorn each of the stair risers leading down from the street to the club, reminiscent of the historic Selaron Steps in Rio de Janeiro. When the venue is open, the bar and dance area are strategically dim, lit primarily by multicolored ceiling lights and a trippy mural in fluorescent paint by Pennsylvania artist Reza Ghanad at the back of the stage.

Parker, a longtime DC sound engineer and reggae musician, has managed Tropicalia since 2017. He says that while the club ordinarily makes most of its money from the crowds that come for the late-night dance tune throb, he treasures the live music offered earlier in the evening by performers such as local Balkan brass act Black Masala, Haitian band Boukman Eksperyans, and Parker’s own reggae efforts under the name Dr. Dubenstein.  

Jim Thomson of Multiflora Productions booked bands at Tropicalia for its first two years and has fond memories of gigs there by Malian guitarist Mamadou Kelly, the late DC-based Sierra Leonean musician Janka Nabay, Palestinian electro group 47 Soul, Turkish psychedelic band Mogollar, and Septeto Santiaguero from Cuba. Thomson says he sought to make Tropicalia “a home for disparate ‘roots to the future’ music from around the world and within … DC.” His best memories, he says, are “immersed in the experiences usually within about a six-hour stretch” where he would meet the groups and take them to Local 16 for dinner, walk them back to Tropicalia for their performance, and then afterward head up the stairs onto a busy U Street and send them off to their next destination.  

Over the years and up to closing for the public health emergency, Tropicalia booked a long roster of DJs for the late nights including DJ Heat, DJ Randy White and DJ Underdog. Parker has a lot of respect for their skills in keeping the club busy and lively until the wee hours.

After the club shut down in March because of pandemic restrictions, Parker would drop by the club once a week or so to check on the interior and clean up trash that was dropped by passersby on the stairs that lead to the club’s entrance. Parker visited Tropicalia on Aug. 27 and saw nothing awry. When he stopped at the club on Sept. 8, though, he discovered evidence of the thefts. Parker and Ayoubi called the police that day, but elected not to share the news with others. Now, frustrated with the pace of the police investigation, Ayoubi and Parker have decided to go public.

Parker says that when he came down the stairs and entered the club that day, he immediately noticed the large soundboard console was missing, the curtain on the back of the stage was open, and an amp was gone. He then walked into his office and saw that more things were missing. Outside his office he noticed that the thieves had tampered with the security alarm code box, pulled the covering off the electrical system and fusebox, and yanked out a number of wires. Since part of the system was digital, Parker hoped to figure out the exact time of the theft from the remaining portion of the fire alarm box, but incorrect programming rendered the time stamp as 2010, thwarting that effort.

Behind the bar, Parker saw that a cash register — empty since March — had been pried open. Parker contacted an IT consultant who determined the error message still on the register screen popped up on Aug. 29. The thieves took the hard drive for the indoor security cameras, but the club also has an outdoor video recorder that shows part of the fence in front of the club entrance. Parker says he has watched the video for Aug. 29. “I didn’t see anybody coming in or out. So maybe it’s a false date on the computer or maybe [the incident] happened on the 28th or 30th.”  Parker says he continues to view video footage. 

Parker says that, to date, two officers, two detectives and a fingerprint specialist from the Metropolitan Police Department have surveyed the club. “Whoever did this had keys and they knew everything about this place. There was no forced entry,” Parker says. 

Parker feels that the police did not do a thorough job of fingerprinting in the club. He hopes that if he can figure out the exact date of the theft, the police can also look at the footage from the city security camera across the street on the plaza of the Frank D. Reeves Municipal Building. Parker says that the incident must have occurred between his visits of Aug. 27 and Sept. 8. Parker says he hopes the case won’t be overlooked by detectives amid the increasing number of homicides in the city. 

Complicating the situation is the fact that Tropicalia doesn’t currently have liability insurance. “Insurance is like $5,000 or $6,000 and they canceled our policy on April 20 because we could not pay,” Ayoubi says. Ayoubi notes that they had to let their bookkeeper go to save money. He says he and his wife are now handling their books. 

Parker suggests that disgruntled former employees may have targeted Tropicalia. Initially the police were suspicious of Parker, he says. But since he took a DNA swab test, the police have not questioned him about the incident.

The DC Line attempted to contact MPD detective Jared Rothman, who is working on the investigation, but calls and emails to him went unanswered. The MPD’s Public Information Office did not answer specific questions provided via email, but Officer Hugh Carew provided a general statement: “Detectives have pursued each lead thus far in this investigation. They are continuing to work toward developing additional leads. Anyone who has information related to this case is asked to contact us at 202-727-9099.”

Meanwhile, as Ayoubi deals with all of the personal and professional trauma in his life, he seems determined to keep Tropicalia and Local 16 from closing permanently. 

Ayoubi came to the United States in 1979 after fleeing Kabul when the Soviet Union invaded the country. He says he arrived in New York “with a one-way ticket, $20, and a second language of French.”  

After moving to DC in 1981, he got a job as a busboy at a Hilton hotel. He worked his way up the Hilton chain and attended culinary school. Later, he worked for Hilton in Chicago and Minneapolis. After coming back to DC for a position at the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner, Virginia, he partnered in the 1990s with his cousin Farid Nouri and entrepreneurs Eric Hilton and Yama Jewayni to run nightclubs such as Dragonfly, Red and Eighteenth Street Lounge. (Nouri announced in June that Eighteenth Street Lounge could not come to an agreement with its Dupont Circle landlord.)

Parker says if the police are unable to track down the thieves so he can reclaim the stolen merchandise, he hopes Tropicalia can come up with more than $15,000 to purchase used sound equipment and reopen the club once DC rules allow it to do so. He and Ayoubi will also need money to replenish the liquor and pay the establishment’s other bills. Ayoubi says that funds he received from the federal government’s COVID-19 Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) for Tropicalia and Local 16 have been exhausted.

While industry analysts are predicting that cash-flush national chain restaurants will take up spaces like Tropicalia and the recently closed U Street Music Hall, Parker has doubts. “It’s not gonna be easy to find a tenant for the basement,” he says.

Prior to the pandemic, the club was usually open Thursday through Sunday since that’s when customers generally prefer to dance, drink, and listen to live music. In addition to the rent, there are the costs of paying staff, insurance, entertainment and other bills. 

The rent for Tropicalia is $14,400 a month. The business has paid its rent through May but not since then. “Who knows when the landlord will want their money back. The landlord has been good to us right now,” Ayoubi says. But he worries that provisions for paying the back rent could amount to an additional $10,000 a month. “We can’t make that money,” he says.

Ayoubi is hoping that the city will extend the prohibition on evictions that currently lasts 60 days beyond the declared public health emergency, which is currently set to expire Dec. 31. He is also hoping that the federal government will authorize another assistance plan similar to the Paycheck Protection Program so he can pay his rent. He’s worried that his clubs may not survive if Congress doesn’t approve another federal assistance program before February. He’s looking into the possibility of applying for unemployment benefits.

While the theft, his father’s death, his mother’s ongoing health issues, and the uncertainty over government aid to keep his clubs alive have shaken his confidence, Ayoubi presses on, mindful of having overcome past challenges when starting a new life in the United States after his escape from Afghanistan. “I am not giving up and Derrick Parker is not giving up,” he says.

This post has been updated to eliminate a reference to the Eighteenth Street Lounge seeking a new site. “I’m not looking for a location for a new version of ESL,” owner Farid Nouri said in a Nov. 12 email to The DC Line.