Restaurant
Ben's Chili Bowl
Half-smoke and chili counter that stayed open through the nineteen sixty-eight riots by special curfew permission.
0:00≈ 2 min
Location
0:00≈ 2 min
About this audio guide
This guide to Ben's Chili Bowl on U Street in Washington, D.C. follows Ben Ali, who left dentistry school to open a chili counter with Virginia, a bank teller he met behind her window, in 1958. It turns to April 1968, days after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, when fire was moving down U Street and the civil rights organizer Stokely Carmichael walked in with an unusual request for Ben. The guide follows what Ben did next, and the ordinary bet a husband and wife had made ten years earlier by opening in the first place.
This audio guide was created using AI.