Did Restaurant Reservations Really Plunge Because of Trump’s DC Takeover?

Data from OpenTable shows that relative to the same calendar dates last year, reservations at DC restaurants were down by 20 percent or more from August 11th through August 17th, troughing out at 31 percent below 2024 levels on Wednesday 13th August (see graph below from Fox5 DC). Comparing the Monday to Sunday week directly (August 11–17th 2025 vs. August 12–18th 2024), dining was down 24 percent this year.

Were DC’s 2025 restaurant goers really so skittish about humvees at Union Station and the prospect of military patrols in Dupont Circle that almost a third cancelled their dinner plans or avoided DC entirely?

I was skeptical of such a big effect, especially because the drop-off trend turned downwards before Donald Trump’s announcement and then stuck through the week even when it became obvious there were no large-scale and violent counter-protests. That got me thinking: perhaps there was something weird going on with last year’s data, such that the relative drop-off for 2025 actually reflected an elevated number of reservations in 2024?

Well, it turns out that August 12 through August 18th 2024 was last year’s DC summer Restaurant Week, which this year only began on August 18th. Restaurant Week is a promotional dining event where (over 350) participating restaurants offered special fixed-price menus in 2024 for the duration of the week, and sometimes beyond. A major aim is to boost reservation rates in the lean summer period, as a means of introducing diners to new restaurants.

The result is that seated reservation rates were likely inflated relative to “normal” for almost the entire equivalent week in 2024 (sadly OpenTable doesn’t have the longer time series publicly available to confirm, though I’ve asked for it). It therefore stands to reason that the year-on-year downturn being widely reported for this past week was exaggerated by the comparison from an artificially higher baseline in 2024.

I asked OpenTable if they had any other data that would shed light on this. They have (so far) seemed unwilling to provide me the 2024 data (relative to 2023), responding with a general press statement they’ve been circulating. But they did give me a week-over-week comparison:

“Dining for August 11–17 was down 7 percent versus August 4–10.”

So, still a decline, but nowhere near a fifth to a third of reservations. And that’s comparing different weeks of the year, remember.

In follow up, I’ve asked OpenTable again if they could provide me with the August 2024 data (versus 2023) to show the scale of uplift last year’s Restaurant Week caused. From there we can get a better sense if last week’s effect was really about President Trump’s takeover. I will update this post if that data becomes available.

In the absence of that, we will only really get a better indication of the impact of DC’s military presence in the coming days when we can compare a) the first day of restaurant week 2025 to the last day of restaurant week in 2024, imperfect as that is given it’s a Monday vs. Sunday comparison and b) direct non-restaurant week comparisons later in the month.

There are many objections, of course, in principle and practice, with President Trump’s federalization and militarization of DC’s policing. We don’t need to exaggerate the commercial impact. I’m surprised more journalists didn’t review this claim skeptically. It’s surely a classic example of motivated reasoning—that because something you don’t like is happening, it must be causing other devastating effects.