Shouk, a plant-based kosher street-food chain in Washington, D.C., permanently shut down its final locations this month in part due to protests and boycotts from anti-Israel activists.
Once featured by the Food Network and The Washington Post for its “Shouk Burger,” the chain had five stores in the region. The closures come after two years of protests and boycotts over the war in Gaza crippled the business.
Local activist group DC for Palestine led a boycott campaign that claimed the restaurant’s falafel and other menu items “appropriated” Palestinian cuisine and that the owners were “complicit in Israeli apartheid.”
Co-owner Dennis Friedman, a Jewish American who opened the first Shouk location over a decade ago with Israeli co-owner Ran Nussbacher, rejected those accusations. He said the mission of Shouk was to bring people together.
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“I don’t agree with that because the intention of Shouk was pure, and good,” Friedman told Fox News Digital. “When my business partner came to me, it wasn’t ‘let’s make Israeli food.’ He wanted to make plant-based food that reminded him of his childhood and home. That was the core of where we started to build the recipes. For the most part, Shouk has been promoted as Mediterranean, plant-based, and Middle Eastern. Very rarely have we claimed anything else. That’s why Shouk is written in both Arabic and Hebrew in all the stores — because we are a place to bring everyone together.”
He called Shouk “a gathering place for people of all races, colors, and creeds to come together to enjoy food,” that was good for customers and the planet.
He said their Georgetown location was the first to be targeted, citing its proximity to Georgetown University and what he described as a “heavy Muslim population” in the area.
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While he said business was booming before Oct. 7, the protests quickly started tanking their income.
Friedman said they reached out to local business groups and representatives and hired security outside their stores, calling the experience of being harassed by protesters over the past two years “scary and unnerving.”
“We had everything from little children coming into the store during a busy lunch screaming ‘Free Palestine’ while their parents videoed for social media,” he said. He said the protests were part of a “very coordinated” and successful “effort by the BDS to hurt Shouk.”
“There were posters of dead baby Palestinian children on the windows or on our seating outside. You know, it ranged from, you know, vandalism to intimidation to maybe things that we don’t even know,” he added.
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Friedman reflected on the chain’s 12-year run, calling it an “amazing experience” he couldn’t have imagined in his “wildest dreams.”
He said Shouk was “near and dear to his heart” and that he and Nussbacher tried their best to take care of their employees during the closures.
“Most of our staff have been with us since we opened,” he said. “Our turnover was very low because we ran the company ethically, we ran it well, and we ran it fairly. And so our staff became part of our family, and they didn’t want to leave.”
The chain closed its last locations just days before a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was reached.
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DC for Palestine celebrated the closures as a “BDS win” in an Instagram post, writing:
“Shouk WAS one of the main targets of our “APARTHEID? I DON’T BUY IT” consumer boycott initiative! Much of what they served was Palestinian food that they culturally appropriated as “Israeli street food”. Additionally, they imported Israeli ingredients for their dishes. TODAY WE ARE HAPPY TO ANNOUNCE THAT, AS OF OCTOBER 1, 2025, SHOUK HAS CLOSED ITS DOOR, PERMANENTLY!”
The group urged supporters to continue boycotting U.S. and local businesses that sell Israeli products.
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