Last week, a Fairfax-area restaurant owner sent his customers an email you don’t expect from a restaurant. A regular posted it to Reddit. Read it the way they did.
“We’re in that weird phase where sales aren’t high enough to comfortably have three people, but we desperately need three people to function…”
“Out of the 12 people on my roster, two were no-call/no-shows this week… there are only 19 years of kitchen experience — and 18 of those years belong to me.”
“Daily sales hovering between $500 and $1,500 is a brutal place for a restaurant to be… I literally make no profit.”
“I’m not saying that I’m giving up… it’s been 4 long years for me. I literally started this store with daily sales in the negative and fought to get this far… Tomorrow is a new day… and we will be back at it.”
The name’s left off here on purpose — he didn’t sign up to be anyone’s political exhibit. But the email is real; you can read it yourself.
But that is the Northern Virginia restaurant business right now: a margin you could lose in the couch cushions, and one exhausted owner working every job in the building to hold on.
So ask the people who run the county one question. Knowing restaurants are running this close to the line — and they do know it — would you pick this moment to tax them?
Jeff McKay did.
On May 13, 2025, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors voted 9 to 1 to put a new 4% tax on every prepared meal in the county — tucked into the annual budget markup.
It took effect January 1. Order a $25 dinner and the county takes a dollar of it now — on top of the 6% the state already charges. Your tab crossed 10% in tax, and nobody asked you.
Except they did ask you. You said no. Not once — twice, at the ballot box, “overwhelmingly,” in the words of the one supervisor who voted against it.
So how does a tax voters killed twice become law anyway?
Richmond took the vote away.
For decades, a Virginia county couldn’t levy a meals tax unless voters approved it in a referendum. Fairfax used that power exactly the way you’d expect. It said no, and then no again.
Then in 2020, the General Assembly simply erased the requirement. No referendum needed. The Tax Foundation had already diagnosed why that mattered, in a headline that tells the whole story: “Virginia Gives Voters a Say on Meals Taxes, and They Usually Say No.”
So the say was removed. McKay’s board waited for the rule to change, then slid the tax into a budget markup — no ballot, no campaign, no chance to say no a third time.
When the voters keep giving the wrong answer, you stop asking the question.
Here is how the Chairman describes taxing something his residents rejected twice. The budget, McKay said, “reflects our commitment to listening to the community.”
Read that one slowly. The community was asked. The community said no, twice. The listening produced a 4% tax anyway.
Pat Herrity (R-Springfield), the lone Republican on the ten-member board and its only no vote, was blunter. “The county has a spending problem, not a revenue problem,” he said — county spending is up 50% in ten years.
The tax, he added, is “a single industry tax that’s coming at a time when restaurants are barely recovering from the pandemic.”
He has the target pegged. The county expects to skim nearly $68 million from meals in just the back half of one fiscal year.
About a third of that, the county’s own budget director says, comes from out-of-towners. The other two-thirds comes from you.
The chains will absorb it. The Cheesecake Factory will be fine.
It’s the single-location pho counter. The food truck at your kid’s game. The owner who just told his customers he makes no profit. The chains don’t feel 4%. He does.
The owner who wrote that email, as it happens, is just inside the City of Fairfax — carved out of the county’s tax. A small mercy he didn’t ask for. The restaurants a mile in any direction, in the county McKay runs, get no such reprieve.
The tax doesn’t care whether they cleared $2,500 today or $900. It takes its cut either way.
Fairfax voters were asked twice whether they wanted this tax. Twice they said no. They never got a third vote — McKay’s board made sure of it.
There’s one vote left he can’t delete. Every supervisor who passed this tax faces the ballot in November 2027. Pat Herrity will be the only name on it that voted no.
The other nine can explain why “listening” meant taxing the answer you already gave.