A Long-Empty Corner and New Openings Bring a Different Fall to McLean
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
For most of the last decade, if you lived in McLean and wanted a night out, Tysons was an option. Old Dominion Drive had a grocery store, a diner, and parking. Café Oggi, the Italian restaurant that had anchored the corner of Old Dominion and Lowell Avenue for more than thirty years, closed its doors in early 2022. The corner remained vacant.
What's changed isn't one restaurant opening. It's that several changes came together inside the same eighteen months, and the overlap is why this fall actually reads differently if you live here.
The Café Oggi space stayed vacant long enough that most residents stopped expecting anything to happen there. It finally reopened as Town, a new American bistro from an owner who is a longtime McLean resident and previously ran restaurants in Tysons, including Greenhouse Bistro. Town opened in November 2025, more than three and a half years after Café Oggi's last dinner service.
The long vacancy is part of the story. The storefront remained empty while the neighborhood around it kept building new houses and filling old ones. Town's opening adds a restaurant to this two-block corridor.
A mile down the road, Chesterbrook Shopping Center was changing too. Federal Realty had managed the center as a third-party operator for nineteen years before acquiring an 80 percent ownership interest in April 2021. A full renovation plan was announced after that ownership change, and the phased overhaul ran from fall 2022 until a Friendsgiving open house marked the reopening on November 14, 2025.
The center was under partial construction for three years. The tenant mix that came out the other side is the real story. Sorn Thai and Call Your Mother, the bagel shop from owner Andrew Dana and chef Daniela Moreira, moved in alongside longtime anchors Safeway and Mylo's Grill. The first home of the McLean Art Gallery opened in the same complex, along with SkinSpirit and three women's clothing shops. Sweetgreen took over a former BB&T Bank space at 6220 Old Dominion Drive after a delayed opening that finally landed on December 2, 2025, its thirteenth Northern Virginia location. A Surfside taco stand, the first Virginia location for the fifteen-year-old D.C. chain, is set for the space next door.
Federal Realty's ownership change came before the renovation, but the timeline doesn't establish that one caused the other.
The third piece moved faster, but it's still part of the same pattern of vacancies getting filled after a wait. Chef David Guas, known in the DMV for Bayou Bakery in Courthouse, had been hearing from McLean friends and neighbors for years asking why he wouldn't open something closer to home. He finally did in June 2024, taking over the former Assaggi Osteria space at 6641 Old Dominion Drive and inheriting the 700-degree wood-fired oven the previous pizzeria left behind. Neutral Ground Bar + Kitchen now roasts Chesapeake oysters and a twelve-ounce Duroc pork chop in that same oven.
In Arlington Magazine, Guas said, "I am so burnt out on every conversation ending up in a political discussion."
That's how Guas explained the restaurant's name, a nod to the historic median along Canal Street in his native New Orleans that once served as common ground between neighborhoods at odds. In McLean, the idea was simpler: a place to eat that wasn't trying to be anything other than itself. The restaurant got a wider audience earlier this year when WETA's Signature Dish opened its January 5, 2026 season premiere there, filming host Seth Tillman ordering grits and grillades before the cameras moved on.
McLean Central Park went through its own version of the same pause. What is now called McLean Artfest was known for years as MPAartfest, and the 2024 event was pushed back while the park itself was under renovation. It returned on October 5, 2025, the first Artfest held in the newly renovated park.
This year's edition, on Sunday, October 4, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., marks another change: it's the first year the festival is jointly produced by the McLean Community Center and McLean Project for the Arts, rather than run by MPA alone. The format stays familiar, more than thirty local and regional visual artists showing juried work, a Children's Art Walk, food trucks, and a beer and wine garden, free to attend. Two weeks before that, on Saturday, September 26, the McLean Community Center hosts Harvest Happenings from 10 a.m. to noon, a free indoor-outdoor fall celebration with live entertainment and crafts. If you're the kind of person who signs up for the McLean 5K, registration pricing increases on September 1, so that's the one date on this list worth acting on before the season even starts.
Put together, the fall calendar in McLean now has enough going on that you can build a real weekend without leaving the zip code:
None of these are new ideas on their own. What's different is that they're all happening at the same time, in the same half-mile stretch, for the first fall in recent memory. The corner filled, Chesterbrook's renovation wrapped up, and the park's signature festival returned during this period. Together, those changes add new restaurants, shops, and events to McLean.
If you've lived here through the changes along Old Dominion Drive, this fall is worth noticing. And if you're weighing whether McLean still fits the way you and your family actually live day to day, from the walk to dinner to the Saturday you spend at the park, that's exactly the kind of question Eva Homes DMV helps clients think through with patience and a full picture of the neighborhood, not just the listing. Let's Connect.
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