The Old Clarendon Bookstore Floor Now Seats More People Than the Bookstore Ever Did
For most of 2025 and half of 2026, the ground floor at 2800 Clarendon Boulevard sat behind construction paper. The Barnes & Noble that had anchored The Crossing Clarendon for years closed that spring so the whole space could be gutted and rebuilt. When the dust cleared, the bookstore came back smaller and moved upstairs. What replaced it downstairs was not a new bookstore, or a nail salon, or a bank branch. It was two restaurants built to seat more people at dinner than the old store ever did during business hours.
That single swap tells you more about where Clarendon is headed this fall than any list of new menus could. The neighborhood is not simply adding restaurants. It is re-engineering the same square footage to hold a lot more people who came specifically to eat and drink, and Clarendon Day on September 26 will be the first time most residents see the whole picture at once.
Two tenants split the old bookstore's footprint, and neither is small.
Three Notch'd Brewing Company, a Charlottesville brand making its first move into Northern Virginia, took a 10,160-square-foot chunk of the ground floor. Company president Scott Roth told ARLnow the space is built to seat about 350 people inside, with room for another 150 at private events, and it will run a whiskey distillery and tasting room alongside the beer program. An earlier plan to add an ax-throwing venue got scrapped. Roth's read on the market was blunt: casual dining is having a moment because everything else has gotten expensive, and the brewery wants to be the neighborhood's answer to that.
Next door, in a much smaller 2,659-square-foot slice, Xi'an Famous Foods opened its first sit-down Virginia location on August 7, with a formal grand-opening celebration set for August 15. This is the New York chain famous for hand-ripped noodles once endorsed by Anthony Bourdain, and until this year the DMV only knew it through ghost kitchens. CEO Jason Wang told Washingtonian the Alexandria ghost kitchen closed at the end of July specifically so staff and equipment could shift over to the new Clarendon storefront. The build seats about 66 people on benches and street-food-style stools, with a glassed-in prep area so diners can watch the noodles get pulled by hand. No tipping, delivery routed exclusively through DoorDash, opening prices hovering around ten dollars a bowl.
Add the two together and the old bookstore floor, which never sat a single customer down for a meal, now has standing capacity for something north of 400 diners at once. The bookstore itself came back with nearly 14,000 square feet of retail space, but it moved to the upper level and, as ARLnow's headline put it plainly, reopened smaller than before. The ground floor got handed over entirely to food and drink.
Walk a few blocks and the same pattern shows up twice more, in spaces that used to do something else entirely.
Buffalo & Bergen, the New York-style deli and soda counter from bartender-turned-owner Gina Chersevani, has been working toward a Clarendon location at 1028 North Garfield Street, in the space where UnCommon Luncheonette closed. Chersevani told ARLnow that Clarendon holds a special place in her heart, tracing back to two years bartending at the neighborhood's old EatBar. The original target was summer, and while the timeline has since slipped into this year's broader wave of openings, it is still one of the most anticipated additions on the corridor, with menu items built around Chersevani's Sicilian heritage alongside the deli's usual bagels and egg creams.
Over on Wilson Boulevard, the former Wilson Hardware space at 2915 Wilson Blvd has become The Boulevard, a day-to-night restaurant blending modern American food with Asian fusion, with a rooftop bar called Solset serving lighter bites and sunset cocktails above it. Owner Antonis Karagounis, a McLean resident with a string of D.C. nightlife projects behind him, told ARLnow he was targeting a late April or early May opening this year. His read on the neighborhood, reported by ARLnow, was that Clarendon now feels more like downtown than a suburb, with people out on the street at hours that used to be quiet.
None of these four projects required new construction. Nobody broke ground on an empty lot. Every one of them took a box that already existed, that used to hold something quieter or smaller, and rebuilt it to hold more people eating and drinking at once. A bookstore split into a brewery and a noodle counter. A hardware store became a restaurant with a rooftop bar. A shuttered luncheonette is becoming a deli built around a soda fountain and a full bar.
That is a different story than "new restaurants keep opening," which is true in most growing neighborhoods and tells you nothing specific about this one. The specific thing happening in Clarendon is that existing retail footprints are being asked to do more work, at higher density, for longer hours, than they were built for. If the sidewalks outside The Crossing Clarendon feel busier on a Thursday night than they did a year ago, that is not a vibe. It is because the same physical inches of real estate are now serving several hundred more people dinner and drinks than they were in 2024.
Clarendon Day returns on Saturday, September 26, and the timing lines up almost exactly with this wave finishing construction. The Clarendon Alliance confirms the date, and ARLnow's event listing puts the scale at more than 20,000 attendees for what it calls Arlington's largest community festival, with live music, local food and drink, a KidZone, arts and crafts vendors, and community exhibitors filling the Wilson Boulevard corridor near Clarendon Central Park.
Anyone who walked Clarendon Day last year and plans to walk it again this September will be covering ground that looks different at almost every block. Xi'an Famous Foods will have had about six weeks to settle in. Three Notch'd will likely be mid-buildout or freshly open next door. The Boulevard and Solset will have had a full summer of rooftop service under their belt. Buffalo & Bergen may or may not have opened its doors yet, depending on how the year's timeline holds. None of that changes what the festival itself offers, but it does mean the food line for Clarendon Day this year runs past storefronts that did not exist the last time the festival happened.
Most of what gets written about neighborhoods like this settles for a list: here is what is new, here is what is coming soon. The more useful question is why it is happening in this particular shape, in this particular place, at this particular time. In Clarendon's case, the answer is that landlords and operators have found they can pack more paying customers into the same storefronts than those storefronts were designed for, and they are doing it now, in the same six-month stretch, on the same two streets.
That kind of shift tends to show up in property conversations long before it shows up in a market report. If you live in Clarendon and have watched this corridor change shape this year, or you're weighing what a block like this means for a home nearby, Hanna Abebe would welcome the conversation. Let's Connect.
Whether you’re buying your first home, selling a trust property, or navigating a probate sale, my goal is always the same: to provide honest guidance, strong advocacy, and a smooth experience from beginning to end. Real estate is about people, not just properties. I would be honored to help you take your next step.
2300 Clarendon Blvd Ste 200 Arlington, VA 22201