The corner of Old Dominion Drive and Lowell Avenue sat dark for the better part of four years. Café Oggi, the Italian restaurant that had anchored that intersection for more than three decades, closed in early 2022, and the storefront just sat there through four different autumns, a blank window in a town center that residents kept describing the same way: fine for a coffee run, but if you wanted an actual dinner out, you got in the car and drove to Tysons.
That pattern broke this year, and it broke in two places at once. This fall, for the first time in a long while, a McLean resident can build a full weekend without leaving the 22101 zip code, not because anyone declared it so, but because the restaurant corridor and the community calendar happened to finish their separate renovations in the same twelve months.
The Corner Finally Lit Again
That Old Dominion Drive storefront reopened on December 13, 2025, as Town Kitchen & Bar. The new owner is a longtime McLean resident who previously ran Greenhouse Bistro over in Tysons, and the build-out shows it: a 20-seat bar, roughly 100 seats inside, and a patio built to hold 35 more once the outdoor permitting cleared. The menu changes seasonally, and the bread pudding has already become the thing regulars mention first. What matters more than any single dish is what the reopening represents. For years the empty storefront was the physical proof of an argument McLean residents had been making about their own town center: that it existed to feed people into Tysons, not to hold them.
A Shopping Center Stopped Being a Layover
A mile up the road, the same shift happened at a larger scale. Chesterbrook Shopping Center had been under a phased renovation since fall 2022, an $8.5 million overhaul that followed a change in ownership. Federal Realty had managed the property as a third party for 19 years before acquiring an 80 percent interest in April 2021, and the renovation that followed was the kind that only happens once a landlord actually owns the upside. The finish line arrived on November 14, 2025, with a Friendsgiving open house marking the reopening.
The tenant mix that came out of it is the real story. Sorn Thai moved in as a sit-down option that doesn't require a Tysons parking garage. Call Your Mother, the bagel shop from owner Andrew Dana and James Beard-nominated chef Daniela Moreira, opened with the kind of bagel sandwich that punches above a suburban shopping center. The McLean Art Gallery found its first physical home there. Sweetgreen took the old BB&T Bank space at 6220 Old Dominion Drive, opening November 11, 2025, as its 13th Northern Virginia location. Sassanova followed with a July 2025 opening. All of it sits around the two tenants who never left: Safeway and Mylo's Grill, the diner that has anchored that corner for years and now has actual competition instead of just foot traffic.
Here's the corridor as it stands right now, corner to corner:
| Where | What's There Now | Open Since |
|---|---|---|
| 6671 Old Dominion Dr. | Town Kitchen & Bar (formerly Café Oggi) | December 2025 |
| 6220 Old Dominion Dr., Chesterbrook | Sweetgreen | November 2025 |
| Chesterbrook Shopping Center | Sorn Thai | 2025 renovation wave |
| Chesterbrook Shopping Center | Call Your Mother | 2025 renovation wave |
| Chesterbrook Shopping Center | Sassanova | July 2025 |
| Chesterbrook Shopping Center | Safeway, Mylo's Grill | Longtime anchors |
The Park Caught Up With the Restaurants
McLean Central Park went through its own version of this. The park closed for renovations before reopening in time for the 2025 edition of what was then still called MPAartfest, and this year's festival marks a second, more permanent kind of change. For the first time in its history, the event is officially produced by the McLean Community Center in partnership with McLean Project for the Arts, rather than run by MPA alone with MCC as a supporting sponsor. That's not a cosmetic detail. It means the community center that runs the park is now co-owning the event that fills it, the same kind of ownership shift that pushed Federal Realty to finally renovate Chesterbrook instead of just collecting rent on it.
The Alden Theatre's summer concert series just wrapped its Thursday-evening run at the Central Park pavilion, which had been going since June 18. That run used to feel like the park's one seasonal claim to relevance. Now it's the opening act for a fall calendar that has three real dates on it.
What's Actually on the Calendar
- Saturday, September 26, 10 a.m. to noon — Harvest Happenings at the McLean Community Center, 1234 Ingleside Avenue. Free admission, indoor-outdoor, live entertainment, a petting zoo, and a pumpkin patch where you can buy one to decorate on site.
- Sunday, October 4, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. — McLean Artfest at McLean Central Park, the 19th annual edition and the first produced jointly by MCC and MPA. Free, juried, more than 30 local and regional artists, a Children's Art Walk, food trucks, and a beer and wine garden.
- Saturday, October 10 — The McLean 5K returns with a certified course through the center of town, hosted by the community center in support of the McLean Community Foundation. Packet pickup runs the Friday before at MCC from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., with race-day pickup from 7 to 8 a.m.
None of these are new events invented for the occasion. Harvest Happenings and the McLean 5K have run for years. What's new is that they now land on a calendar that also includes somewhere worth eating dinner afterward, which used to be the missing half of the equation.
What a Saturday Actually Looks Like Now
Run through it plainly. Morning starts at the community center for Harvest Happenings or, a week later, the 5K. Afternoon means a stop at Chesterbrook, maybe Sweetgreen for a bowl or Sorn Thai if lunch turns into a sit-down meal. Evening means Town Kitchen for the seasonal menu and that bread pudding, or downtown to Chef David Guas's Neutral Ground Bar and Kitchen if the plan shifts toward the Sunday jazz brunch crowd instead. None of that requires crossing into Tysons or driving into the District. It requires driving the length of Old Dominion Drive, which is the same drive that used to end with a dark storefront and a decision to keep going.
That's the actual change this fall represents. Not that McLean got new restaurants, small towns get new restaurants constantly, but that the restaurants and the park programming finished renovating in the same calendar year, for related reasons, and now sit close enough together that a resident doesn't have to choose between them.
If you're already living this stretch of Old Dominion Drive, none of this changes your address. But it does change what your address is next to, and that's worth knowing whether you're staying put or just curious what's changed since the last time you drove past that corner. Cesar Castillo works this part of McLean regularly and is always glad to talk through what's happening in the neighborhood, whether or not a move is anywhere on your radar. Schedule a free consultation whenever the timing makes sense.
