For roughly three years, the corner of Old Dominion Drive and Lowell Avenue sat dark. Café Oggi, an Italian room that had run there for more than three decades, closed in early 2022, and the storefront became one of those quiet gaps a walking neighborhood learns to route around. A mile southeast, the Chesterbrook Shopping Center was going through its own long absence. Federal Realty had wrapped a fence around most of the property, and for the better part of two years the anchor Safeway shared the strip with plywood and staging.
Both of those holes closed in the same twelve months. Taken separately, they are two commercial-real-estate stories. Taken together, they are the reason the half-mile of Old Dominion Drive between Chesterbrook Road and Lowell Avenue now behaves, for the first time in the neighborhood's modern life, like a walkable center of gravity for McLean itself rather than a service road to Tysons.
That is the shift worth paying attention to this summer. Not any single opening. The sequencing.
The stretch, end to end
Start at 6218 Old Dominion Drive and walk northwest. In roughly ten minutes you pass the reopened Chesterbrook Shopping Center, a Friday-morning farmers market at Lewinsville Park, a Saturday-morning market on Elm Street, and the new dining room at 6671 Old Dominion. None of these things existed in their current form two summers ago.
The pattern is not that McLean built a new district. It is that four separate projects, none coordinated with the others, all finished within a single calendar cycle.
Chesterbrook, after the scaffolding
Federal Realty acquired an 80 percent interest in Chesterbrook in April 2021, and by the following year had begun what the firm described as an $8.5 million "facelift" for the shopping center, which was originally built in 1967. The property held its reopening event, billed as a "Friendsgiving," on November 14 to celebrate the reopening of the renovated Chesterbrook Shopping Center at 6224 Old Dominion Drive in McLean.
The tenant list that emerged is the more interesting part. A neighborhood strip that had been anchored by a grocer, a drugstore that closed, and a small handful of service tenants is now populated with, among others:
- Sassanova, a contemporary women's fashion boutique. Its McLean shop is Sassanova's first Virginia store and opened in mid-July 2025.
- Apricot Lane and J. McLaughlin, two more clothing shops that filled portions of the former Rite Aid box.
- Framebridge, the custom framer that also operates in Mosaic District and Clarendon.
- Call Your Mother, the D.C. bagel shop, now in a permanent storefront after two years of running a food truck at the property.
- Sorn Thai, a full-service restaurant that took one of the largest remaining boxes.
- McLean Art Gallery, in its first brick-and-mortar space.
- SkinSpirit, Bluemercury, Kosmo Nail Bar, South Block, and a Small Door Veterinary clinic.
- Sweetgreen, which opened its 2,571-square-foot store at 6220 Old Dominion Drive in November 2025 in the former BB&T Bank box, the chain's 13th location in Northern Virginia.
The Surfside piece is what closes the loop. The D.C. taco brand has filed paperwork for a liquor license and is opening its first Old Dominion state location in McLean, setting up shop at 6218 Old Dominion Drive, sharing a building with the new Sweetgreen. It will be the company's first Virginia store after 15 years of being D.C.'s beloved fast-casual restaurant chain.
The design cue running through the property renovation matters if you care about how a place reads on foot. Federal Realty's scope of work included architectural enhancements, refreshed storefronts, upgraded landscaping with indigenous plants, decorative lighting, widened sidewalks and outdoor amenity spaces infused with art. Widened sidewalks are the operative words. A 1967 grocery-anchored strip designed for arrival by car now, quietly, wants you to walk between its tenants.
The Town corner
A mile up Old Dominion, the Café Oggi vacancy has resolved. The new tenant is Town, a new-American neighborhood bistro at 6671 Old Dominion Drive, at the corner of Old Dominion and Lowell. The dining room seats roughly 100 with a 20-seat bar, and the patio, added during the renovation, seats about 35. The ownership is local. The operator is a longtime McLean resident who previously ran Greenhouse Bistro in Tysons.
The reason Town matters more than one restaurant opening ordinarily would is the site itself. Café Oggi's tenure meant that for thirty-plus years a full-service, sit-down restaurant sat at what is arguably downtown McLean's most legible intersection. When it closed, the corner stopped functioning as an evening destination. Its reactivation puts the western anchor back on the walking loop.
Fridays and Saturdays, bracketed by markets
The weekend layer is what makes the corridor read as a place to spend time rather than a place to run errands. Two producer-only markets run within a few blocks of each other, on two different days:
| Market | Where | When | Season |
|---|---|---|---|
| McLean Farmers Market | Lewinsville Park, 1659 Chain Bridge Road | Fridays, 8 a.m. to noon | May 1 to October 30, 2026 |
| McLean Fresh Farmers Market | 6888 Elm Street | Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. | May 9 to October 31, 2026 |
The Fairfax County Park Authority operation at Lewinsville is strictly producer-only, meaning that all of our farmers and producers may only sell what they raise on their farms or make from scratch. One scheduling note worth keeping on your calendar: the McLean Farmers Market is CLOSED on May 15th due to the McLean Day Festival, which returns to Lewinsville Park for its 111th year on May 15 and 16.
A Saturday in July, if you live here
If you are trying to picture how the corridor actually gets used now, one plausible sequence:
- Start at Elm Street around 9:30 a.m. for the Saturday market. Coffee first, produce second.
- Walk or drive the mile southeast to Chesterbrook. Framebridge, Sassanova, and Call Your Mother are all within one facade.
- Lunch at Sorn Thai, or a bowl from Sweetgreen if the group cannot agree.
- Errands: SkinSpirit, Bluemercury, Small Door if the dog is due.
- Come back at 6:30 p.m. for dinner at Town. The patio is the whole point in July.
That itinerary is worth pausing on. Two years ago it was not possible. Chesterbrook had gaps where three of those stops now sit, Town was a boarded corner, and the Elm Street Saturday market was still building out its vendor list. A resident who wanted a full Saturday inside the neighborhood boundary was routing through Tysons Corner Center or into Arlington. That is no longer the shortest path.
The through line
For most of the last generation, McLean's commercial identity has been described in relation to something else. Restaurant coverage tended to treat the neighborhood as an appendage of Tysons; retail coverage did the same. The Town coverage put it plainly: for decades, McLean's culinary reputation had been defined largely by its proximity to Tysons rather than by its own restaurant landscape, and Town's opening represents part of a growing effort to give McLean a culinary identity of its own.
What the 2026 configuration adds is scale. One restaurant is a data point. A restaurant, plus a rebuilt shopping center with a boutique retail mix, plus two producer markets running six days apart, plus the region's largest single-day community festival at Lewinsville, is a district. Chesterbrook is described on its own materials as nestled in the heart of McLean, VA, just minutes from Arlington, Tysons and the District of Columbia, a charming neighborhood shopping center uniquely curated with boutiques, delicious dining, groceries, pampering services and everyday essentials, a community staple that has been serving customers for over 50 years. The description used to be aspirational. This summer it is roughly accurate.
What this means if you already live here
A few practical consequences worth naming. Foot traffic on the Chesterbrook side of Old Dominion is meaningfully higher on weekend mornings than it was in 2024, and the parking rhythm has shifted with it. If you are used to arriving at Safeway at 10 a.m. on Saturday, the Sweetgreen and Call Your Mother lines are now competing with you for the same lot. The Friday Lewinsville market has been the more reliable produce stop for years, but the Elm Street Saturday market is now the one that lines up with the Chesterbrook retail run.
The Town patio is small enough that on a Saturday in July you will want a reservation. The bar is walk-in and can absorb a party of two.
Café Oggi's absence taught the neighborhood something it had almost forgotten, which is that a single corner tenant can decide whether a stretch of Old Dominion feels like a place or a route. The corner is lit again. The rest of the corridor followed.
If you are thinking about how a shift like this changes the way a specific McLean block lives and, in time, trades, that is the conversation my practice at Donna Leanos is built for. Get access to my private listings when you are ready to see what is quietly available on the corridor before it reaches the open market.
