Columbia Heights Is Filling Two Restaurant Rows at the Same Time, and They're Not Filling the Same Way

Walk two blocks in either direction from the Columbia Heights Metro stop this fall and you will run into two very different kinds of construction dust. On 14th Street and Irving, inside the DC USA mall, workers are prepping for what the building's marketing team is calling "Eat Street," a push to fill as many as eight new restaurant spaces at once. Six blocks over on 11th Street, a single storefront that has changed hands three times since the Obama administration is getting a fresh coat of paint for its fourth act.

Both are real. Both are happening right now. But they are not the same story, and reading them as one flattens what is actually interesting about this neighborhood's fall calendar. Columbia Heights isn't getting "more restaurants." It's getting two different restaurant economies running on parallel tracks, three blocks apart, and the kind of place each track produces says something about how this neighborhood actually works.

The Mall Is Filling Eight Spaces at Once

DC USA has never been shy about its identity as a mall. It's the building where you go for Target, Lidl, Best Buy, and Marshall's, all under one roof, directly across from the Green and Yellow line platforms. What's new is the scale of the food push. According to a Columbia Heights ANC representative, the "Eat Street" campaign at DC USA involves plans for up to eight new restaurant spaces along Irving Street, the side of the building that has historically felt more like a loading corridor than a dining destination.

The anchor tenant isn't a restaurant at all. Bouldering Project, the climbing gym chain, is opening its second Washington location inside DC USA, joining the mall's existing lineup of national retailers. The gym will offer a full fitness area, a youth climbing space, a training center, and a sauna, all built for a membership base that can also use the company's existing Eckington location. That's a very different kind of tenant than a single restaurant lease. It's a company with the capital to build out a large footprint inside a mall podium, and its arrival is being used as the hook to market the smaller food bays around it.

That's the mall model in miniature: one large, well-capitalized anchor signs first, and the retail spaces around it get marketed as a package deal to whoever wants proximity to that foot traffic. The result, if the leasing goes as planned, is a food corridor that shows up mostly at once, backed by a landlord with the balance sheet to hold spaces empty while it waits for the right eight tenants rather than the first available one.

11th Street Fills One Storefront at a Time, and Remembers Every Tenant

Six blocks south, the story runs on the opposite clock. Two addresses on 11th Street are getting new restaurants this fall, and both of them come with a paper trail of prior tenants that locals still reference by name.

At 3226 11th Street NW, chef Scott Chung is opening Major Yum, a fast-casual concept built around a dish called "Chung's Chicken," a mix of General Tso's and Korean fried chicken. Chung has stepped away from his other projects, Bun'd Up, Sparrow Room, and Rice Crook, to run this one full time, and he's aiming for a late-fall opening. The address itself has a longer memory than the restaurant will. That storefront was most recently Johnny's All American, before that the widely mourned Bad Saint, and before that the neighborhood clothing shop Jeans N Things. Locals walking dogs past the space have been narrating its progress in real time, most recently reporting a new coat of paint and construction visible through the windows.

A few blocks up, 3416-3418 11th Street NW is becoming El Jardin, a Mexican restaurant that will take over the space last occupied by Cinco Soles, which closed in July 2025. Before Cinco Soles, that address was Maple, and before Maple, it was Columbia Heights Coffee. Four concepts, four different cuisines, one storefront.

That kind of turnover isn't a sign that 11th Street struggles to keep restaurants open. It's a sign that these are small, individually leased rowhouse storefronts, the kind that can turn over to a new single operator every few years without a mall's leasing calendar or capital requirements getting in the way. A chef with a following and a concept can take one of these spaces and open on a timeline measured in months, not the coordinated multi-tenant rollout a mall requires.

What the Split Actually Tells a Resident

Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only track "what's new" instead of "where things open and how." The two corridors aren't competing for the same night out. They're built to serve two different kinds of demand.

DC USA's Eat Street, once it fills, will most likely deliver restaurants built for reliability and volume: places designed to work at scale next to a climbing gym and a Target run, with parking in the building's basement level for anyone who'd rather drive than walk. It's the corridor for a dependable Tuesday.

11th Street is where the neighborhood's restaurant identity actually gets made and remade. It's the block where a single chef with a strong local reputation, like Scott Chung, can take over a storefront that's already been three other things and turn it into the next thing people talk about. It's also the block where a closure, like Cinco Soles in July 2025, gets filled within months rather than sitting dark, because a small storefront is a much easier bet for a new independent operator than a mall unit with a multi-year lease structure attached.

For a resident deciding where to spend a Friday night this fall, that distinction is more useful than a list of names. If you want to know what DC USA will look like once "Eat Street" fills in, watch for lease announcements to land in a cluster, the way the Bouldering Project deal did. If you want to catch the next thing before it's established, 11th Street is where you should be walking your dog.

A few addresses worth tracking through the end of the year:

• 3226 11th Street NW - Major Yum, chef Scott Chung's fast-casual concept, targeting a late-fall opening in the former Johnny's All American and Bad Saint space
• 3416-3418 11th Street NW - El Jardin, a new Mexican restaurant moving into the space last held by Cinco Soles
• 3606 14th Street NW - Deluxe Bar, opening next door to the long-running Chercher Ethiopian Restaurant, with seating for up to 55 inside and a 15-seat sidewalk cafe pending its liquor license
• DC USA, Irving Street side - up to eight restaurant spaces under the "Eat Street" marketing push, anchored by a new Bouldering Project gym

The Neighborhood in Between

None of this happens in a vacuum. The Columbia Heights Civic Plaza, at 14th and Park Road, sits almost exactly between the two corridors, and it keeps running its own schedule regardless of what's opening around it: a Saturday farmers market from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and a smaller Wednesday market in the afternoon. It's the kind of fixed point that makes it easy to notice how much is changing around it. If you're heading to the Saturday market this fall, it's worth detouring a block or two in either direction to see what's actually landed versus what's still behind papered-over glass.

That's the real read on Columbia Heights right now. It isn't one restaurant scene getting bigger. It's two different systems, a mall filling multiple leases on one clock and a strip of rowhouse storefronts turning over one chef at a time, both busy in the same three or four blocks, both worth watching for entirely different reasons.

If you're curious about what any of this means for property values or timing along either corridor, or you just want a neighbor's read on a specific block, Jeanne Phil Meg has spent years watching Columbia Heights change one storefront at a time. Contact us anytime you want a local take that goes beyond what's on the menu.