McLean's Old Dominion Drive Finished a Four-Year Rebuild, Twice, Three Weeks Apart

Anyone who drives Old Dominion Drive regularly has spent the better part of four years treating two stretches of that street as background noise. One corner, near the heart of Downtown McLean, sat with its windows papered over for so long that residents stopped expecting anything to happen there. A few minutes up the road, Chesterbrook Shopping Center spent those same years behind barricades and half-finished facades, the kind of ongoing construction you drive past without really registering anymore.

Both projects finished. Not eventually, not vaguely around the same period, but within about three weeks of each other, last December. If you haven't been paying attention to either one, this is the summer to notice both.

The corner that sat empty for three and a half years

Café Oggi closed its doors on Old Dominion Drive in early 2022 after more than 30 years in business, leaving a gap in a town whose dining identity had long lived in the shadow of Tysons. The space at 6671 Old Dominion Drive sat quiet for the better part of four years while a new ownership team, led by a longtime McLean resident who had previously run restaurants in Tysons including Greenhouse Bistro, worked through a multi-year renovation.

That renovation became Town Kitchen & Bar, which opened December 13, 2025. The build-out was not modest: a 20-seat bar, patio seating for roughly 35 guests, and room for about 100 people inside, all built into a corner that had been vacant since before most current McLean Community Center program guides were printed. The restaurant has drawn attention less for any single dish than for what it represents. Downtown McLean, for the first time in years, had a full-service anchor of its own rather than a reason to drive to Tysons.

That shift is visible in a smaller but telling detail. This past April, the McLean Revitalization Corporation ran the town's first-ever McLean Restaurant Week, from April 12 through 19, with prix fixe menus and bundled deals across downtown restaurants. A neighborhood doesn't organize a restaurant week around a dining scene it doesn't believe exists yet.

The parallel project nobody connected to it

While Town Kitchen & Bar's corner sat empty, Federal Realty was three years into an $8.5 million overhaul of Chesterbrook Shopping Center, the Safeway-anchored strip a short drive away that has served the neighborhood for more than 50 years. Construction started in the fall of 2022. The scope was comprehensive: new facades, widened sidewalks, updated landscaping, and outdoor gathering space, plus a wholesale remerchandising of the tenant list.

The rebuild happened in visible stages. Kosmo Nail Bar opened in November 2022, South Block followed in March 2023, and J. McLaughlin arrived that May. Le Village Marché, a French-inspired home goods shop, opened its doors that June. Small Door Veterinary was added to the roster not long after. None of this drew much attention outside the shopping center's own foot traffic, because none of it looked finished yet.

The pace picked up in 2025. Sassanova, a women's boutique, opened July 17. Federal Realty marked the completed renovation with a "Friendsgiving" event on November 14. Sweetgreen was next, though not on schedule. It was supposed to open November 11, got pushed back three weeks after a company announcement, and finally opened December 2. Surfside, a fresh-Mex chain making its first move into Virginia after 15 years in D.C., was targeting a spring 2026 opening as of last fall. Spring has since come and gone, so it's either already serving tacos on the patio or it's the one piece of this rebuild still running behind.

Two renovations, one finish line

Here's the part that gets lost if you only follow one end of the street. Town Kitchen & Bar opened December 13. Sweetgreen opened December 2. Chesterbrook's completed renovation was publicly celebrated November 14. Three separate milestones, three different addresses on the same road, all inside a five-week window last winter.

Neither project was announced as connected to the other. Federal Realty was managing a retail asset. Town's ownership team was rebuilding a single restaurant. But both had spent roughly the same stretch of years recovering from a loss that predated the pandemic recovery most people associate with 2022, and both crossed the finish line at almost the same moment. This is the first summer where a resident can drive the length of Old Dominion Drive and find both ends actually done, rather than remembering one as finished and assuming the other still is not.

What that actually looks like this month

None of this matters much as a timeline exercise unless it changes what you do this week. Here's what's on the calendar right now, close enough to that stretch of road to fold into an evening or a Saturday morning.

• Fall class registration at McLean Community Center opened today, August 10, both online and in person at 1234 Ingleside Ave., with the new Fall Program Guide covering classes and performances for the coming season.
• Old Firehouse Center's Open Game Nights continue every Wednesday in August from 6:30 to 9 p.m., with table tennis, bridge, Mah-jongg, arcade games, and the center's sensory lab open to all ages, kids under 18 with an adult.
• OFC Ignite: Back to School Kickoff & Tailgate Party closes out the month on August 29, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., free, with games, food, music, and activities built around the start of the school year.
• The McLean Farmers Market runs every Friday morning through October 30 at Lewinsville Park, 1659 Chain Bridge Road, 8 a.m. to noon. Two new vendors joined this season, Siesta Gozleme for Turkish and Kurdish food and Sicilian Mom for handmade arancini, and the market now holds off on live music until after 9 a.m. so early shoppers get a quiet first hour.

None of these events are new inventions built around the renovated corridor. They're the same community fixtures McLean has run for years. What's different is that a Friday morning at the farmers market and a Wednesday evening at the Old Firehouse Center now sit a short drive from two ends of a street that, for most of the last four years, offered a reason to keep driving past both of them.

The corridor is finished. Most people's mental map of it isn't.

If you've lived in McLean since 2022, you've built a habit of avoidance around Old Dominion Drive without necessarily noticing you did it. That habit outlasted the construction. The corner that used to be Café Oggi has been open for eight months. Chesterbrook's renovation has been complete for longer than that. Neither fact changes property values or school boundaries or anything a spreadsheet would track. It changes what a Tuesday night looks like, which is its own kind of local knowledge worth having before anyone asks you to sell it.

If you're weighing what any of this means for your own corner of McLean, from what a finished commercial corridor tends to do for walkability and foot traffic to what your home might be worth in a neighborhood that's visibly reinvesting in itself, The Gaskins Team offers free valuations and no-pressure market consults for residents who want a straight answer rather than a sales pitch.