The veritable embarrassment of riches that is now the restaurant scene in the City of Falls Church, with an array of serious top-drawer choices complementing an ever growing number of quality dining options, shows no signs of slowing down, according to the report issued by the City’s Economic Development Office (EDO) at this week’s meeting of the City Council’s Economic Development Subcommittee at City Hall.
While City Hall has not yet come up with an accurate way of measuring the success of the recent Restaurant Week, and the noted closing of one solid City restaurant last week, Pizzeria Orso, has caught a lot of peoples’ attention, the clear upside of the industry in the Little City is very evident, and it will get better when two new and classic steakhouses open their doors here in the next period.
According to Becky Witsman of the City EDO, new businesses planning to open soon include two first-rate steak and seafood establishments. One is a Korean steakhouse, Seoul Prime, being promised for the Founder’s Row development, though no further details were provided this week, and the other is the regional brand-named Grill Marx. The latter will go onto S. Washington in a currently unoccupied space in the same apartment building that once was home to a Target store.
Over 250 seats will go into the large site for the Grill Marx as $2.8 million will be spent on its buildout in the coming months and an opening by fall is being predicted.
As for the Target site, Duffie owners of the property say that an announcement is pending on who will go into the vacated Target site. Word was initially supposed to come by the end of February, so it could be any day now.
Also moving ahead with an imminent demolition of one of the two buildings on the site of the old Stratford Motel in the 300 block of W. Broad are owners of Dominion Wine up the street, who are preparing to create the Stratford Gardens restaurant on the old hotel site.
A plethora of smaller eateries has also been announced for the massive 10-acre West End project to include Mason’s Famous Lobster Rolls, Ice Cream Jubilee, Burger Fi and Seoul Spice.
While the Class A medical office building on that project is being completed, the long-stay hotel is now slated to be up and running by this fall, along with the condo building on the site (to be called The Oak).
There is 10,000 square feet of space for a restaurant in the Founders’ Row 2 building now under construction at W. Broad and West Street.
Many of these will be discussed at next week’s four-hour “retreat” of the City’s Economic Development Authority (EDA) Tuesday, March 5 at 6 p.m. in the downstairs Laurel Room of City Hall.
That meeting will include planning for the May 9 NAIOP bus tour, an annual event when a caravan of up to 10 buses will take developers and others around the region to look around and discuss possibilities. The F.C. EDA has signed up as a sponsor of the event, hoping that the Little City will be duly showcased as part of the tour, and so far so good, as the tour is scheduled to stop for lunch in Falls Church’s West End project, sponsored by the City of F.C.
The mega-Whole Foods slated to go into the Insight Developers’ property at Washington and Broad will be handed the keys to the site in April and will hope to be open by Thanksgiving in the fall.
The new restaurant called Zevian, slated to go into the Famile site at The Kensington on W. Broad that was acquired recently by Adem Kaplan, owner of Sfizi up the street, is slated to be ready to open by the fall, he says. It will offer Mediterranean fare, including for breakfast when Turkish coffee will be offered (Kaplan himself is Turkish).
