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new restaurant
Arlington’s first halal barbecue restaurant is up and running in Ballston.
Hal & Al’s BBQ in Quarter Market, the food hall in Ballston Quarter, opened in December. It is best known at this point for its beef brisket, though it also serves beef ribs and turkey sausage and sides such as chili and mac and cheese.
All of the meats follow Islamic food preparation laws — meaning customers will not find pork on the menu.
Owner Mohsin Rehman was born and raised in Baltimore and his parents immigrated to the U.S. from Pakistan. Rehman incorporates his upbringing in his dishes by merging Baltimore and Pakistani flavors to create Hal & Al’s popular brisket.
“Deep down, I have my love for Old Bay,” Rehman said. “So we use kind of a hybrid of Pakistani spices and Maryland crab seasoning mixed together to create our brisket. It creates this kind of ‘Bay-B-Q’ vibe, a Chesapeake Bay barbecue vibe.”
Rehman believes it’s important to highlight flavors from different regions as part of the varied Northern Virginia food scene.
“We live in a world — such a diverse world with such a diverse palette — and just black pepper and salt really keeps you from showcasing what you could do with brisket,” Rehman said. “You’re not going to go to a fancy restaurant where they’re like, ‘We only use black pepper.’ They’re going to use a multitude of spices from all over the world. I try staying to my roots.”
Rehman started his venture into the culinary world in college where he was lovingly titled the “Italian grandmother” by his friends due to his love of cooking.
“I get a lot of joy from feeding people,” he said. “I’ve always really gotten a lot of pleasure from seeing people nourished and happy from what I put my time into. The nice thing about barbecue is it’s a very family-oriented community, it sparks a lot of memories for folks.”
In 2010, Rehman started a food blog and, he says, was the only halal food blogger who traveled nationwide as part of his writing. He was inspired to open Hal & Al’s BBQ in Quarter Market (4328 Wilson Blvd) after noticing a lack of halal barbecue spots on the East Coast.
“I found halal Italian places, halal Chinese spots, but not once did I find a halal barbecue place,” he said. “When I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, what theme I wanted to go with for the restaurant, there’s nothing more quintessential to being American than barbecue. But there’s also nothing more quintessential to being human than barbecue.”
Rehman’s big goal? To put his “Bay-B-Q” spin on the map.
“You have Texas barbecue, you have Kansas City barbecue, there’s Memphis barbecue, you go to Carolina and they have that vinegar barbecue, and you go down to Alabama and they have the Alabama white sauce barbecue,” he said.
“I’m hoping 20 years from now we’re going to have Bay-B-Q, which is going to be barbecue using Chesapeake Bay seasonings or Old Bay,” Rehman continued. “And it’ll be barbecue all based here in the DMV, up and down the mid-Atlantic.”
Former Clarendon mainstay Mister Days appears to be opening in a new location, nearly five years after its closure.
An LLC associated with Mister Days, Celtic LB Group INC, recently applied for a liquor license for the currently vacant restaurant space at 1101 N. Highland Street.
Tiffany Lee, daughter of Mister Days founder Bobby Lee, said in an email to ARLnow that her father “is once again at the helm.” She noted that she is “not involved in the new one.”
The previous occupants of 1101 N. Highland Street include Clarendon Grill, which shuttered in 2018 after 22 years, and The Pinemoor, which closed its doors in July after three years. The Pinemoor was the last occupant of the large restaurant space, which features both an inside bar and an outside patio bar.
In late November, readers noted an old Mister Days sign in the space.
Mister Days first opened in an alleyway off Dupont Circle on Nov. 21, 1977 serving prime rib, ham sandwiches, a soup and a salad. In the years that followed, Mister Days moved to 18th Street NW between L and M Streets NW before opening in Arlington in 2000.
Mister Days grew a strong following and remained a local staple for over 40 years. The Arlington sports bar closed permanently in April 2019.
The original bar served famous guests like movie star and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, as well as former Washington football greats like Sonny Jurgensen and John Riggins. It also had live entertainment from singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter early in her career.
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Chip City Cookies has opened its doors in Clarendon.
According to the general manager, the grand opening Friday was successful with folks waiting in the snow to take a peek at the new sweets shop.
“We had a line out the door on Friday while it was snowing,” she said. “It was crazy.”
The Clarendon location at 2700 Clarendon Blvd is the cookie business’s first foray into Virginia, though Chip City is in the midst of a big expansion effort overall in the D.C. area and across the country.
Known for its large, gooey 5.5-ounce cookies, Chip City has a rotating weekly menu of 40 different flavors, including the classics, chocolate chip and triple chocolate, and more inventive flavors, from cannoli to horchata.
There are two dairy-free options: chocolate chip and a rotating flavor.
There’s no shortage of cookies in Arlington. Captain Cookie and the Milkman opened a location in Courthouse earlier this year while Crumbl Cookies is planning to open this spring at the Lee-Harrison Shopping Center. There’s also delivery-only local cookie purveyor MOLTN.
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Astro Beer Hall’s second location in Shirlington is thriving four months after its opening.
Peter Bayne and Elliot Spaisman, two of the beer hall’s owners, said they receive more patronage in Shirlington than in their downtown D.C. location at this point.
“We opened up and it was like pure madness,” Bayne said. “We had so many people coming through the door. We were just trying to keep our heads on, essentially. It was overwhelming, the amount of support and love we felt from the community. People were even more excited than we were to get open.”
The beer hall’s second location opened Sept. 19 and has seen consistent business. Bayne credits much of the Shirlington location’s success to the mix of ages and professions in the area.
“They all interact and they all are like regulars together,” Bayne said. “It’s nice to see these cross-generational friendships that happen in the neighborhood of Shirlington… I was just really happy because we clearly picked great real estate to be at and something that we know is going to be there for a long time, and just a wonderful community to be a part of.”
Spaisman and former Washington Capital Jeff Halpern were childhood friends. They opened the first Astro Doughnuts — which later became Astro Doughnuts & Fried Chicken — in 2013, inspired by the doughnut shop they visited after hockey practice when they were kids in Bethesda.
The pair quickly expanded the business by offering fried chicken, chicken sandwiches with airy doughnut buns.
Spaisman and Halpern later partnered with a hospitality development group, Tin Shop, and conceived the idea for a donut-shop-turned-beer-hall.
The 14,000-square-foot two-story beer hall features a game room, a 140-seat patio and a full-service coffee shop. The restaurant offers brunch, lunch, dinner, a variety of beer and cocktails, and of course coffee and doughnuts.
According to Spaisman, the most popular menu items across the board are the chicken fingers and the asteroid fried chicken sandwich. The most popular drink: the ‘Woke Up Sexy Again’ hazy IPA.
Following the Shirlington location’s successful launch, there are now plans in the works to revamp the basement area with pool tables, music and visiting DJs, giving the space more of a bar feel.
“We’ve been really happy with the level of business we’ve had and we’ve had a problem where we don’t have enough seats for everybody,” Bayne said. “It would be great for the basement to really have a nightlife activity, a spot that feels that it’s going to be a bar as opposed to a restaurant.”
Bayne and Spaisman are excited to add a level of nightlife to the beer hall and are hopeful this addition will open by the spring.
“It’s a busy operation and we’re having fun with it,” Bayne said. “Overall it’s been a great success.”
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A new butcher shop is set to open in Falls Church within the next few weeks, giving Arlingtonians more options for high-end, locally sourced meats.
Brick House Butcher, owned and operated by brothers Afsheen and Arash Tafakor, will be located just off of W. Broad Street, next to Dominion Wine & Beer, which they also own. They aim to open the shop by the end of January.
The shop at 109 Rowell Court will offer an array of beef, poultry, pork and seafood products and a variety of homemade items — like crabcakes and meatballs — that are ready to cook or eat. It will additionally feature different types of compound butter made and sold in-house and will serve OddFellows Ice Cream.
The two butchers working at Brick House, Mike and Emma Ferguson, have a combined 23 years in the hospitality industry, including fine dining and livestock management, according to the shop’s Instagram account.
Afsheen says Brick House Butcher has a “farm-to-butcher-to-table” concept and will source meat from Virginia farms. The butcher will also find ways to use the whole animal, rather than focus on specific cuts.
“We’re a whole-animal butcher shop, so we’ll break down a whole animal,” Afsheen said. “We don’t just get, like, loins of ribeye. We have a lot of the parts of the animal that we gotta use.”
The brothers decided to open Brick House Butcher after noticing a lack of “old-school American butchers” in Falls Church, Afsheen said. The closest option is The Organic Butcher in McLean, a perpetually busy shop that serves many Arlington clients.
Afsheen and Arash grew up working at Georgetown Square Wine and Beer, owned by their father. In addition to Dominion Wine and Beer, they own Downtown Crown Wine and Beer in Gaithersburg and have plans to open a restaurant called Stratford Gardens elsewhere in Falls Church.
The butcher will eventually provide meat to Dominion Wine and Beer’s in-house, second-floor restaurant, as well as to Stratford Gardens, according to the brothers.
A new restaurant is set to fill a decade-long vacancy in Crystal City.
Lantern Restaurant & Bar, owned by Shen Zhao and Bing Liu, is moving into a storefront at the base of an apartment building at 320 23rd Street S., last occupied by Matsutake Hibachi Steak and Sushi until its closure in 2014.
The property, next to a Virginia ABC store and across from a Hilton hotel, appears to have sat vacant since.
Window dressings on the property say Lantern Restaurant & Bar is “coming soon.” Neither the owners nor the leasing agents for the space responded to requests for comment before deadline.
The new bar-restaurant is moving into the base of an apartment building plagued by stubborn business vacancies. Around the corner, storefronts have been vacant since the departure of Bar Louie and Legal Sea Foods.
The main attraction on this block, which also formerly was home to a Chili’s, is now the bowling alley Bowlero — which, for a while, drew a rowdy crowd that rankled apartment residents living atop it.
Crystal City has seen several restaurant closures in the wake of Covid. Most recently, The Freshman closed earlier this month and San Antonio Bar & Grill shuttered its location in the underground Crystal City Shops in December.
Not far away, however, the neighborhood received an infusion of new dining options last October when developer JBG Smith opened a 1.6-acre outdoor food hall and park in the Crystal City Water Park. There, visitors can get everything from duck-fat fried chicken sandwiches to Indian-style crêpes filled with lentils and chutney to gelato.
A new delicatessen is slated to take over the space formerly occupied by Rappahannock Coffee on Columbia Pike.
Gi Lee, the longstanding owner of the coffee shop, announced his retirement last month, marking the end of a two-decade run.
Previously, ARLnow reported that another café was expected to succeed Rappahannock, with the building’s landlord predicting a December opening.
But in a surprising twist, Jose Lopez, the new tenant, revealed that the former coffee shop, located at 2406 Columbia Pike, will instead be serving up deli fare, from Philly cheesesteaks to club sandwiches. There will still be coffee, however.
Barring any delays in receiving his permits from the county, Lopez, a Maryland resident and co-owner of the Honduran restaurant El Catrachito in Olney, says he plans to open the deli around the end of the month. Its official name will be “Columbia Pike Deli.”
The former Rappahannock Coffee signage has been taken down, and in its place, a “Coming Soon” banner now adorns the entrance. While the space will look largely the same as it had under Lee, Lopez said he plans to give the walls a fresh coat of paint and install new flooring.
When asked about his decision to open a deli, Lopez, who immigrated to the U.S. from Honduras in 1999, shared that he previously spent 16 years working at a deli in Maryland before opening his own restaurant.
“It’s my passion,” he said. “I enjoy working with the customers, working with a co-workers and I like to to cook.”
The new deli will join several other restaurants that have opened within a half-mile stretch of Columbia Pike over the last year, including Mpanadas, the Spanish tapas restaurant Sabores and Japanese restaurant Ryu Izakaya.
Another, 2910 Kitchen & Bar, is expected to open sometime this month.
A Korea-based coffee chain quietly opened its first permanent U.S. outpost in the Ballston neighborhood last month, drawing long lines and rave reviews.
Gute Leute Coffee Bar, located at 800 N. Glebe Road next to Mussel Bar & Grille, held its soft opening on Saturday, Dec. 23.
Although Gute Leute translates to “good people” in German, the coffee chain was conceived in Seoul, South Korea.
The cafe’s menu offers a variety of teas and coffee drinks, including espressos and lattes. A unique highlight is a weekend-only, three-course tasting event, available only with a reservation.
Dubbed the “Omakase” coffee experience, which translates to ‘I leave it up to you’ in Japanese, customers who book online can savor a variety of seasonal espresso drinks, including the Pine Cone, served in a sour sugar-rimmed glass, the Granita with lemon sorbet, and the Gute Leute, a blend of cream and cookies over a butterscotch base.
Sang Moon, a Fairfax resident and co-owner of Gute Leute, told ARLnow he was one of the original investors of the coffee chain back when it first opened in Seoul in 2021. Five Gute Leute stores are currently operating in Seoul, according to Sang.
After working with company’s corporate headquarters for years, Sang said he approached the CEO about bringing the concept to the U.S.
“It was a little bit unique,” he said. “We have nothing similar here.”
At the behest of the company’s CEO, Sang and his business partner, Sean Moon, conducted multiple market tests — pop-up cafes — in New York City last year.
“It was very successful,” Sang said.
Having successfully demonstrated the viability of the concept in the U.S. market, Sang was given the green light by the Gute Leute CEO to open his own franchise in Arlington.
It appears to have been a good decision so far: over the weekend the cafe’s Instagram account warned of 20-45 minute waits for coffee due to a “surge of customers.” That’s despite opening with little fanfare during the holidays, on the “quiet” western side of Glebe Road, where businesses have struggled in the past.
Despite complaints about the wait, online reviews have raved about “some of the best coffee” in the D.C. area.
While Gute Leute currently only offers coffee, Sang says the plan is to add pastries to the menu soon.
“Right now, we’re trying to focus on quality and service,” he said. “But we plan to offer croissants, breakfast sandwiches and pastries.”
Before Gute Leute, Sang operated the Korean fried chicken restaurant Noori Chicken in Annandale, which closed last week. He also co-owns the quick-serve Courthouse restaurant Bibimix with Sean, who himself owns the Korean bakery Paris Baguette in Fairfax.
Gute Leute joins a growing list of coffee options in the Ballston area, including the upcoming Roggenart Bistro & Café, the outdoor stand Ballstonian, and Slipstream, near the intersection of Wilson Blvd and Glebe Road.
Hat tip to John Peck
Crumbl Cookies has its sights set on opening another location in Pentagon City, but the scent of freshly baked cookies might not fill the air for another year.
The new Pentagon City cookie outpost will be located on the ground floor of the 11-story, 253-unit Milton building at 1446 S. Grant Street — the second apartment tower in the multi-phase Pentagon Centre shopping center redevelopment.
Currently, a “Coming Soon” sign adorns the storefront window.
“The Pentagon City store is currently still in the early stages of construction,” Beth Baty, a Crumbl spokeswoman, told ARLnow. “It is tentatively set to open sometime in December 2024 or January 2025, although that is subject to change depending on construction times and supply chain.”
This expansion comes on the heels of another Crumbl Cookies set to open in the Lee Harrison Shopping Center, along Langston Blvd, later this year.
Crumbl, known for its elaborate designs and flavors, such as confetti milkshake and blueberry muffin, initially planned to open the Lee Harrison location this past fall. Baty confirmed the opening was rescheduled for this February or March.
Crumbl will join at least three other businesses at the base of the Milton building: Yunnan by Potomac Noodle House, Sparkle and Pop Nails and First National Bank.
That leaves space for two fast-casual restaurants and one full-service restaurant, according to a leasing map.
Hat tip to @CartChaos22202
Bluefish Bistro Sushi & Kitchen, a new sushi restaurant, has quietly opened at Centro Arlington on Columbia Pike.
Located at the corner of S. George Mason Drive and the Pike, the 1,450-square-foot sushi restaurant celebrated its grand opening last month, taking up residence on the ground floor of the mixed-use development next to the Harris Teeter and the Vietnamese eatery Pho Saigon Pearl.
Andy Park, the owner, previously owned and sold a sushi restaurant in Illinois before moving to Northern Virginia in late 2020. He spent the last three years working at Ariake Japanese Restaurant in Fairfax before opening Bluefish.
A prominent “Grand Opening” banner has been displayed above its entrance for several weeks, welcoming diners to savor its various sashimi and sushi rolls, such as the Red Dragon, made with spicy tuna, soft shell crab, cucumber and spicy mayo.
So far, however, Park says the restaurant has not been getting the foot traffic it hoped.
“We didn’t do any advertising,” he told ARLnow. “People don’t know we’re open.”
Centro Arlington, which replaced the long-standing Columbia Pike Village Center in 2019, is a six-story complex that also houses medical and professional offices, an Orangetheory fitness studio, a veterinary practice and apartments.
As a newcomer to the local dining scene, Bluefish faces some competition on the Pike.
In October, Japanese street food and sushi restaurant Ryu Izakaya opened on the ground floor of the Days Inn. Last year another Japanese eatery, Takohachi, opened down the Pike at Penrose Square after relocating from the now-redeveloped Westmont Shopping Center.