For the better part of five years, the walk from the Cleveland Park Metro entrance up to the Uptown marquee felt like a corridor that had lost its middle. The theater went dark in March 2020. Ardeo + Bardeo, the long-running Ashok Bajaj restaurant next door, cleared out. A California Tortilla space sat quiet a few doors down. If you live on Newark, Ordway, or Macomb, you already know the pattern of the last few years: you drove to dinner, or you crossed the street twice.
That pattern is changing this fall, and it is changing at three specific addresses on the east side of Connecticut Avenue. A resident who last walked the strip in the spring will find a different rhythm on the same sidewalk in September.
The three-address thesis
The interesting thing about Cleveland Park's 2026 turnaround is not that new places opened. New places open in every DC neighborhood every year. The interesting thing is the geometry. Three of the corridor's largest and longest-vacant footprints filled in within roughly eighteen months of each other, and they sit close enough that a resident can hit all three on a single loop from the Metro.
3311 Connecticut Ave NW — Sababa
The former Ardeo + Bardeo space is now Sababa, a modern Israeli concept from restaurateur Ashok Bajaj. Bajaj is opening Sababa in the space vacated by Ardeo + Bardeo, and the menu leans on small plates as well as larger plates meant to be shared family-style. Early reviewers on Yelp in June 2026 flagged the pita program, the labne, and the eggplant dips as the anchoring dishes.
Bajaj is not a stranger to the block. He ran the previous tenant for two decades. The relevance for a current resident is that the room is once again seating at dinner volume rather than sitting dark, and it is doing so under a name that draws people up Connecticut from Woodley Park and Van Ness rather than only pulling from within Cleveland Park.
3501 Connecticut Ave NW — Buffalo & Bergen
The old California Tortilla footprint is now Gina Chersevani's third Buffalo & Bergen, and it is the biggest of the three. Chersevani opened Buffalo & Bergen's third DC location at 3501 Connecticut Avenue NW, with a menu that expands on the Union Market and Capitol Hill originals. The design leans into a bakery-forward format. The room has black-and-white New York vibes with a twelve-foot bar, and a four-seat "carb bar" overlooks the mixers and oven where everything is baked. Dough is imported from A&S Bagels in Long Island City, then proofed and baked on-site because Chersevani argues New York water makes a superior bagel.
If you have kids and a Saturday morning to fill, this is the address that changes your week. The signature items on the WJLA segment in February were the Father Figure chicken cutlet pizza pocket, the Bandito pork carnitas sandwich, pastrami on rye, and the Good Feather club, and the bar keeps a rotation of Best Day Brewing non-alcoholic craft beers on offer for daytime service.
3426 Connecticut Ave NW — The Uptown
The single largest piece of the corridor is not open yet, but the lease is signed and the work is underway. Sandro Kereselidze and Tatiana Pastukhova, the husband-and-wife team behind Artechouse, have inked a twenty-year lease on the shuttered Uptown Theater and are reviving the art deco movie palace under new management. The pair are planning to transform the movie house into an arts venue, and Kereselidze has said the goal is to reinvent the venue with the latest technology while honoring its almost century-long history as an arts destination.
The building itself is protected now in a way it was not when AMC walked away. The Uptown was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2022, and the John Jacob Zink design from 1936, with its yellow-and-red-brick exterior, limestone fluted facade panels, and Art Deco zigzag and floral reliefs, is one of the last DC movie palaces of its kind. The relevance to a resident is not nostalgia. The relevance is that the largest dark storefront on the block is being brought back with a use case that generates evening foot traffic without the parking demand of a first-run cineplex.
A Saturday, walked in order
Here is what the new corridor looks like as a real walking pattern, not a list.
Start on the 3400 block at 9 a.m. The Cleveland Park Farmers Market runs Saturdays 9 to 1, and the same setup functions as a food-waste drop-off point during market hours, which is a small operational detail worth knowing if you have been trying to compost from a condo. Walk one block south to Buffalo & Bergen for a bagel and an egg cream. Walk another two blocks south to Sababa if you are stopping for a late lunch or holding the room for dinner. If you have out-of-town family in tow, cross Porter and add the twenty-five-acre estate of Hillwood, which sits on the same walkable radius.
The evening version of that same loop looks different in September than it did in May.
The center of gravity for a Cleveland Park evening has moved from a single restaurant destination to a corridor that reads as one continuous walk from the Metro up to the Uptown marquee.
What survived, and what that tells you about the room
The corridor did not rebuild from zero. A resident already knows the addresses that carried the strip through the vacancy years, and any honest read of the fall 2026 map has to acknowledge them. Medium Rare on the north end, Dolan Uyghur, Siam House, Little Blackbird, Byblos Deli, and 3321 Bistro all held the block. Cleveland Park Bar & Grill at 3407 Connecticut, formerly Fat Pete's, still runs the rooftop deck and the sports crowd.
Reading the openings against the survivors tells you something about the room the corridor is now optimized for. The new anchors are daypart-diverse. Buffalo & Bergen owns breakfast and lunch. Sababa owns dinner. The Uptown, when it reopens, will own the 7-to-10 p.m. window that the corridor has been unable to fill since the theater went dark. Nothing here is redundant. That is unusual for a DC main street, and it is the reason the fall walking pattern feels different from the summer one even before Artechouse cuts a ribbon.
The evening layer residents underuse
Two recurring dates deserve to live on the fridge if they are not there already.
The first is District Bridges' monthly Fourth Thursdays market. Every fourth Thursday of the month from 5 to 9 p.m., the block hosts local makers, artists, small businesses, and live music. It is not a festival. It is a working evening market that runs on the same block as the survivors, which means you can pair it with dinner without a car.
The second is Art All Night. Art All Night Cleveland Park is scheduled for September 11, 2026, from 5 to 10 p.m. This is the corridor's biggest evening of the year, and it will be the first Art All Night since Buffalo & Bergen and Sababa both came online. If you have avoided the strip on Art All Night in previous years because there was nowhere to sit down mid-walk, that constraint is gone.
The quiet institutional layer
Two additional facts belong in a resident's mental map because they change how much foot traffic the corridor will see on weekdays.
The first is up the hill. Washington International School has finished its new Le Centre Brown building, a 58,000-square-foot addition with new science, multipurpose, cooking, and dining facilities, and students and teachers have already moved in. Weekday afternoon pickup and drop-off pattern the sidewalks between Macomb and the Metro in ways that were interrupted during construction.
The second is the parks connection. Melvin C. Hazen Park connects on foot to Rock Creek Park, and from there the trail network runs south toward the city center and north to the Maryland line. A resident who moved to Cleveland Park for the trail access has more reason than usual this fall to walk out of the park and finish on Connecticut Avenue rather than driving somewhere else for the meal.
Where this leaves a Cleveland Park household
The practical read for anyone who already lives here is that the errand loop is now real again. You can leave the house on foot, hit the farmers market, pick up bagels, drop compost, run into a neighbor at the Fourth Thursday market, and eat dinner at Sababa without moving a car. That was not true in fall 2024. It was barely true in fall 2025. It is true right now, and it will be more true once the Uptown lights come back on.
If a fall walk down Connecticut has you thinking harder about staying, moving up within the neighborhood, or listing the condo you have outgrown, the team at David Cox knows this corridor building-by-building. Contact Us — Let's Solve Your Home Needs.
