On the afternoon of June 30, two separate announcements hit Mount Vernon Avenue within hours of each other. Neighborhood Restaurant Group said it would open a record store at 2016 Mount Vernon Avenue, in the space vacated by the children's play café Mulberry Lane. That same Tuesday afternoon, Crooked Beat Records announced it would reopen at 2101B Mount Vernon Avenue, a two-story townhouse that had sat vacant for more than a decade. The two addresses sit roughly 128 feet apart on opposite sides of the street, a one-minute walk if you catch the light right.
Read that as coincidence and you'd miss the actual story. Neither shop is a stranger to the Avenue. NRG already runs Evening Star Café, Hi/Fi Tex-Mex BBQ, and Planet Wine within a few blocks of the new record store. Crooked Beat isn't opening cold either. It's returning after a January flood forced it out of its old basement space at 2417 Mount Vernon Avenue, and the building it's moving into was purchased specifically so the shop wouldn't have to leave the neighborhood. That detail matters more than the record-store math. It's the pattern behind almost every business change happening on the Avenue this year.
Nobody's Learning This Business From Scratch
Start with the buyer. Crooked Beat owner Bill Daly said a longtime customer of nearly three decades bought the 2101B building and closed on it the same day the two announcements went out, with the shop set to rent from her. In a video posted to social media, Daly explained the motive plainly.
"She just wanted Crooked Beat to keep going. And we are really appreciative of that."
That's not an investor chasing a return. That's a regular who didn't want to lose her record store, so she bought the building underneath it.
The NRG side tells the same story from a different angle. The new shop is a second location of Mobius Records, the Fairfax City vinyl store Dempsey Hamilton has run since 2014. His partners on the Del Ray build-out are Evening Star Café chef Nathan Anda and NRG beverage director Greg Engert, working alongside founder Michael Babin. All three already have addresses on Mount Vernon Avenue. The record shop opening also coincides with Evening Star Café's 29th anniversary, which is either a nice bit of timing or evidence that this group doesn't do anything on the Avenue without connecting it back to something already there.
Little Birdie follows the identical logic in the restaurant category. Matt Sloan and chef Eric Brannon opened their new chicken-and-seafood concept at 1504B Mount Vernon Avenue in June, directly across the street from Matt & Tony's All Day Kitchen + Bar, the restaurant they've run at 1501 Mount Vernon since 2022 and which is currently a finalist for a 2026 RAMMY Award for Best Brunch. Sloan didn't scout a new neighborhood for his second concept. He took the space across the street.
Even the one true outsider on this list, Crooked Run Fermentation, picked its spot with the same logic in mind. The Leesburg-founded brewery is building out a taproom at 2003 Mount Vernon Avenue, the former home of Dolce & Bean, and construction has been underway since spring. Crooked Run already runs a location at D.C.'s Union Market. Choosing a storefront between two blocks it clearly studied first isn't the same as a chain parachuting into a strip center.
What's Actually New, in Order
If you've been half-following the headlines and lost track of what's open versus what's still under construction, here's where things stand as of mid-September.
- Mobius Records ALX opened September 12 at 2016 Mount Vernon Avenue, in the space Mulberry Lane Play Café vacated in July. Expect the same curated mix of new and used vinyl, CDs, and cassettes that built the Fairfax City flagship, plus plans for DJ nights and live sets at Evening Star.
- Crooked Beat Records is rebuilding its new street-level space at 2101B Mount Vernon Avenue after closing its flooded basement location in May. The shop had targeted an August reopening, so check current hours before a special trip.
- Little Birdie has been open since June 23 at 1504B Mount Vernon Avenue, serving chicken sandwiches on Japanese milk buns alongside Chesapeake oysters and seasonal seafood. Hours run Tuesday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., and weekends 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Closed Monday.
- Crooked Run Fermentation is still under construction at 2003 Mount Vernon Avenue. No firm open date yet, but the brewery has said it's on pace for later this year.
- Del Ray Public House, the rebrand of the longtime Del Ray Pizzeria, has been serving its new Southwest-leaning menu since March at 2218 Mount Vernon Avenue, including Country Fried Steak Tuesdays alongside the pizza that made the previous name.
- Cubbies, a Chicago-style hot dog and Italian beef counter, opened in July above the Public House at 2216 Mount Vernon Avenue, currently running Friday through Sunday evenings only.
A Building That's Been Doing This Since 1908
The Del Ray Public House address carries its own version of the neighbor-investment story, just stretched across a much longer timeline. The structure at 2218 Mount Vernon Avenue was built in 1908 as the home and medical office of Dr. Robert Yates, the Town of Potomac's first physician, who later served as the town's mayor before his death in 1925. Over the following century the building held a real estate firm, professional suites, a hot tub showroom, a consignment shop, and art studios before Del Ray Pizzeria moved in and, this spring, became Del Ray Public House. The current owners kept the pizza on the menu rather than erase it, which fits a building that has changed identities a half dozen times without ever losing its footing on the block.
That's worth sitting with if you've noticed how few of this year's openings involve a truly new name showing up from outside Del Ray. Crooked Run is the exception, and even it built its production reputation in Leesburg before choosing a spot between two blocks it had clearly walked before committing.
Walking It This Fall
If you're stringing together a Saturday on the Avenue this month, the geography lines up well. Start at the 1500 block for lunch at Little Birdie or Matt & Tony's, walk north past the Public House and Cubbies around 2216 and 2218, then hit the record-store block between 2016 and 2101B, close enough together that browsing both in one stop barely counts as a detour. Crooked Run's taproom at 2003 should join that stretch once construction wraps.
Then circle back for Art on the Avenue on October 3. The 31st annual festival runs 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. along Mount Vernon Avenue between Hume and Bellefonte Avenues, with more than 350 artists, several stages of live music, a pie-baking contest, and enough food vendors to skip the restaurant question entirely for the day. It's free, it doesn't need tickets, and it's the one weekend a year when the whole stretch of the Avenue functions as a single continuous event rather than a string of individual stops.
None of this is about whether Del Ray is a good place to live. If you're reading this, you already know that. It's about what changed underneath the surface this year: almost every name on this list belongs to someone who already had something else running a few doors down, or a customer who cared enough to buy a building rather than watch a shop close. That's a different kind of growth than a corridor filling up with whoever signed the lease first, and it's worth noticing while you're walking past it.
If you're the kind of neighbor who tracks these changes because you like knowing your own block, or because you're weighing what a move within Del Ray might look like down the road, Cox & Cox Group has spent years paying attention to exactly this kind of detail on Mount Vernon Avenue. Contact us. Let's solve your home needs.
