For thirty-some years, the 3400 block of Connecticut Avenue was governed by a rule most residents could recite from memory: restaurants and bars were capped by street frontage, the service lane belonged to cars, and the Uptown Theater's marquee lit for whatever AMC decided to screen. That version of Cleveland Park is gone. What replaced it did not arrive with a ribbon cutting. It arrived in pieces, and by July 2026, the pieces have started to make sense as one thing.
If you already live here, you have felt the shift on foot. The service lane no longer functions as a service lane. The bagel shop everyone joked would never actually open is on its second menu expansion. The Uptown's paper is off the windows, though the doors are still shut. And on the fourth Thursday of the month, the block that used to empty out after 8 p.m. is closed to cars and busy with vendors until nine.
The service lane pilot never really ended. It just kept getting more permanent, one summer at a time.
What actually changed on the block
The mechanical change is small and specific. During the pandemic, DDOT piloted closing the service lane on the 3400 block to through traffic. People used it. Nanny O'Brien's Pub eventually gathered a petition with roughly 1,000 signatures asking that the closure be made permanent, and ANC 3C, in a 7–1 vote, recommended keeping the lane closed to drivers and open to pedestrians, streateries, and placemaking. That is the vote that unlocked the current summer.
The visible consequences, all on the same two blocks between Porter and Macomb:
- The 3400 block now operates as the Cleveland Park Promenade, a walkable spine wide enough to hold a market without narrowing the sidewalk.
- District Bridges runs a Cleveland Park Night Market on the fourth Thursday of the month, April through September, from 5 to 9 p.m. The July 2026 lineup includes Tae-Gu Kimchi, KIJANI, Laurel & Lyre, minmin handmades, and Balmy Waves, with Matthew McConnell as artist in residence.
- The Cleveland Park Farmers Market continues on Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., April through December.
- Ten endangered animal sculptures, installed on lampposts between Cleveland Park and Woodley Park Metro in 2024, are still up. So is Claire Sharp's "Flower Power" mural on the front of Spices.
None of this is dramatic on its own. Taken together, it is a working answer to the question the neighborhood has been asked, and has ducked, for a generation: can the commercial strip carry evening foot traffic without losing the residential quiet a block away? This summer, it does.
The new arrivals that gave the block a reason to stay open
Two openings in the last eighteen months matter more than the rest, because both anchor daypart. One holds mornings. One holds evenings.
Buffalo & Bergen opened at 3501 Connecticut Ave NW in early 2025, the third and largest location of Gina Chersevani's New York deli concept. Bagels come in from A&S on Long Island and are proofed and baked on site. The Cleveland Park kitchen has since added what Chersevani calls a "carb bar," pushing the menu past bagels and knishes into morning pastries, Neapolitan-style pizzas on a 72-hour fermented dough, and hot pockets rebuilt from scratch. That May 2026 expansion, covered by Washingtonian, turned a bagel counter into an all-day operator. It is the reason the north end of the strip now has real 7 a.m. energy.
Sababa, Ashok Bajaj's modern Israeli restaurant, took over the Ardeo + Bardeo space with a menu of shareable small and larger plates. Bajaj's other restaurants around the city span Indian, Italian, and New American, and Sababa is the operator's first push into Levantine cooking in Cleveland Park. Local reviews on Yelp through June 2026 place it alongside Little Blackbird and Dolan Uyghur among the neighborhood's most-booked rooms. That matters for a specific reason: the last time this block had a restaurant of that ambition and price point, the room was Ardeo + Bardeo itself.
Around those two, the existing rotation still holds the block. Medium Rare on Connecticut continues its $32.95 prix fixe of bread, salad, prime dry-aged steak, and hand-cut fries. La Piquette, chef Francis Layrle's French bistrot, keeps its Diner's Choice run intact. Dolan Uyghur remains the only place in the neighborhood where you can order laghman and chuchura in the same sitting. Siam House, 3321 Bistro, Byblos Deli, Laredo, and Cleveland Park Bar & Grill at 3407 fill in the rest.
The Uptown is the thing everyone is still waiting on
The 1936 Uptown Theater, closed by AMC in March 2020 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in December 2022, has a signed 20-year lease with Sandro Kereselidze and Tatiana Pastukhova, the husband-and-wife team behind Artechouse. Their new venture, UPTOWN Experiences, is described by Kereselidze as a return to old-glamour theatergoing paired with current-generation projection, including a screen he wants built at roughly three times the size of the original. He has called it a multimillion-dollar project. No opening date has been announced.
That absence is doing real work. The Uptown's marquee at 3426 Connecticut is dark, but the building's presence on the block is the reason the streetscape upgrade, the Main Street program, and the density conversation all point at this stretch instead of somewhere else. Cleveland Park's leverage right now is that its most valuable single asset is a dormant 1,300-seat art deco palace with a 20-year tenant already signed. For a homeowner who lives within walking distance, that is worth watching, and worth understanding as the anchor that most of the current activity is quietly organized around.
A fourth-Thursday walking route
If you have out-of-town guests in July or August and want to show them the block without narrating it, here is an order that works.
- Start at Buffalo & Bergen, 3501 Connecticut Ave NW, around 5 p.m. Order an egg cream and a "Pickle Me Pink" bagel with cold-smoked lox and beet-horseradish cream cheese. Eat outside if you can.
- Walk south along the raised, sidewalk-level service lane. The differential paving makes it obvious where cars still belong and where they no longer do.
- Pass under the Uptown marquee at 3426. It is still dark. Point at it anyway.
- Cross into the Night Market on the 3400 block. Do a full loop of the vendors before buying anything. Tae-Gu Kimchi is the reliable pick if you want something you cannot buy at the Saturday farmers market.
- Dinner at Sababa if you booked ahead, La Piquette if you did not, or Medium Rare if the party contains a teenager. All three are within a two-minute walk of the market's south end.
- Nightcap at Nanny O'Brien's, which has earned the honor by dint of having pushed the petition that made the walk possible in the first place.
The through-line
The single claim worth taking away from this summer is that Cleveland Park has finally accepted the terms of being a walkable commercial neighborhood instead of a residential enclave with a strip mall attached. The wdcep profile notes that Connecticut Avenue is a designated Great Streets corridor, with $2.55 million in grant funding available in fiscal year 2024 and awards of up to $85,000 for eligible small businesses. That is the kind of infrastructure that keeps a Buffalo & Bergen or a Sababa in tenant improvement money during the buildout, and it is a lever the neighborhood only started pulling in earnest after the ANC's density and service-lane votes.
For anyone who has owned a home in Cleveland Park long enough to remember when the strip was single-story retail with a Blockbuster and a bank branch, the change is not subtle. The block is doing things a Cleveland Park block was not supposed to do. It is louder on Thursday nights, quieter on Sunday mornings, and, for the first time in about a decade, worth walking the length of on purpose.
If a decision about your home in Cleveland Park, or anywhere in close-in Northwest, is on your mind this year, the Hagen Bergstrom Team would be glad to talk. Book an appointment when you are ready.
