The Avenue Gets an Anchor: What Wheelhouse and a Programmed Avalon Say About Chevy Chase's Summer

For years, the stretch of Connecticut Avenue between Chevy Chase Circle and Livingston Street has been described, generously, as a throwback. Local dry cleaner, corner café, indie wine shop, the Avalon still lit up at night. Charming, quiet, unhurried. The kind of commercial strip whose defining feature was that it hadn't changed.

This summer it changed.

5714 Connecticut, from a Wine Shop to a Yacht Club

On June 10, 2026, Wheelhouse opened at 5pm at 5714 Connecticut Avenue NW, walk-ins welcome, reservations limited. The address matters. The 4,500-square-foot restaurant sits just over the Montgomery County–DC border in the former Wine & Organic market space, which for a long time was the kind of storefront that anchored The Avenue's daytime-errand identity: something you popped into on a Saturday, not a place you built an evening around.

The operator is not a first-timer. Bo Blair, founder and CEO of Georgetown Events Hospitality Group, brought the concept in, and the same company runs Millie's, Due South, The Bullpen, Surfside, and the Jetties sandwich shops, including a location in downtown Bethesda. The template Blair keeps referencing is Millie's in Spring Valley, which he has openly described as the shape he wanted to replicate here. Blair told Bethesda Today the company had long wanted to open in DC's Chevy Chase neighborhood and finally found a spot they liked.

The interesting number is not the square footage. It is 35 feet of bar, a patio, a separate takeout counter, and a parking lot behind the building. That is not the footprint of a store. It is the footprint of a place designed to hold a neighborhood for four hours at a time.

Chef David Scribner's menu leans on elevated American classics with Chesapeake Bay influences, from raw bar and seafood through burgers, salads, and sandwiches, paired with cocktails and weekend brunch. The nautical vintage yacht club theme extends into the menu, which includes a children's menu. Blair has been explicit that he wants a family restaurant the neighborhood keeps returning to, not a destination diners drive in for.

The Avalon Stopped Being Just a Movie Theater

Two blocks south, at 5612 Connecticut Avenue NW, the Avalon has served the Chevy Chase neighborhood since 1923 as Washington's only nonprofit cinema, with two screens showcasing independent and foreign films. That has been true for a very long time. What's different in summer 2026 is how much of the calendar is programmed rather than drop-in.

The Avalon Summer Film Series is running through the season, built around the great summer movies of the 1980s. Layered onto that: Art House Theater Day on July 30 with two special member-free showings, Once Upon a Time in a Cinema at 5:15pm and the 50th anniversary showing of Network at 7:30pm. Senior Cinema Thursday runs every third Thursday at 10:30am, with one of the current features shown at a discounted price. The Wednesday Signature Series continues its rotation of six programs at 8:00pm in the historic downstairs theater.

Each of those is a scheduled reason to be on The Avenue at a specific hour, on a specific evening, with a specific set of neighbors. Combined with a full-service restaurant at 5714, the block now has something it did not have last summer: a reliable weekly cadence of evening use.

A Week on The Avenue, Loosely Mapped

For a resident planning the last stretch of July, the block's rhythm now looks something like this:

• Wednesday evenings, 8:00pm. Signature Series screening at the Avalon. Pre-film drinks at the Wheelhouse bar are a five-minute walk.
• Thursday, July 16, 10:30am. Senior Cinema Thursday at the Avalon. The July program is supported by East Rock Creek Village. Followed easily by lunch at Wheelhouse's takeout counter or patio.
• Thursday, July 30. Art House Theater Day. Two screenings, free for Avalon members. Dinner window between them opens at Wheelhouse at 5pm.
• Any Saturday. Wheelhouse weekend brunch, then the Summer 1980s series in the afternoon.
• Any Sunday. Raw bar and patio, then a Weekend Family Matinee at the Avalon if the kids will sit still.

The rhythm is the point. The Avenue used to reward walking to it. Now it rewards staying.

The Zoning Change Behind the Storefronts

None of this is happening in a vacuum. The DC Zoning Commission approved two applications for map and text amendments to create new neighborhood mixed-use zones along Connecticut Avenue in Chevy Chase: the first covers Connecticut Avenue between Western Avenue and Livingston Street, enabling low-density commercial and moderate-density residential development; the second covers the civic site between Northampton Street and McKinley Street, enabling moderate-density residential development with a public facility.

That is the paperwork behind what a resident already feels walking the strip. The old zoning treated The Avenue as a preserved retail spine. The new zoning treats it as a place where restaurants, small residential buildings, and civic uses can layer on top of each other. Wheelhouse's arrival in a former retail bay is the visible edge of that shift. It is likely not the last.

Worth putting in perspective: the Connecticut Avenue strip has historically been almost entirely local businesses catering to residents, with most of the neighborhood's condominiums clustered along the avenue near that small strip of local shops and restaurants. Adding evening-use tenants to that mix does not remake the neighborhood. It thickens what was already there.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

Two practical observations for anyone whose kitchen window faces The Avenue.

First, foot traffic patterns will shift. A neighborhood restaurant with a 35-foot bar and a patio, four blocks from the Avalon's marquee, changes the pedestrian volume on the sidewalk between 5pm and 10pm in ways the previous tenant did not. That is a good thing for the corner café and dry cleaner on either side of the block. It is also something the parking-restricted side streets around Livingston and Northampton will start to feel by August, if they haven't already.

Second, the summer 2026 openings are worth reading as a signal about the next two years, not the next two weeks. Blair said his group had been trying for a long time to find a spot in Chevy Chase they liked. That is the language of an operator who has been circling. The new mixed-use zoning between Western and Livingston makes that kind of search materially easier. Expect to see other operators run the same math on nearby storefronts.

For families who have lived here through the quieter decade, the shift is not from sleepy to loud. It is from a strip you used during the day to one that also earns a weekday evening. The Avalon's ceiling still has its painted plaster. The Wednesday Signature Series still starts at 8pm. The difference is that now, at 6:45pm, there is somewhere on the same block to eat first.

If you're curious what the shift in evening use is doing to home values along the blocks off Connecticut, or you're weighing a move within the neighborhood, the team at Tyler Jeffrey tracks The Avenue block by block and is happy to talk through what the next twelve months on the corridor look like. Contact Us to start the conversation.