Walk from the Kensington MARC station down to Connecticut Avenue and Plyers Mill Road, and you'll find a shopping center that took most of a decade to fill. Walk the other direction, toward Antique Row, and you'll find a bakery that signed a lease and opened in about three weeks. Same town, same year, two completely different speeds. If you've noticed one side of Kensington seems to move at a crawl while the other side turns over overnight, you're not imagining it. There's a real reason, and it has nothing to do with which businesses wanted to be here.
Four years for a gyro
The corner property at 10619 Connecticut Avenue used to be a gas station. In 2022, Montgomery County's Planning Board approved a site plan to redevelop it into a small retail center, up to 11,400 square feet of commercial space including a bank with a drive-thru, on a lot just over an acre. The application had already been sitting in review since October 2021, and the county granted at least one extension while the applicant worked out a stormwater concept plan that needed sign-off from the State Highway Administration. The board's approval, a 5-0 vote, came down on May 19, 2022.
That date matters, because it's the clock everything else got measured against. Buffalo Wild Wings GO, the fast-casual, order-ahead version of the wings chain, held its ribbon cutting on September 23, 2025, more than three years after the Planning Board signed off. Marathon Deli, the College Park Greek institution that's been serving gyros since 1972, first confirmed its Kensington lease back in June 2023 and didn't hold its grand opening until May 8, 2026, its first location outside College Park in more than five decades. Mezeh Mediterranean Grill had already signed on as a tenant by 2022, before construction had even started, and still didn't open until August 27, 2026, over four years after the site plan cleared.
| Tenant | Opened | Time since site plan approval (May 2022) |
|---|---|---|
| Buffalo Wild Wings GO | Sept. 23, 2025 | About 3.3 years |
| Marathon Deli & Grill | May 8, 2026 | About 4 years |
| Mezeh Mediterranean Grill | Aug. 27, 2026 | About 4.25 years |
None of that delay was about demand. Marathon Deli's owner George Soldatos and his family had been trying to bring the restaurant to Montgomery County since at least 2023. What actually ate the time was ground-up construction: permitting, a curb-cut reduction from four down to one, a bank with a drive-thru lane that needed its own review, and the ordinary friction of building something new from a cleared lot. Once the building was finished, tenants still had to finish their own interior build-outs before they could open the doors. If you've been driving past that corner for years wondering why a shopping center with signed tenants sat half-empty, that's the answer. New construction in Kensington doesn't run on restaurant time. It runs on site-plan time.
Three weeks for a bakery
Compare that to what happened on the other side of town. Breads Unlimited, the bakery that's been a fixture on Arlington Road in Bethesda since 1981, announced on March 19, 2026 that it was opening a second location in Kensington. It opened April 11, less than a month later, at 10303 Kensington Parkway, in the space that used to hold The Growing Years Consignment Shop, right next to The Dish & Dram.
The difference isn't ambition or capital. It's the building. Breads Unlimited, now owned by longtime employee Jose Roberto Molina, moved into an existing commercial storefront that already had power, plumbing, and a certificate of occupancy behind it. No site plan, no curb-cut negotiation, no stormwater review. Just a lease, a buildout, and a bakery case. The new shop folds in elements of the Bethesda original with an expanded menu of breakfast and lunch sandwiches on fresh bread, alongside pizza.
That stretch of Kensington Parkway was already doing its own quiet thing before the bakery arrived. BabyCat Brewery has been pouring house beers like its Kieffer's Kölsch out of a taproom on the same block since November 2022, with the food truck Cattie Shak parked on site most nights. The Dish & Dram, a gastropub with a private dining room locals have been renting out for years, sits a few doors down. Frankly...Pizza rounds out the cluster. None of it required a Planning Board vote to exist. It's the difference between infill and construction, and in a town Kensington's size, that difference decides how fast your options change.
What's actually open right now
If you're trying to figure out where to eat this week without the history lesson, here's the current state of both clusters.
At the Crossroads of Kensington, near the Safeway on Connecticut Avenue:
- Buffalo Wild Wings GO, open since September 2025, order-ahead wings and sports bar staples in a 1,000-square-foot format
- Marathon Deli & Grill, open since May 2026, with a fuller bar and sit-down menu than its College Park original, including a Kensington-only moussaka
- Mezeh Mediterranean Grill, open since late August 2026, customizable bowls and wraps
- M&T Bank, relocating into the center from its longtime spot on Howard Avenue
On Kensington Parkway, near Antique Row:
- BabyCat Brewery, open since 2022, with Cattie Shak food truck on site
- The Dish & Dram, gastropub with a private dining room
- Frankly...Pizza
- Breads Unlimited and Pizza, open since April 2026
And unaffected by either cluster, the Kensington Farmers' Market keeps its own schedule entirely: Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., year-round, at the Historic Train Station on Howard Avenue, with more than 20 vendors selling produce, cheese, seafood, and baked goods.
The event that didn't survive the wait
Not everything in Kensington is arriving this year. Something long-running just paused. In January 2026, the Town Council announced that the Kensington Day of the Book Festival, the street fair that's filled three blocks of Howard Avenue with authors, poets, and live music every April for eighteen years, would not be held this year. Founder Elisenda Sola-Sole told the mayor and council she could no longer continue organizing it, though she expressed hope the town might eventually take it over. The council said it would take up the festival's future during 2026-27 budget planning.
It's a strange contrast to sit next to the Crossroads timeline. A shopping center can spend four years waiting on stormwater permits and still open every one of its storefronts. A festival that ran for eighteen years without missing a spring can go dark the moment one volunteer organizer steps back, because nothing in the town's calendar was built to survive a single point of failure. New commercial space in Kensington moves on government time. A homegrown institution moves on whoever's still willing to run it.
That's the part worth sitting with if you live here. The restaurants will keep arriving on their own schedules, one government approval and one lease at a time. Whether Howard Avenue fills with book vendors again next April depends on something the Planning Board has no say over at all.
If you're weighing what a Kensington address is actually like day to day, block by block, this is the kind of detail that doesn't show up in a listing description. Team Nurit works this market year-round and can walk you through what's changing on both sides of town before you commit to a street.
