Walk from Connecticut Avenue down to 20th Street this month and you will pass five storefronts that were something else a year ago. Not vacant. Not "coming soon" signs gathering dust. Actually different businesses, doing actual different things, most of them open within the last five months. Dupont Circle has always turned over its ground floor faster than most DC neighborhoods, but the shape of this particular wave is worth noticing if you live here: the old barrooms are splitting into narrower, more specific concepts, while a few blocks away the neighborhood's most storied dining rooms are doing the opposite, expanding to reclaim ground they used to hold.
Four Old Barrooms, Four New Ideas
Start with the buildings that used to hold Dupont's catch-all bars, the places built to serve everybody a little bit of everything. Each one is being replaced by something with a single, specific purpose.
The old Sign of the Whale space at 1825 M Street NW has new signage up as of early August for Dupont Public House, a project from the general manager of the DC pub Across The Pond. No opening date has been announced yet, but the sign going up after months of quiet work is usually the last step before doors open, not the first.
A few blocks over, the former Big Hunt space at 1345 Connecticut Avenue NW reopened in June as Wok and Roll Karaoke, with nine private karaoke rooms, a full bar, a sushi counter and a nightclub layout built for private events rather than the pull-up-a-stool crowd the old dive bar used to draw.
And the old Duffy's spot on P Street is splitting in two. La Merna, a Chicago-Italian tavern with seating for 55, is moving into 2153 P Street NW with a liquor license that spells out sidewalk cafe seating and carry-out service. Right next door, Saints Way Sandwich Shop is filling a second storefront in the same old footprint. One long-running Irish pub, subdivided into an Italian tavern and a sandwich counter.
Here is the pattern in one place:
- 1825 M Street NW: Sign of the Whale, a general-interest sports bar, becoming Dupont Public House
- 1345 Connecticut Avenue NW: Big Hunt, a longtime dive bar, now Wok and Roll Karaoke
- 2153 P Street NW: Duffy's, an Irish pub, becoming La Merna, a Chicago-Italian tavern
- 2155 P Street NW: the same Duffy's footprint, splitting off Saints Way Sandwich Shop
None of these four addresses is reopening as what it used to be. Each is narrowing into a single idea, karaoke, a specific regional cuisine, a sandwich counter, rather than trying to be the neighborhood's living room the way the old tenant did.
The Comeback Wing
Three blocks away, a different kind of renewal is happening, and it runs in the opposite direction. In March, ala reopened its Dupont dining room after a renovation that brought capacity up to 220 people, with a brighter, Mediterranean-inspired build-out. The Levantine restaurant opened its first location on 19th Street in 2021 and added a Bethesda outpost in 2023. It is not narrowing its footprint. It is widening it, betting that more seats and a bigger room will do more for the business than a smaller, sharper concept would.
The bigger story on this side of the ledger is The Riggsby, which reopened in early June inside the Royal Sonesta on P Street. The original Riggsby closed in 2019 when its former home, a Dupont hotel that has since become Lyle, changed ownership. Restaurateur Michael Schlow spent years looking for a new landing spot before settling on the Royal Sonesta, and what came back is the same supper club concept people missed, the same signature pork chop, the same throwback cocktail list, just relocated a few blocks north.
Schlow has been candid about how uneven the last few years have been for DC dining, citing softer downtown foot traffic as a factor that has closed other restaurants nearby. That makes the Riggsby's return notable less because a restaurant reopened and more because someone bet on the exact same room concept coming back bigger rather than smaller, on a block where the safer move would have been to shrink.
New Arrivals That Skip the History Entirely
Not every new name on the map is inheriting anyone's old lease. Uchi, the Austin-born sushi concept from Hai Hospitality, opened near Dupont Circle in May with chef Rob Drennan running the kitchen and a 185-seat room built around two private back entrances for guests who would rather not be seen coming in. It is the kind of splashy, from-scratch opening that does not care what used to occupy the block. It is simply betting that Dupont's density can support a national omakase brand the way Austin, and now several other cities, already have.
District Taco took a smaller swing at the same idea. In July, the flagship Dupont location at 1919 M Street NW added Mezcaleria, an agave-focused bar built into the existing restaurant rather than a separate storefront. It is not a new address so much as a new reason to stop in, tequila and mezcal flights layered onto a menu that has been serving the same block since well before most of the changes on this list.
The Calendar That Doesn't Change
For everything turning over on the ground floor, the neighborhood's weekly rhythm is holding steady. The Sunday farmers market still runs from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on 20th Street NW, and this year the aisles are actually a little wider after organizers expanded the fire lane and moved farmer parking off the block, a small fix for what had been the most congested corner of the market. The Thursday market, a newer addition run in partnership with the Dupont Circle BID, sets up on the 1900 block of Massachusetts Avenue NW from 4 to 7 p.m. through the end of October, giving people who cannot make Sunday mornings a weekday option instead.
Then there is the Dupont Artisan Market, which is a different kind of fixture altogether. As of early August it was halfway through its 19th season at the corner of 19th and Connecticut, a run long enough that its organizers describe it as one of the longest-running artisan markets anywhere in the city. Washingtonian magazine once credited the neighboring farmers market with teaching Washingtonians to love their fruits and vegetables. Nineteen years of the same artisan market, selling pottery and cutting boards and handmade fragrance on the same corner, is the kind of continuity that puts the storefront turnover in perspective. The restaurants and bars change hands every few months. The Saturday market a block away has been quietly doing the same thing since before most of those storefronts had their current names.
That is really the shape of Dupont Circle right now. A cluster of old barrooms giving way to narrower, more specific concepts. A handful of legacy dining rooms betting the opposite way, that bigger and more polished beats smaller and safer. National brands arriving without any of that history to work around. And underneath all of it, two weekly markets and one long-running Saturday fixture that have not needed to reinvent anything to stay full.
If you have been meaning to try the new pork chop at the Riggsby or you are just curious what a sandwich shop looks like squeezed into half of an old Irish pub, the next few weeks are a good time to find out. And if this kind of steady, block-by-block change ever has you wondering what it means for property values or timing a move in the neighborhood, that is a conversation Maggie Daley is always glad to have over coffee, not just when you are ready to buy or sell.
