Walk past 2800 Clarendon Boulevard this month and you'll notice the building doing two things at once. Upstairs, the Barnes & Noble that's anchored The Crossing Clarendon for about two decades is smaller than it used to be, tucked entirely onto the second floor. Downstairs, where the bookstore used to sell half its inventory, construction crews have spent the better part of a year turning that same square footage into a brewery and a noodle counter. The bookstore now occupies half the footprint it once did. What replaced the space it gave up says more about where Clarendon's dining scene is actually headed than any list of new restaurant names could.
The bookstore that halved itself
Barnes & Noble closed its doors last May for what was billed as a routine renovation. A year is a long time for routine work, and when the store finally reopened on May 6, 2026, it was clear why: the layout had changed. Instead of the two-level footprint the store used for two decades, the reopened Barnes & Noble occupies just the upper floor, 14,041 square feet, roughly half its original size. Author Sam Kean, known for science and history titles like "Dinner with King Tut," cut the ribbon and signed books that morning.
Giving up an entire ground floor is not a small concession for a chain that's spent twenty years building foot traffic at that address. It only makes sense if the space traded away was worth more to someone else, and in this case it clearly was.
What moved into the floor it gave up
The ground floor split into two tenants, and neither one is a bookstore. Three Notch'd Brewing Company, a Charlottesville-based brewery with locations already scattered across Virginia, signed on for 10,160 square feet back in October 2024, making this its first Northern Virginia outpost. The original plan included an ax-throwing area alongside the taproom. By this spring, that plan had changed. Three Notch'd's president, Scott Roth, confirmed the brewery had dropped the ax-throwing concept in favor of a fuller build-out: a whiskey distillery, a tasting room, and a private event space that can hold up to 150 guests, with total seating for roughly 350 people inside. The revised plan puts the emphasis on dining, tasting, and private events.
Membership has a price tag attached. Three Notch'd's Fresh Beer Club runs $20 a month, and members get three pint cards plus two handpicked six-packs or four-packs of the brewery's canned beers and cocktails. Construction was still underway through the spring, with a target window described as late summer into early fall, which puts the anticipated opening right around now.
The remaining sliver of the old bookstore footprint, 2,659 square feet, went to Xi'an Famous Foods, a fast-casual Chinese chain known for hand-pulled noodles. That tenant was aiming for an August opening, which means it should already be serving customers next door to the brewery by the time you're reading this.
Add the two spaces together and the corridor's math gets interesting. Three Notch'd and Xi'an Famous Foods combined take up 12,819 square feet, just over 90 percent of what Barnes & Noble kept for itself upstairs. The building didn't shrink. It reorganized around eating and drinking.
A drink policy that predates the brewery
None of this happened in a plaza that was standing still to begin with. The Crossing Clarendon adopted an open-container policy, branded Sip n Stroll, back around the time Three Notch'd first signed its lease in fall 2024. The arrangement lets drinks purchased at Seamore's, Colada Shop, or Lifetime Café travel out of those storefronts and into the shopping center's shared common areas, and into certain other participating shops. Barnes & Noble opted out then and has stayed out since reopening, choosing to remain the one dry storefront in a plaza that's otherwise built around carrying a drink from one end to the other.
Seamore's own footing at the plaza has been less settled. A landlord dispute made local news in late 2025, and reporting at the time described a lockout tied to allegations over unpaid rent. Whether that's fully resolved is genuinely unclear as of this writing, with some listings still showing the address active and others marking it closed. If Seamore's is your plan for a Friday night, it's worth confirming hours before you go rather than assuming the door will be open.
A few doors down, an old name comes back
Clarendon's churn this season isn't only about new concepts arriving. It's also about an old one returning. Il Radicchio, the Italian spot that ran for thirty years in a different Clarendon-adjacent location, reopened on September 4, 2026 at 2909 Wilson Boulevard, in the space that Mazaro had occupied before. A restaurant with three decades of history in the neighborhood didn't disappear when its original lease ended. It found a new address a short walk away and picked back up.
That detail matters because it complicates the easy read on Clarendon's restaurant scene as simply "hot right now, cooling later." Some of what's changing is genuinely new capital moving in, like a Charlottesville brewery testing its first Northern Virginia location. Some of it is a familiar name finding its footing again after a gap. Both are happening on the same half-mile stretch of Wilson and Clarendon Boulevards this fall.
What this actually means if you're walking the block
If you live near The Crossing Clarendon, here's the state of things as of late September 2026, not a rundown of hypothetical future openings but what's true right now. The bookstore you've known for years is smaller and confined to the second floor. The ground floor it used to occupy is either open or very close to it, split between a 350-seat brewery with a whiskey distillery and a fast-casual noodle counter. The plaza's carry-your-drink policy has been in place for about two years now, covering three of its food and beverage tenants, with the bookstore still the holdout. Seamore's status is worth double-checking before you make it your destination. And a few blocks over, an Italian restaurant with three decades of history in the neighborhood is starting a new chapter in a storefront that used to be something else.
None of that adds up to a simple story about a neighborhood getting better or worse at dining. It adds up to one address making a bet that eating and drinking pull harder than books do on a Tuesday night, and a nearby address betting that Clarendon still has room for the restaurant it already knew.
We spend a lot of time on the ground in Arlington, tracking the kind of block-by-block change that doesn't show up in a listing description. If you're curious what else is shifting around Clarendon, Ballston, or anywhere else in Arlington, The Onyx Element is always glad to talk through what we're seeing.
