If you have walked past 2800 Clarendon Boulevard this month and noticed a line forming for hand-pulled noodles where the escalator used to carry shoppers up to the children's section, you have already spotted the story. What most people crossing that stretch of Clarendon Boulevard do not know is that the noodle counter is only one piece of it, and the full picture took almost two years to build.
Barnes & Noble ran the ground and upper floors of that building for roughly two decades, the kind of two-level anchor store that made the corner feel permanent. This year it does not anymore. The bookstore now occupies a single floor. The space it gave up downstairs belongs to a Charlottesville brewery and a New York noodle chain, and the way that handoff played out says something about what a shopping center in Clarendon is actually built to hold in 2026.
A Two-Level Bookstore Becomes Three Businesses
The shift started quietly. In October 2024, Regency Centers, the company that owns The Crossing Clarendon, confirmed that Three Notch'd Brewing Company had signed a lease for 10,160 square feet of the bookstore's ground floor. A second tenant, unnamed at the time, would take the remaining 2,659 square feet on the same level. Barnes & Noble would shrink to the 14,041 square feet upstairs, connected by a new elevator and escalator built for the purpose.
That is a real estate detail most shoppers never see. What they did notice, within days of the announcement, was a new open container policy at The Crossing's central plaza, the one locals call The Loop. Drinks bought at Seamore's, Colada Shop, or Lifetime Café could suddenly be carried across the common area and into select stores. Barnes & Noble was not one of the businesses on that list. The center had already started rearranging itself around drinking and eating before a single wall came down.
How We Got Here
The full sequence, pieced together from public leasing updates and local reporting over nearly two years, runs like this:
- October 2024: Three Notch'd Brewing signs for the ground floor, with plans that include a kitchen, a full taproom, a whiskey distillery, and an ax-throwing lane.
- February 2025: Barnes & Noble announces it will close for renovation, holding a 25 percent off "last chance" sale through May 23.
- Spring through winter 2025: The bookstore's old space sits mid-construction as the ground floor is subdivided for its two new tenants.
- March 2026: Construction is visibly underway across all three spaces at once, the bookstore's upper floor and both restaurant buildouts below it.
- April 2, 2026: Three Notch'd drops the ax-throwing concept entirely, redirecting that square footage toward dining, the distillery, a tasting room, and private event space.
- April 23, 2026: Barnes & Noble announces its reopening date, May 6, with New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean cutting the ribbon.
- August 7, 2026: Xi'an Famous Foods opens its doors in the smaller of the two ground-floor spaces, with a formal grand-opening event following on August 15.
- Now, and into fall: Three Notch'd is targeting a September construction wrap, with doors expected to open sometime this fall.
Two years, one address, three separate businesses learning to share it.
The Detail That Explains The Rest
The ax-throwing cut is the piece of this story that tells you the most, and it is the piece most passersby will never hear about. When the brewery signed its lease in 2024, ax throwing was part of the pitch, a novelty draw meant to set the space apart from a standard taproom. By April 2026, Three Notch'd's leadership had walked that plan back, telling local reporters the space would instead prioritize a full-service restaurant, the whiskey distillery, a tasting room, and room for private events. The finished floor plan seats roughly 350 guests.
That is not a small adjustment. It means that even a business built around a novelty attraction concluded, mid-construction, that the smarter use of its own square footage was more tables and more pours, not a game. If a brewery with a signed lease and a rendering already in hand still recalculated in favor of seats over spectacle, that tells you plainly what the ground floor of a Clarendon shopping center is now worth as capacity for eating and drinking, compared to almost anything else that could fill the same footprint.
What's Actually Open Right Now, and What's Still Framing
For anyone planning an actual visit rather than reading about the history, here is where things stand as of late August 2026.
Xi'an Famous Foods is open. The Clarendon location is the chain's first sit-down storefront in the D.C. area, after running takeout and delivery only kitchens in Alexandria and Washington. The Alexandria ghost kitchen closed as the Clarendon room opened, with staff and equipment shifting over. The room seats around 66 people on bench seating and street-food-style stools, runs quick service with a no-tipping policy, and opened with many dishes discounted to around $10. The signature order is the spicy cumin lamb hand-ripped noodles, the dish that first drew attention to the chain when it appeared on Anthony Bourdain's television show nearly two decades ago. The chain's next move in the region is a Rockville, Maryland storefront planned for October.
Three Notch'd Brewing is not open yet. Construction is targeting completion around September, with the brewery's own leadership saying they expect to welcome guests sometime this fall. When it opens, the menu will lean into classic pub food, pretzel bites with beer cheese, parmesan garlic fries, a rotation of burgers, alongside the brewery's canned cocktails and a planned retail spot for take-home bourbon and whiskey from its distilling operation.
Barnes & Noble reopened on May 6, smaller than before but very much back in business upstairs.
The Walk Around The Loop
None of this happened in isolation from the rest of The Crossing. Whole Foods, Apple, and the Container Store are still anchoring the wider center, and the open container policy around The Loop means a Three Notch'd pour or a Colada Shop coffee can travel with you past most of those storefronts once the brewery is fully open. What used to be a single stop for a book and a coffee is turning into a stretch of Clarendon Boulevard built for lingering across three or four businesses in one visit rather than one.
That is the actual shift worth understanding here, more than any single opening date. The building did not get smaller. It got more crowded with reasons to stop, and the businesses that survived the two-year buildout are the ones that bet on seats, pours, and bowls over anything that competed with them for the same square footage.
If you already call Clarendon home, you will feel this the next time you cut through The Loop on a Friday evening and find yourself deciding between a bowl of noodles and a table at the brewery instead of just picking up a paperback and heading out. That decision did not exist at this address two years ago. It does now, and it took a bookstore giving up two-thirds of its floor to create it.
For more on what is changing across Clarendon, Ballston, and the rest of Arlington's walkable neighborhoods, Great Falls Great Homes keeps a close watch on the details that shape daily life here, not just the ones that show up in a listing.
