Drive past the plaza at Chevy Chase Lake this month and the construction fencing has been gone for a while. The storefronts are full, the sculpture in the town square catches the afternoon light, and there's a new Italian restaurant with paper still taped over its windows. What hasn't caught up is the trail that was supposed to be the whole point of building a walkable town square here in the first place.
The Capital Crescent Trail's segment between Bethesda and Silver Spring, the one meant to run directly past Chevy Chase Lake's future Purple Line stop, has been closed since September 2017 for light rail construction. That's longer than most of the restaurants now open on the plaza have existed.
What's Actually Open Now
The dining lineup at Chevy Chase Lake reached a real milestone before most of the neighborhood noticed. By early 2025, brokers tracking the property reported that apartments at The Barrett and The Claude were fully stabilized and 97 percent of the retail space was leased, according to Connect CRE. That's not a plaza still filling in. That's a plaza that finished filling in and has spent the past year and a half adding to an already-complete roster.
What's there now:
- Elena James, serving breakfast and lunch alongside full dinner service
- Dok Khao and Uncorked, both part of the established lineup
- Ro Sushi, the sushi concept attached to Elena James
- The Charmery and Playa Bowls for dessert and quick bites
- Amazon Fresh, CVS, and Truist Bank rounding out daily errands
The newest addition is Osteria Divina, which put up coming-soon signage on the ground floor of The Claude at 3820 Chaplin Place late last year, as first reported by MoCoShow. It's led by the team behind Osteria 177 and Carpaccio Tuscan Kitchen in Annapolis, with a menu expected to center on handmade pasta, seafood, and prime meats alongside a full wine list. No opening date has been announced. Sarah's Handmade Ice Cream is also in the pipeline, which means the plaza will soon have two dedicated ice cream shops within a few hundred feet of each other, a small but telling sign of how much foot traffic the developers think this corner of Connecticut Avenue can support.
Not every food story in Chevy Chase this year has been an opening. The Heights Food Hall, a separate concept elsewhere in the neighborhood, closed with one day's notice to customers. Worth keeping straight if you're trying to track which Chevy Chase food hall is which: Chevy Chase Lake's plaza and The Heights are two different projects, and only one of them is still adding tenants.
The Trail That Was Supposed To Connect It
Chevy Chase Lake wasn't pitched as a standalone plaza. It was pitched as a stop on a regional trail network, one of the points where the Capital Crescent Trail was designed to link directly to a Purple Line station, connecting residents to Bethesda in one direction and Silver Spring in the other, according to planning documents from the trail's engineering firm. A separate account from Bethesda Magazine describes the future station, one block from the Chevy Chase Lake site, as including a dedicated trail bridge over Connecticut Avenue.
None of that exists yet, because the trail segment running past it has been closed for nine years. The reopening date has moved more than once. Completion was originally predicted for 2023 or 2024. A Montgomery County capital budget document filed this past January still projected the main trail construction would wrap by spring 2026. The most current tracking available, reflecting status as of this spring, still points to a fall 2026 reopening for this stretch, according to the Coalition for the Capital Crescent Trail. Every one of those dates has been treated as firm before, and every one has slipped.
If you're biking the current detour, the county's own routing sends cyclists onto Jones Bridge Road, a stretch with no shoulder and no marked bike lane.
That's not a minor inconvenience if you're weighing whether to ride over from Bethesda instead of driving. It's the reason a growing number of regular trail users have shifted to on-road workarounds or skipped the connection entirely until construction wraps.
What It Means For A Walk Or Ride Over This Fall
If you live in Chevy Chase and you're planning to get to the plaza on foot or by bike rather than by car, right now the reliable route is local streets, not the trail. That's true whether you're coming from the established neighborhood streets closer to Connecticut Avenue or looping in from Bethesda. The town square itself, with its lawn, water features, and the recycled-steel and acrylic streetcar sculpture installed to reference the old Connecticut Avenue trolley line, was built for people arriving on foot. Getting there on foot from any distance, at the moment, still means working around a nine-year construction gap.
When the segment does reopen, whenever that ends up being, it will change the calculus for anyone within a mile or two who currently drives because the trail route isn't there. Until then, treat fall 2026 as a target the way you'd treat any construction estimate in this county: plausible, not guaranteed.
The plaza got built. The dining lineup got finished, then kept growing past finished. What Chevy Chase Lake still doesn't have is the low-stress route on foot or bike that the whole project was designed around, and that gap is worth knowing about before you plan an evening walk over for dinner.
If you're weighing what a home in Chevy Chase actually offers day to day, including how a project like this one changes over time, The DC Team at TTR Sotheby's International Realty tracks these shifts as part of understanding the neighborhood, not just the listings in it.
