For a decade the four blocks around the Avalon Theatre have been a solid neighborhood dinner strip without a real anchor. Opal for a date night, Parthenon for a Tuesday, Little Beast when someone wanted pizza, BirdSong for the bar. Nothing wrong with any of it. Nothing that pulled the block together, either.
That changed in June. If you live north of Chevy Chase Circle and you have not walked past 5714 Connecticut yet, the shape of your weeknight dinner options has quietly reorganized around a new front door.
What actually opened, and where
Wheelhouse, a Chesapeake Bay-leaning American restaurant from Georgetown Events Hospitality Group, opened to the public on Wednesday, June 10, in the space just beyond the Montgomery County line on Connecticut Avenue NW. The address is 5714 Connecticut Ave. NW, in the former Wine & Organic Market space next to Citibank. If you have driven past that dark storefront for the last few years wondering what would land there, this is the answer.
The scale matters more than the concept. The full-service restaurant runs 4,500 square feet and can seat 211 across indoor and outdoor sections, with a 33-foot bar as the centerpiece. For context, that makes it one of the larger sit-down rooms on the strip, and the only one on the DC side with a dedicated patio of that size. There is also a parking lot behind the restaurant, which along this stretch of Connecticut is not a small detail.
The operator's track record is worth knowing before you go. Georgetown Events Hospitality Group also runs Millie's in Northwest DC, Due South, The Bullpen, Surfside, and the Jetties sandwich shops, including a Jetties location in downtown Bethesda. So the reference point is Millie's, not a fine-dining reinvention. CEO Bo Blair told Bethesda Today he wanted something similar to Millie's in Spring Valley, which sits at 4866 Massachusetts Ave. If you have eaten at Millie's, you already know the shape of what Wheelhouse is doing.
Menu-side, expect coastal-nautical framing with a focus on Maryland seafood, a raw bar, burgers, sandwiches, salads, and seafood dishes, with weekend brunch added on top of an all-day lunch and dinner menu. The children's menu is on the printed menu, not a request-only thing. Takeout service, ice cream, and weekend brunch all rolled out on June 20, so as of this month everything the room was designed to do is live.
One design note that will matter to residents who care about how a bar feels: the bar area is decorated with sailing flags suspended from the ceiling and has TVs where patrons can gather to watch sports. Read that as a bar you can go to alone for a Nationals game, not a bar where the TVs are hidden behind a plant.
The block, in walking order
Here is the useful way to think about the strip now that it has a bookend. From south to north, roughly:
- Clyde's of Chevy Chase, technically a few blocks south on Wisconsin near the mall, still the default for a long lunch or a group. Their coffee is roasted locally by Quartermaine Coffee Roasters in Rockville, which is the kind of detail that separates a chain from a place that lives here. Happy hour runs 3 to 6 pm and 10 pm to close, with half-off bottles in the Race Bar starting at 5 pm.
- Wheelhouse, the new anchor at 5714 Connecticut. Raw bar and patio.
- The Avalon Theatre, the reason the strip exists in its current form. Blair specifically flagged being a dining option for moviegoers at the Avalon as part of Wheelhouse's pitch.
- Opal, BirdSong, Parthenon, and Little Beast, the four rooms Bethesda Today grouped as the commercial strip along Connecticut Avenue that's home to other restaurants in the same block cluster.
That is a five-restaurant, one-theater, one-happy-hour walk inside about a quarter mile. It is not the sort of thing you see on other stretches of upper Connecticut.
What the Heights Food Hall exit tells you
The other piece of local dining news from the last year cuts the opposite direction. The Heights Food Hall in Chevy Chase closed with one-day notice, thanking customers as it shut its doors. That is worth sitting with for a second.
A food hall is a bet that residents want optionality under one roof. A 211-seat sit-down restaurant with a raw bar is a bet that residents want a room to sit in. On this stretch of Connecticut, the food hall lost and the sit-down won. That is a small piece of information, but it tells you something about who is actually eating out on weeknights in this ZIP code and what they want from the meal. It also tells you that the operator moving into Chevy Chase in 2026 did so with eyes open, coming off a very recent local failure across the same customer base.
Blair put it more plainly to Bethesda Today, saying he hopes the eatery becomes a "neighborhood family restaurant". The bet is on regulars, not destination diners.
Two ways to actually use this
Rather than a generic "top spots" list, here is how the strip works if you already live nearby.
Weeknight, no plan. Walk to Wheelhouse at 5:30, sit at the bar or the patio, order from the raw bar, be home in ninety minutes. If the bar is full when you arrive, cross to Parthenon or Little Beast. The point of the new anchor is that you no longer have to decide in advance.
Movie night at the Avalon. Reservations before, walk-in after. Wheelhouse's takeout counter, which sits next to the restaurant and also serves ice cream, is the actual innovation here for post-movie use. You do not need a table to end the night with a scoop. Grab it and walk.
Out-of-town guests. Clyde's for the room and the history, Wheelhouse for the raw bar and the noise level. Neither requires a car once your guests are staying with you.
Weekend brunch. The strip was under-served on brunch until June 20. Wheelhouse's brunch service, layered on top of Millie's-style coastal cooking, is now the walkable Sunday option that this piece of Connecticut Avenue has been missing.
The strip has a shape now
The reason this matters, beyond one restaurant opening, is that Chevy Chase's Connecticut Avenue commercial strip has spent years being a good collection of restaurants without being a plan. You could get a good meal on any given block. You could not really tell someone "meet me on the strip" and have that mean anything.
You can now. Wheelhouse is doing three things at once that reshape the block: it holds a 211-person crowd so nothing else has to, it runs a takeout window that services the Avalon crowd without needing a table, and it puts a patio on Connecticut Avenue in a stretch that mostly hides its outdoor seating in back gardens. The rest of the strip, the four smaller rooms and Clyde's a few blocks south, now has an anchor to orbit around instead of five equal-weight options competing for the same Tuesday reservation.
For residents, that means the calculus for a weeknight dinner changed in June. For anyone thinking about how the neighborhood feels day to day, that is a bigger deal than any single restaurant opening.
If you are weighing a move within the neighborhood, or you own here and are starting to think about what comes next, Stacy Berman and the team live in this market every week. Contact Stacy when you want a read on how the ground-floor changes on Connecticut Avenue translate into how a block actually lives.
