Lidl and Andy's Pizza Are Filling Plaza America's Vacancies at Two Different Speeds

The grocery store at 11660 Plaza America Drive has sat dark since August 2025, when Whole Foods packed up its produce cases and moved a mile and a half east to The Spectrum at Reston Town Center. A parking lot that used to fill up on Sunday mornings has spent more than a year serving the rest of the shopping center instead, the CVS, the Total Wine, the Michaels, all still doing business next to a blacked-out storefront twice the size of anything else in the plaza.

A few doors down, a much smaller storefront is about to go through the opposite experience. Mod Pizza's Plaza America location, open for roughly a decade, closes for good at the end of this month. Fairfax County staff are already reviewing building plans for its replacement.

Same shopping center. Same landlord marketing both spaces. Two very different timelines.

What's Actually Vacant, and For How Long

Plaza America sits where Sunset Hills Road meets Reston Parkway, a few minutes from the Wiehle-Reston East Metro station, and it has functioned as one of Reston's steadiest retail centers since the mid-1990s. A leasing site plan updated in late August delivered the first real news on the Whole Foods box, which is that the German discount grocer Lidl has signed a lease for the space.

Here's how the two vacancies compare on paper.

The math on that first row matters. Whole Foods didn't just relocate, it nearly doubled its footprint, which means the box it left behind at Plaza America runs somewhere around 23,000 square feet. That happens to land close to what Lidl actually wants. The chain builds its U.S. stores around a 25,000-square-foot format stocked with roughly 4,000 items, engineered for a shopping trip that takes about twenty minutes rather than an hour. A store built for one grocer's smaller era turned out to be nearly the right shape for a different grocer's whole business model.

Why the Grocery Box Took a Year

Lidl isn't new to this kind of move. The chain, headquartered in Arlington and running more than 200 stores across nine East Coast states and D.C. since its first U.S. openings in 2017, has already done a version of this swap once nearby. In Herndon, Lidl opened a store at 2110 Centreville Road in October 2025 inside a redeveloped Kohl's, sharing the building with Hobby Lobby and Planet Fitness. That project shows the timeline once a lease is actually signed: renovation, permitting, and an opening roughly a year after the space became available.

Plaza America is now somewhere in that same sequence. A signed lease is not an open store, and no opening date has been announced. But the Herndon precedent gives the wait a shape. A grocery box this large only has so many chains that want it, especially one already downsized from what a full-line supermarket typically stocks, and that short list of interested tenants is exactly why the space took a year to fill instead of a season.

Why the Pizza Spot Won't Sit Empty Long

The Mod Pizza space is playing out on the opposite schedule. Mod's spokesperson confirmed to a local outlet that the Reston location will close permanently at the end of September, trimming the chain's Northern Virginia footprint down to outposts in Gainesville and Woodbridge. That's the kind of closure that would normally leave a gap in a shopping center's food lineup for months while a landlord fields offers.

Instead, Andy's Pizza had already signed a lease for the same address before Mod's last day even arrived. The Reston shop will be the chain's 16th location, expected to open by the end of the year in a 2,963-square-foot space built for around 100 diners across regular tables, high-top seating, and booths. The menu carries Andy's usual mix of whole and by-the-slice pizza alongside Old Bay fries, chicken wings, and fried brussels sprouts.

Founded in 2018 by cousins Emily and Andy Brown out of a stall in Tysons Galleria's Taste of Urbanspace food hall, Andy's has spent the past year expanding fast. The chain picked up the D.C. region's Fast Casual Restaurant of the Year title at the RAMMYs in the weeks before the Plaza America lease was announced, and it's also opening at Union Station and, notably, in Gaithersburg, where it took over another former Mod Pizza storefront. That's not a coincidence. A manager at the Tysons Galleria location put it plainly when confirming the Reston expansion:

"I had a lot of folks ask when we're coming to Reston."

Andy's isn't guessing at whether a former Mod Pizza box will work. It has a playbook for exactly this kind of space, and Plaza America is the second time this year that playbook has kicked in.

The Rest of the Plaza Is Moving Too

The grocery box and the pizza suite are the two stories with signed leases, but that same site plan shows more of the center in motion than just those two addresses. It lists pending deals for a vacant space next to the old Whole Foods storefront and for another beside Michaels that's been empty since Performance Bicycle Shop closed in 2019.

Four more suites are currently listed as available, including two that are still operating today:

• The 3,516-square-foot space Noodles & Company currently occupies
• The 1,303-square-foot space where Tropical Smoothie Cafe is still open
• An 11,963-square-foot second-floor office suite at 11694 Plaza America Drive, where the software firm Macedon Technologies expanded in 2020
• A new 1,995-square-foot suite next to Citizens Bank

It isn't clear when the Noodles & Company or Tropical Smoothie Cafe leases expire, or whether either business could stay if no replacement tenant signs first. Marketing an occupied space doesn't mean an eviction is coming. It usually means the landlord is testing what else the market will pay for that square footage before a lease renewal locks the rent in for another term.

Taken together, the leasing activity at Plaza America right now isn't really two isolated stories about a grocer and a pizza shop. It's a shopping center working through a backlog of turnover at several sizes at once, and the size of the box is doing most of the work in determining how long each one sits empty. The smallest suites move fast because there's already a chain actively hunting for that exact shape. The largest box moves only as fast as the short list of grocers willing to take it.

For anyone who's been driving past that dark storefront for the past thirteen months wondering when the parking lot fills back up, the answer is still pending an opening date. For anyone who just wants a slice before the end of the year, that timeline is a lot closer to settled.

Reston's shopping centers change block by block, and keeping track of which changes matter for daily life versus which ones matter for a home sale is most of what a local agent does between transactions. If you're watching Plaza America, or wondering how retail turnover in your own pocket of Reston affects what your home is worth, All Reston Real Estate is a good place to ask.