Reston Station's Restaurants Opened in the Wrong Order

If you've been waiting for Reston Station's most talked-about restaurant to open, you've been waiting since 2023. That's when Comstock and Clyde's Restaurant Group announced Ebbitt House, the first-ever expansion of D.C.'s Old Ebbitt Grill, for a spot in Reston Row. In the three years since, an entire hotel has gone up next door, and that hotel's own restaurant, the polished and pricey Simon, has been open long enough to get reviewed, critiqued, and reviewed again. The casual, crowd-pleasing name got announced first and is still waiting on a kitchen. The formal one showed up, opened, and started taking reservations.

That sequence isn't trivia. It tells you how this specific stretch of Reston, the office towers, hotel, and apartments wrapped around the Wiehle-Reston East Metro station on the north side of the Dulles Toll Road, actually gets built. It runs on hotel and office construction schedules, not restaurant leasing schedules. Once you see that pattern, the current lineup, and the empty storefront everyone keeps asking about, makes a lot more sense.

The order it actually happened in

1. March 2023. Comstock and Clyde's Restaurant Group announce a signed lease for Ebbitt House at Reston Row, the first expansion in Old Ebbitt Grill's history.
2. Before either of them. Founding Farmers, Davio's Northern Italian Steakhouse, Tous les Jours, and Noku Sushi are already open and running as Reston Station's original dining anchors.
3. September 2025. The JW Marriott Reston Station opens, and it opens with a full restaurant and bar already running inside it: The Simon and Schar Bar.
4. As of the most recent reporting, June 2026. Ebbitt House still doesn't have a confirmed opening date.

The marquee name has been "coming soon" for over three years. The hotel restaurant, announced and built after it, has already been open long enough to earn a critical review and start working out its kinks.

Why the polished restaurant got there first

The mismatch makes sense once you look at what kind of construction each project actually was. A hotel opens on a fixed delivery date tied to its financing and brand standards. A JW Marriott doesn't soft-launch half-finished, so when the building opened in September 2025, its restaurant and bar opened with it, on the hotel's schedule, not a separate restaurant lease timeline. Ebbitt House is a different kind of project entirely. It's a 12,000-square-foot restaurant being built from scratch as part of Reston Row, and that kind of build depends on its own general contractor's schedule, without a hotel's opening-week pressure forcing the date.

There's a second piece to this. Reston Station's office towers are leased to Google, ICF International, Spotify, Qualtrics International, and Rolls-Royce of America, among other tenants, according to Comstock's own announcements around the development. That's a lot of expense-account lunches and business travelers who show up the day a hotel restaurant opens, whether or not the rest of the district is finished. A stand-alone restaurant like Ebbitt House needs actual neighborhood foot traffic to fill 425 seats, and Reston Station is still adding toward the roughly 3,000 residences planned beyond the 2,000-plus residents already living there. Corporate dollars can support a hotel restaurant before a neighborhood has the rooftops to support a big stand-alone one.

A few minutes away, the model Ebbitt House isn't using

For a contrast, look just down Sunset Hills Road at Plaza America, a separate, already-established shopping center that has nothing to do with the Reston Station development. In October 2025, Wonder Food Hall took over a formerly vacant space there, and it went from empty box to serving customers in a matter of weeks. Reporting from opening week counted at least two dozen food concepts available to order from, more than the 15-plus originally announced, and later coverage put the number above 27, making it Wonder's largest DMV location. The lineup includes national names like Streetbird for fried chicken and a Bobby Flay steak concept, alongside additions built specifically for the Reston opening: Jota by José Andrés serving his Spanish dishes, Bankside with Southern-style po-boys and seafood from Chef JJ Bankside, and Barrio Cafe bringing Chef Silvana Salcido Esparza's regional Mexican cooking from Phoenix.

Wonder could move that fast because retrofitting an existing retail box is a fundamentally different project than pouring foundations for a new one. It's the same reason The Simon opened on the hotel's timeline while Ebbitt House is still waiting on its own. The type of construction, not the appeal of the restaurant, decides who opens first.

What's actually on the menu while you wait

The Simon and Schar Bar lean into ceremony in a way Wonder's counter-service model never tries to. Chef Anthony DiGregorio's menu runs to dry-aged duck à la presse and a Virginia chess pie, and Pastry Chef Claus Olsen's Schar Arrowhead dessert, built around crème fraîche cream and almond caramel crumble, gets specific mention in local coverage. The cocktail list nods to the neighborhood's own history: the Schar Bar is named for Dwight Schar, a developer behind Reston Station, while the restaurant itself honors Robert E. Simon, Reston's founder, with drinks like the Simon Old Fashioned and one called the Lake Anne Smoke.

Six months after opening, a local reviewer at The Reston Letter was still finding rough edges. The piece noted steep prices and service-timing missteps, and beyond the cocktail names, found the room itself

"a missed opportunity to introduce visiting hotel guests to the town's character."

That's a fair critique for a restaurant carrying Reston's founder's name into a hotel full of out-of-town guests who might never otherwise learn who Robert E. Simon was.

The empty room everyone's still waiting on

Ebbitt House is worth its own explanation because of the scale of what's being built. The official site describes a 300-seat dining room and a 125-seat patio with its own bar, close to 425 seats total once both spaces are running, at 1860 Reston Row Plaza. It's the first time in the history of Old Ebbitt Grill, D.C.'s oldest saloon, tracing back to 1856, that the brand has expanded to a second location.

The timeline has moved before. Reporting from last fall had Clyde's Restaurant Group targeting a first-quarter 2026 opening. By the time Fairfax County's tourism office published its roundup of anticipated 2026 restaurants in June, Ebbitt House was still described as opening sometime that year rather than already serving. Three years after the lease was announced, the restaurant people are most likely to ask about is also the one that's taken the longest to get here.

What that means practically, for anyone deciding where to take a group tonight: Founding Farmers, Davio's, and Noku Sushi are the established options inside Reston Station itself, The Simon works if you book ahead and don't mind the price tag, and Wonder, ten minutes away at Plaza America, solves the night nobody can agree on cuisine. Ebbitt House will probably become the default answer for "where do we take twelve people" once it opens. It just isn't yet.

Reston Station didn't grow the way a typical neighborhood does, restaurant by restaurant as rooftops fill in. It grew around a Metro stop and a corporate campus, which means its dining scene has been following office leases and hotel delivery dates instead of household counts. That's useful to know whether you eat there every week or just noticed, for the first time, that this pocket of Reston runs on a different clock than the rest of town.

All Reston Real Estate keeps track of these shifts because they change how a place feels to live near, long before they show up in any listing. If you're curious what any of this growth means for your own corner of Reston, a Get a Free Home Valuation is a good, no-pressure place to start.