Kensington Has Two Main Streets Now

For as long as most people have lived here, Kensington has had one commercial identity: Howard Avenue and Antique Row, with its Victorian storefronts, its Saturday market smoke curling up from the old train station, and a scattering of dealers who'll tell you the provenance of a sideboard if you give them ten minutes. Connecticut Avenue, a few blocks over, was the other Kensington: the Safeway, the strip retail, the place you drove through on the way to somewhere else.

That split stopped making sense sometime this spring. Between April and May 2026, two restaurants with decades of standing elsewhere in the DMV moved onto the Connecticut Avenue corridor, and a third is finishing buildout now. None of them are unknown quantities gambling on a new market. They're businesses that already have a following and chose Kensington anyway. That's a different kind of signal than a chain opening a location, and it's worth understanding if you live within walking distance of either street.

The Crossroads Stops Being a Waiting Room

Marathon Deli opened its Kensington location on May 8 at 10619 Connecticut Avenue, inside the Crossroads at Kensington shopping center. The Greek eatery was founded in 1972 near the University of Maryland and has spent more than fifty years building a following among generations of College Park students and locals who never stopped craving it after graduation. Its arrival in Montgomery County generated real anticipation among people who'd been driving to Prince George's County for a gyro plate.

It's not opening alone. Mezeh Mediterranean Grill, a fast-casual chain that's been serving customers since 2012 in Annapolis, has leased 2,350 square feet at the same address, positioned next to a Buffalo Wild Wings Go and directly across from Marathon Deli. As of early 2026 the storefront was listed as opening soon and actively hiring, which in retail terms usually means weeks, not months.

What matters here isn't the food. It's the fact that two businesses with built-in regional followings picked the same half-block of Connecticut Avenue in the same season. A shopping center doesn't attract that kind of tenant by accident. Something about the corridor's foot traffic and rent economics made it worth the move for operators who didn't need to take a risk to survive.

The Corner Where the Consignment Shop Used to Be

Half a mile away, on Kensington Parkway, a similar pattern shows up in miniature. Breads Unlimited and Pizza opened its new location on April 11 at 10303 Kensington Pkwy, directly next to The Dish & Dram, in the storefront that used to hold The Growing Years Consignment Shop. The new location combines the bakery's original Bethesda menu with an expanded lineup of breakfast and lunch sandwiches and pizza.

The bakery itself isn't new to anyone in the area. It was founded in 1981 by Steven Raab and has operated for decades at 6914 Arlington Road in Bethesda, now under longtime employee Jose Roberto Molina, who took over the business. A 45-year-old Bethesda institution didn't need Kensington to survive. Choosing to open a second location here, in a storefront that had been consignment retail for years, says something about how the corridor reads to an operator scouting real estate: not as overflow from Antique Row, but as a market that can support its own anchor businesses.

Ten Years at the Corner

The Dish & Dram, the gastropub that Breads Unlimited just moved in beside, quietly marks its tenth year in Kensington in 2026. It's the second of three Montgomery County restaurants built by chef Jerry Hollinger and the Hollinger Group, which opened The Daily Dish in Silver Spring in 2009, brought Dish & Dram to Kensington in 2016, and added J. Hollinger's Waterman's Chophouse back in Silver Spring in 2022. Most regulars know the food. Fewer know it's part of a three-restaurant arc built by one chef across two towns, which is the kind of connective detail that only shows up once you start asking where these places actually came from.

A decade in the same storefront, with a legacy bakery now next door and legacy sandwich shops filling in a few blocks away, isn't a coincidence of timing. It's what a maturing commercial strip looks like from the inside, one lease at a time.

Two Corners, Side by Side

Neither corridor is replacing the other. They're specializing.

The Market Still Runs the Clock

Whatever changes on either street, Saturday morning still belongs to the Kensington Farmers' Market, which sets up at the Historic Train Station at 3701 Howard Avenue every week of the year from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., with more than twenty vendors selling produce, cheese, seafood, and prepared food. The depot itself dates to 1891, when the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad opened the station, and it's still an active stop today on MARC's Brunswick Line, with fifteen weekday trains passing through. Once a year, the same tracks host the town's Labor Day Parade, where CSX Transportation, which now owns the line, hands out free souvenirs to the crowd along the route.

That market is the one fixed point between the two corridors. It's close enough to Antique Row to feel like part of that district, but it's also the reason plenty of residents make a loop that now includes both streets on the same morning: coffee and produce at the station, then a sandwich from a shop that's been perfecting one recipe since before most of us were born.

What Didn't Move

None of this is a story about Antique Row losing ground. Goldsborough Glynn Classic Furnishings and Finds, one of the better-known shops on the Row, was recently featured in HGTV's 2026 roundup of antiques stores designers love, following earlier recognition from the Washington Post Express and Bethesda Magazine's "Where the Designers Shop" feature. The galleries that ring the district, Adah Rose Gallery and Red Studio Gallery among them, are still there, as is the Noyes Library for Young Children a few blocks off Howard Avenue. K Towne Bistro still draws people in who came for the antiques and stayed for dinner.

What's changed is that Antique Row no longer has to carry Kensington's entire food and retail identity by itself. It can be exactly what it's always been, a district built around slow browsing and one-of-a-kind finds, while Connecticut Avenue handles the daily rhythm of lunch runs and grocery trips with businesses that have their own decades of credibility behind them.

A neighborhood usually needs one commercial street to feel complete. Kensington spent years with two that didn't quite talk to each other. This year, for the first time, they're running on the same clock.

If you've lived here a while, this is probably the first summer where a Saturday errand naturally strings together both ends of town: market coffee at the station, a walk down Howard Avenue past the shops that haven't changed in years, then a sandwich on Connecticut Avenue from a counter that's been perfecting the same recipe since 1972. That loop didn't exist two years ago. It exists now because three businesses with real staying power decided this town was worth the lease.

If you're watching Kensington from the outside and wondering what a market like this says about the town's trajectory, that's a longer conversation, and one Bernstein Homes is glad to have. Schedule a consultation with our team to talk through what a two-corridor Kensington means for buyers, sellers, and anyone weighing their next move in this part of the DMV.