Cut through the parking garage entrance on your way to Target and you already know the feeling. The Irving Street side of DC USA has never had the pull of the 14th Street face, the one with the glass atrium and the crowds heading in and out of Best Buy. Irving Street is where the loading docks are, where the sidewalk narrows, where you walk fast because there's nothing to slow down for. It has felt that way since the mall opened in February 2008.
That's about to change, or at least someone is finally trying to change it. On September 1, ANC representative Christine Miller shared that DC USA is rolling out a new push called Eat Street, with plans for up to eight new restaurant spaces along the Irving Street frontage. Miller's reaction, posted to social media, captured the mood of a lot of longtime residents: relief mixed with a little disbelief that this side of the building is finally getting attention, plus genuine surprise at one specific tenant rumor. A bouldering gym. Nobody was expecting that on Irving Street.
Here's the part worth sitting with, though. While the mall is only now announcing plans for restaurant space it hasn't leased yet, the actual restaurant scene around it has already moved on without waiting for permission.
The Mall Built for a Neighborhood That Didn't Have This Yet
DC USA opened as the largest retail development in the District, anchored by Target, Best Buy, Marshalls, and Old Navy, at a moment when Columbia Heights had plenty of vacant land near its Metro station and not much else. The city treated it as the linchpin of the neighborhood's turnaround. Two years after it opened, the Urban Land Institute named it one of ten outstanding developments in the Americas, and the District's own planning director at the time called it one of the greenest shopping centers in the country. Urban planners still point to it as an unusual case: an enclosed, suburban-style mall built into a dense, transit-served city block, something no other DC neighborhood has replicated.
That history matters for understanding why Irving Street looks the way it does today. DC USA was designed around big anchor stores that pull people in through an atrium, not around a string of independent storefronts that pull people down a sidewalk. The model worked for what it was built to do. It just never gave Irving Street a reason to exist as a destination in its own right. For eighteen years, that side of the building has functioned as a way to get somewhere else, not a place to go.
What "Up to Eight" Actually Means Right Now
It's worth being precise about where things stand, because the framing matters if you live nearby and are wondering when to expect a new dinner option. As of the September 1 announcement, Eat Street is a leasing campaign, not a lineup of open restaurants. The commentary from neighbors, including Miller's own post, has been hopeful but tentative, with people openly hoping the spaces "get leased soon." Nothing indicates signed tenants yet, let alone opening dates.
That's not a knock on the plan. Filling a mile of underused frontage with eight potential food and retail spaces would be a real shift for how that block functions day to day. But it's a multi-year proposition, not a fall opening. If you're the kind of resident who checks in on neighborhood news, the more useful thing to track right now isn't DC USA at all. It's what's already happening two and three blocks away, without a leasing campaign attached to it.
The Restaurants That Didn't Wait for the Mall
Fall 2026 has turned into a genuinely busy season for Columbia Heights dining, and none of it came out of Irving Street.
The most talked-about opening is Major Yum, a Chinese-Korean fast-casual concept from chef Scott Chung, previously of the Sparrow Room and Bun'd Up. It's set to open this fall in the space that used to house Bad Saint, the Filipino restaurant that closed in 2022 and left the location feeling, as Washingtonian put it, almost cursed. A bar that briefly took over the spot shut down after a public feud between its owner and a local ANC commissioner. Major Yum is the third attempt to make that address work in four years, which tells you something about how hard it is to hold onto a good location in this neighborhood once the original tenant leaves, and how much appetite there still is to try.
A few blocks over, Ulivo has opened as a straightforward neighborhood Italian spot, the kind built to be a regular rotation rather than a special occasion. Burrata and calamari to start, spaghetti and ricotta cavatelli for the pasta course, hanger steak and roasted trout with salmoriglio sauce for mains, and everything on the menu priced under $30. It's not trying to be the destination restaurant. It's trying to be the place you go on a random Tuesday, which is its own kind of ambition in a neighborhood that already has plenty of destination restaurants.
And up Georgia Avenue, Kuro Listening Bar has become one of the more distinctive additions to the broader area's cocktail scene, built around a pair of vintage JBL 4435 studio monitors and a Japanese-inspired approach to both drinks and sound. It's already showing up on 2026 lists of the best new restaurants near Columbia Heights, evidence that people are willing to walk a few extra blocks off the main corridor for something that feels genuinely different.
None of these three openings needed a mall to make them possible. They needed an available storefront, a chef or owner with a specific idea, and a neighborhood dense enough to support it.
Why the Mall Is Chasing the Sidewalk
Put those two stories next to each other and the actual news isn't that DC USA wants restaurants on Irving Street. It's that DC USA is trying to plug into a food identity the neighborhood already built for itself, on its own timeline, without waiting for a leasing campaign or an anchor tenant.
That's a meaningful reversal from the model the mall was built on. In 2008, DC USA was the thing that was supposed to draw people into a neighborhood that didn't have much of a commercial identity yet. In 2026, the neighborhood has enough of an identity that the mall's response to eighteen years of an underused frontage is to try to look more like the sidewalk outside it. Whether or not the boulder-climbing rumor pans out, the instinct behind Eat Street is an admission that the atrium model alone stopped being enough a while ago.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
If you're already in the neighborhood, the practical takeaway is this: don't hold your weeknight plans hostage to Irving Street news. Watch Major Yum's opening this fall if you've been waiting to see what finally sticks in the old Bad Saint space. Try Ulivo on a night you don't feel like cooking. Make the extra walk to Kuro if you want a drink built around better speakers than your apartment has.
Keep half an eye on DC USA's Irving Street side heading into 2027, because if even a few of those eight spaces sign leases, that stretch of sidewalk could look completely different within a year or two. Just don't confuse an announcement with an opening. The restaurants that already exist did the harder work first.
If you're curious how any of this shapes what a home near 14th and Irving is actually worth to live near, not just to walk past, that's a conversation worth having with someone who watches this block as closely as you do. Jen Angotti has been tracking Columbia Heights and the neighborhoods around it for exactly this kind of shift. Let's talk about your next move.
