The Best New Restaurants in Georgetown Aren't on M Street This Year
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
If you walk home along M Street most evenings, you already know what changed there this summer. The new Uniqlo sign at 3262 M Street is hard to miss, a 22,618-square-foot store that took over the old J.Crew space and opened its doors on August 28. It's the kind of change that gets noticed because it has to be noticed. It occupies an entire storefront that used to belong to somebody else.
But the more interesting food and drink news in Georgetown this season didn't happen on the frontage at all. It happened behind it, in the alley that runs off 31st Street between M and Wisconsin, where a chef with a decade-old cult following just built a restaurant from scratch rather than wait for a lease to open up on the main drag.
Alex McCoy and Justin Ahn opened Alfie's on September 2 at 1228½ 31st Street NW, a custom-built space tucked into what's being called Georgetown's alley action. The original Alfie's ran for less than a year in 2016, a scrappy Thai pop-up in Park View that closed over the summer but landed write-ups in Vogue and Bon Appétit anyway. A decade later, McCoy and Ahn had their pick of any commercial corridor in the city and chose an alley behind two of the busiest streets in Georgetown instead.
They're not alone back there. Alfie's new neighbors include the omakase restaurant Two Nine, a forthcoming Spanish concept from Claire and Ari Wilder, and a pizza spot still on the way. McCoy has talked about wanting the cluster to feel collaborative rather than competitive, the kind of scene where restaurants trade pop-ups and staff instead of just splitting foot traffic.
"The great thing about having a small team is we can have fun with this."
A few blocks over, the same pattern shows up again. Chef Ryan Ratino, known for Bresca and Jont, opened his new steakhouse Ox & Olive in a Georgetown alley this year, a beef-by-the-pound concept with a $95 tasting menu that doesn't include the beef. Two chefs, working independently, both decided an alley was the better bet than a storefront lease on M or Wisconsin. That's not a coincidence. That's a read on what it currently costs to get into this neighborhood's best-known blocks.
The 2900 block of M Street tells you why. Boston-based AGEM Property paid $27 million in May for a nine-property portfolio there, retail units that had sat largely vacant for years while the block waited on redevelopment. That's Georgetown's eastern gateway, and it's been an empty stretch of storefronts for longer than most residents probably remember, simply because reactivating a full block of frontage takes real capital and a multi-year plan.
Compare that timeline to the alley off 31st Street. No redevelopment announcement, no institutional buyer, no years of vacancy. A chef signed a lease, built out a small space, and opened. The frontage on M and Wisconsin is built for tenants who can absorb years of construction and carrying costs, which is exactly why the newest national retailer, not the newest restaurant, is the headline there this year.
That's not to say the visible corridor stood still. It just churned rather than grew. Here's what actually turned over on Wisconsin and M since late July, according to the Georgetown Metropolitan's own tracking:
That last one is worth sitting with. A single storefront on Wisconsin Avenue has hosted five different concepts in roughly ten years. That's turnover, not momentum. Compare it to what happened in an alley with no retail history at all, filling with three new restaurants in a single season.
There's one exception worth naming, because it complicates the story rather than confirming it. Dolcezza announced on September 1 that it's returning to Georgetown this winter with a seventh DC-area location at 1300 Wisconsin Avenue, a former pressed juicery. It's not the same building where founders Robb Duncan and Violeta Edelman opened their first 300-square-foot gelato kitchen back in 2004, before outgrowing it and moving operations to a 4,000-square-foot factory in Union Market in 2012. But it's the same street, and after 22 years and six other locations built up around the city, they're coming back to where they started.
That's the version of a Wisconsin Avenue opening that actually adds something rather than just replacing whatever closed. It took a brand with two decades of built-up capital and six existing locations to justify the risk. An alley just needs one chef with a following and a lease.
Even Georgetown Main Street seems to know where the interesting stuff has been hiding. Art All Night returns to the neighborhood on Saturday, September 12, from 5:30 to 10:30 p.m., and this year's version pulls together more than 40 businesses and over 200 performers across 15-plus showcase locations, deliberately routed along Wisconsin Avenue and several side streets rather than sticking to the main corridor. The night opens with a performance from the Radical Elite Show Band, from Duke Ellington School of the Arts, and runs through a weaving workshop, shoe painting, salsa and bachata lessons, African dance and music, eleven open-house art exhibitions, and a 60-plus vendor night market from Neighbors DC.
"It's incredible to see it become part of the rhythm of the neighborhood."
That's Rachel Shank, executive director of Georgetown Main Street, describing how the event has grown. For one night, the people who run this neighborhood's commercial life are actively pointing foot traffic away from the blocks everyone already walks and toward the side streets where most of the actual newness has been happening all along.
If you've been assuming M Street is where Georgetown tells you what's changed, this is the season to walk the alley instead. The frontage will still be there next year, waiting on its next multi-year redevelopment cycle. The alleys already moved on.
Whether you're settled in Georgetown for the long haul or starting to think about what's next for your own address here, it helps to have a team that pays this kind of attention to the neighborhood block by block. If you're curious what that local read means for your own home's value, Capitol Z Homes is happy to walk you through it.
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