Walk north on Connecticut Avenue past the Cleveland Park Metro entrance on a Thursday evening this September and you'll notice the string lights first. They're strung across a rooftop that sat dark and scaffolded for the better part of a year, and now they're on, and there are people under them, and the noise coming down onto the sidewalk is the specific noise of a neighborhood bar that has just found its footing. That's Highlands Tavern, open in the old Cleveland Park Bar & Grill space at 3421 Connecticut Ave NW.
Keep walking two blocks north and the noise stops. The Uptown Theater's marquee is still bare. The box office windows are still papered over, the same way they've been for years. Two very different kinds of waiting sit on the same short stretch of avenue, and the gap between them says something about how neighborhood change actually happens here, which has nothing to do with money and everything to do with how finished an idea is before the permits start moving.
Eleven months, documented in real time
Cleveland Park watched this one happen in public. The Cleveland Park Bar & Grill, a fixture on Connecticut Avenue since 2005, closed its doors, and by mid-September 2025 neighbors were photographing "coming soon" signs going up in the windows for something called Highlands Tavern. From there, the project's progress became a running feature on the local blog PoPville, which covers DC development and restaurant news block by block.
The visible timeline ran like this:
- September 15, 2025: coming soon signage spotted in the windows of the former Cleveland Park Bar & Grill
- May 4, 2026: construction described as in full effect, with visible work on the roof deck
- May 14, 2026: a liquor license placard posted on site, listing a new Retailer's Class C Tavern license with a total occupancy load of 117, including 87 inside with seating for 77 and a summer garden capacity of 30 with seating for 29
- August 7, 2026: a window decal and a note from the ownership team that construction was almost wrapped and opening day was close
- Late August 2026: the official opening, before the end of the month
Eleven months from the first sign in the window to the doors opening. The people behind it are known quantities rather than outside operators testing the market. George Grau, a D.C. native and Culinary Institute of America graduate, runs the scratch kitchen. Ki Yoon, co-owner of the Magruders grocery chain familiar to anyone who's shopped in this part of Northwest, is his partner in the venture. Jeffrey Diaz, an industry veteran, manages daily operations and built the beverage program around a 12-tap draft list and a dedicated non-alcoholic menu. Mathew Douglas, a Chicago-born chef who spent time with a well-known local restaurant group, leads the kitchen. The menu leans into wood-fired pizzas, burgers, and handhelds, with a kids' menu that signals the family-oriented pitch. The tavern has also positioned itself as the neighborhood's watch party spot for Notre Dame football this fall, which tells you something about who Grau and Yoon think their regulars will be.
Nothing about that build was mysterious. A known team took over a known space with a known concept and moved through construction, licensing, and staffing in under a year.
Two years, and still no program
The Uptown Theater's story runs on a different clock entirely. The single-screen movie palace opened in 1936, designed by architect John Jacob Zink, and spent decades as one of the city's defining moviegoing experiences. It hosted the world premiere of 2001: A Space Odyssey in April 1968 and, later, a premiere of Jurassic Park. Its curved screen was, at various points, the largest commercial movie screen in the DC area outside the Smithsonian. AMC closed it in March 2020 as the pandemic hit and its lease came due, and it sat empty for years afterward, papered windows and all, while the building earned a listing on the National Register of Historic Places in 2022.
In October 2024, the building found new owners: Sandro Kereselidze and Tatiana Pastukhova, the husband-and-wife team behind Artechouse, the experimental digital art venue. They signed a 20-year lease. Kereselidze told Washingtonian at the time that he wanted to save the building from becoming "another CVS or department store," and that the plan was something new entirely, not simply an Artechouse satellite.
"I love bringing new life into old venues. It's been an arts destination for almost 100 years now. My goal is to reinvent the venue with the latest technology to stay relevant for the next hundred years."
That was the extent of the public plan two years ago, and it's close to the extent of it now. A liquor license application surfaced in March 2025 describing the future use as a multipurpose establishment for immersive art, performance, and theatrical experiences, with a seating capacity of 25 and a total occupancy load of 350. As of this past July, that same filing language was still the newest official word on the project, prompting more than one neighbor to joke online about what they'd rather see in the space, from an IMAX screen to a burger stand. The city's own economic development office refers to the eventual venue as UPTOWN Experiences, but no opening date has been attached to that name.
Nearly two years after the lease was signed, roughly double the time it took Highlands Tavern to go from window signage to open doors, the Uptown still doesn't have a confirmed program, let alone a date.
Why one moved and the other hasn't
The difference isn't money. A 20-year commercial lease on a National Register building is a bigger financial bet than a tavern buildout, not a smaller one. The difference is what each team knew before they started. Grau and Yoon knew exactly what they were building: a neighborhood restaurant with a kitchen, a bar, a rooftop, and a football watch party built into the pitch from day one. Every permit they filed, including that Class C tavern license with its specific occupancy numbers, followed from a concept that was already whole.
Kereselidze and Pastukhova bought a landmark with an idea still taking shape, by their own admission, in October 2024. Preserving a building on the National Register while inventing a new use for it means every design decision runs through a slower kind of scrutiny than a restaurant renovation does, and when the underlying concept itself is still being worked out, as Kereselidze suggested it was, that scrutiny has nothing fixed to attach to yet. Ambition and clarity aren't the same thing, and only one of them moves permits forward.
What hasn't moved at all
Most of the block, worth remembering, hasn't changed at all. La Piquette, the French bistro on Macomb Street that's held its ground with a menu built around seasonal, farm-raised ingredients, is still fully booked most weekends. Medium Rare's Cleveland Park location and Dolan Uyghur Restaurant are still drawing regulars the way they have for years. And the Uptown isn't the only storefront on ice. A few doors from Highlands Tavern, a spot planned as Moga Doner House has sat without visible progress for months, one more reminder that not every announced concept in this neighborhood turns into an open sign on the same schedule.
That's the real shape of change here. Not a neighborhood in flux, but two specific, unrelated clocks running at very different speeds inside a commercial strip that otherwise looks the way it has for years.
If you've been watching either project from a rental or wondering what a long-term stake in a block like this actually looks like, that's a conversation Michael Rankin has often, and one worth having before you assume you already know how Cleveland Park works.