Walk down Wisconsin Avenue past the old juice bar on the corner near P Street and you'll notice construction paper covering the windows again. By winter, there will be gelato behind that glass. Not just any gelato. DOLCEZZA is coming back to Georgetown, to a storefront at 1300 Wisconsin Avenue NW that used to sell pressed juice, and the timing says something worth sitting with if you've lived here longer than a season or two.
Robb Duncan and Violeta Edelman opened their first DOLCEZZA scoop shop in Georgetown in 2004, a 300-square-foot kitchen where they made gelato by hand and hauled it to DC farmers markets on weekends. By 2012 they'd outgrown that space and moved production to a 4,000-square-foot factory in Union Market. Since then the brand has spread to City Center, Dupont Circle, the Hirshhorn, H Street NE, the Mosaic District, and Bethesda Row. The new Wisconsin Avenue shop will be their seventh in the DC area and their first back in the neighborhood where the whole thing started.
That's a nice story on its own. But it's only half the picture, and the other half is a few blocks south, at 1560 Wisconsin Avenue.
One Storefront, Five Concepts, One Circle Back
That address has spent close to a decade proving that Georgetown's food scene turns over faster than its buildings do. DOLCEZZA held the spot for nearly ten years before moving on. After that it went through a run of tenants in quick succession: Oakberry, then La Jolie Bleue Bakery & Cafe, then Bharati. This past summer it became Delhi Belly, an Indian street food concept from Vikas Kakkar and Raj Manroy, the pair behind Bethesda's Virraaj. The menu leans into railway chai, kulfi falooda, and a paneer tikka wrap that reads more like a snack you'd grab off a cart in Delhi than something built for a sit-down meal, which is the point.
So in one ten-year stretch, a single storefront on Wisconsin Avenue has been gelato, then açaí, then French pastry, then Indian-fusion cafe, then Indian street food. Five concepts, one address, and the founder of the first one is now setting up three blocks away rather than trying to reclaim the original spot. That's not nostalgia. It's a read on the corridor: the storefront itself doesn't hold customer loyalty the way people assume it does. What holds is the block. Duncan and Edelman aren't betting on a building. They're betting on Wisconsin Avenue foot traffic that has been reliable since 2004, regardless of who's behind the counter.
The Same Season Brings a Wider Reshuffle
If 1560 Wisconsin were the only example, you could chalk it up to one unlucky corner. It isn't. This has been an unusually busy few months for openings within a five-minute walk of that stretch.
UNIQLO opened its Georgetown store at 3262 M Street on August 28, with a full weekend of programming that kicked off with a taiko drum performance before doors opened at 10 a.m. A few blocks over, chef Ryan Ratino, known for Bresca and Jont, opened Ox & Olive in a Georgetown alley, a steakhouse serving beef by the pound alongside a $95 tasting menu and a carrot cake shaped, googly eyes included, like an actual carrot. PopUp Bagels set up shop selling bagels in sets of three starting around $15, no spreading required since the cream cheese comes on the side for dipping. And tucked into the alley next to Georgetown Seafood at 1211 Potomac Street, chef Michael Rafidi, of Yellow and a handful of other DC kitchens, is bringing a new concept called Bizzeria.
Notice where a lot of this is happening: alleys. Georgetown's back passages, the ones most visitors walk past without a second look, have quietly become a second restaurant row. It makes sense given the neighborhood's footprint. Georgetown's commercial core is a fixed grid of narrow, historic buildings. There's no empty lot to build a new steakhouse on M Street, so ambitious chefs go where the square footage actually exists, which increasingly means the alley behind the main block rather than the storefront facing it.
Same Facade, Different Business
Here's the part that ties it together. Georgetown's building stock barely moves. A commercial real estate report earlier this year noted that developer EastBanc had its first construction crane up in the neighborhood in six years, tied to new apartments on Pennsylvania Avenue. The redevelopment along the 2900 block of M Street, where a Boston-based firm bought a nine-property portfolio for $27 million in May, has been years in the making precisely because those retail units sat largely vacant during construction. New buildings in Georgetown are rare enough to be news.
New businesses inside old buildings are the opposite. They're constant. The storefront at 1560 Wisconsin didn't get gutted and rebuilt five times. The walls, the windows, probably even the plumbing stayed put while the sign out front changed five times over. Georgetown residents already sense this without needing anyone to spell it out. You develop a habit of glancing at whatever's gone up in the window of a familiar corner before you decide whether to keep walking or go in. That habit exists because turnover here happens inside the architecture, not to it.
What this means, practically, for anyone who lives here and just wants dinner: the map of what's good on Wisconsin Avenue redraws itself every year or two, and the buildings won't warn you. The storefront that used to be your go-to gelato spot might now sell paneer tikka wraps. The alley you've walked past for years might now hide a steakhouse with a Michelin pedigree chef behind it. Georgetown doesn't announce these shifts with a banner across M Street. You find out by walking the same three blocks you always walk and paying attention to what's different.
This fall gives you a reason to do exactly that. Grab a PopUp Bagels three-pack on your way to the UNIQLO opening weekend leftovers, cut through the alley by Georgetown Seafood to see how Bizzeria's build-out is coming along, and put DOLCEZZA's winter opening on your radar so you're not caught off guard when gelato returns to a stretch of Wisconsin Avenue that spent the last several years being something else entirely. The neighborhood looks the same as it did a decade ago from the outside. What's happening behind those windows tells a different story, and it's worth knowing before your favorite new spot becomes somebody else's next chapter.
If you ever find yourself wondering what else changes hands quietly on blocks you thought you knew, or you're simply curious what a place like this is worth given how much its storefronts turn over, Deirdre Jo Fricke knows Georgetown at the level of these small shifts, not just the headline version. Let's Connect.
