How long should it take a restaurant to open once the sign goes up in the window?
If you drive Connecticut Avenue through Kensington regularly, you already know the corner at Plyers Mill Road has been asking you that question since the county approved its redevelopment back in 2022. A new development called Crossroads of Kensington has been filling in, tenant by tenant, since a Buffalo Wild Wings GO quietly opened its doors there in September 2025. Since then the pace has been anything but uniform. One tenant went from empty storefront to full menu to adding a bakery inside eight months. Another has had a sign in the window since at least spring 2025 and, as of this August, still isn't serving anyone.
That gap is the actual story here, and it tells you something useful about how to read "opening soon" on any storefront in town, not just this one.
A gas station corner for a long time
Before any of this, the southeast corner of Connecticut Avenue and Plyers Mill Road was the site of a vacant E-Z Sinclair service station, sitting largely unused with four uncontrolled curb cuts onto two roads. The Montgomery County Planning Board approved the redevelopment, officially named Crossroads of Kensington, on May 19, 2022, capping the project at 11,400 square feet of retail and restaurant space plus a bank with a single drive-through lane, and holding building height to 26 feet. Construction dragged through 2023 and 2024. Preservationists had pushed for something that made better use of the old station's architecture, and neighbors were split on whether a low strip center was the right use for what the town itself calls a gateway to its Town Center. What actually got built is a modest two-building retail center with a covered pedestrian pass-through and a shared driveway easement to Metropolitan Avenue, filled in slowly with tenants who signed leases years before they opened doors.
That slowness matters, because it set the pattern for everything that's happened since.
The first tenant showed up fast, then everyone waited
Buffalo Wild Wings GO was the first business to actually open at Crossroads of Kensington, holding a grand opening in September 2025. It's a smaller, to-go-focused format of the full-service chain, built around app ordering and a narrower footprint, and it filled its space with none of the drama that followed. The tenant with the least local identity and the most standardized build-out was also the fastest to open.
Everyone else took longer, and not by the same amount.
| Tenant | Signed on | Status as of August 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Buffalo Wild Wings GO | Announced 2023 | Open since September 2025 |
| Marathon Deli & Grill | Signed 2023 | Open since May 8, 2026, now expanding |
| Mezeh Mediterranean Grill | Signed 2023 | Still not open |
Two businesses signed on around the same time. One is now adding a bakery. The other is still a storefront with signage and no customers.
Marathon Deli didn't just open, it kept moving
The tenant that made the biggest local splash was Marathon Deli & Grill, a Greek restaurant that's been a College Park fixture since 1972, best known among University of Maryland students and alumni for late-night gyros and fries drenched in a house sauce. Owner George Soldatos, who grew up on the Greek island of Lefkada, runs the business with his wife Maria and their son Peter. The Kensington location, which held its grand opening on Friday, May 8, 2026, is Marathon's first restaurant outside College Park in more than fifty years of operation.
What opened wasn't a copy of the Route 1 original. The College Park location is loud, bright, and built for a 2 a.m. crowd. The Kensington version was designed for a different customer: a full bar, murals instead of Terrapins memorabilia on the walls, and new menu items like moussaka that never showed up on the College Park menu. The gyros and the fries are still there for anyone chasing the memory, but the room around them is built for a family dinner, not a study break.
The more telling detail came two months later. By July 2026, Marathon had already added a Greek bakery inside the same space, selling traditional pastries and custom cakes, and owner George Soldatos told local press that a daily breakfast service was in the works too. That's a business that opened, found its footing, and started building on it within a single season. It's the kind of momentum that tells a neighborhood a business intends to stay and grow, not just occupy a lease.
Mezeh signed the same year and still isn't open
Mezeh Mediterranean Grill signed on to Crossroads of Kensington around the same time as Marathon Deli, back in 2023, and has been listed as "opening soon" through most of 2025 and into 2026 without a firm date. That alone might read as one slow contractor or one stalled permit. But look at what Mezeh has done everywhere else during the same stretch. The company opened a long-delayed Olney location in May 2026, more than two years after that location was first announced in January 2024. It closed a Gaithersburg store permanently this summer and, in the same announcement, told customers a Kensington location was still coming, without a date attached.
The pattern isn't a Kensington problem. It's how this particular chain expands. Mezeh is one restaurant company running several build-outs at once across the county, and each one moves at whatever pace its own permitting, staffing, and internal priorities allow. Marathon Deli, by contrast, had one lease, one owner making every decision, and every reason to move fast once the doors could open. If you're trying to guess how seriously to take a "coming soon" sign anywhere in Montgomery County, the number of other locations that chain has open, half-built, or recently shuttered somewhere else tells you more than the sign itself does.
M&T Bank and a nail salon called My Allure Nail Spa also signed leases at Crossroads of Kensington around the same time as Mezeh, which means at least three of the five original tenants were still finishing build-outs well over a year after their neighbors were already serving customers. A multi-location operator's timeline in Kensington often depends on decisions being made somewhere else entirely.
What this actually means if you live nearby
Right now, if you're heading to that corner for a meal, your real options are Buffalo Wild Wings GO for something quick and Marathon Deli & Grill for a sit-down dinner with a bar and a Greek bakery case by the register. Both are open daily. Mezeh is still just a build-out behind glass, and given the company's track record elsewhere in the county this year, there's no strong reason to expect that to change on any predictable schedule. If a fast-casual Mediterranean bowl is what you're after in the meantime, the closer options remain the existing Aspen Hill and Germantown locations rather than waiting on this one. Mezeh's own Gaithersburg store, in fact, closed permanently this summer, one more sign that the chain's energy is going elsewhere right now.
The bigger takeaway for a Kensington resident isn't really about lunch. It's that a corner sitting half-finished for years doesn't always mean a project has stalled. Sometimes it means one tenant is thriving while the property next door to it is still waiting on a company headquartered somewhere else to get around to it. The corner itself, more than four years after planning approval, is proof that redevelopment in a small town center rarely arrives all at once, even when the paperwork clears on the same day.
If you're watching this corner because you're thinking about what it says for property values along Connecticut Avenue, or you're weighing a move into Kensington and want a read on which parts of town are actually gaining momentum versus which are just promising it, that's exactly the kind of block-level detail worth talking through with someone who watches it closely. Branches Realty works this stretch of Montgomery County every day. Talk to a local broker before you assume a sign in a window means anything at all.
